Monet: Places
With over one hundred paintings, the Museum Barberini presented the largest retrospective ever to be devoted to the Impressionist painter Claude Monet in a German museum.
More than one hundred works charted the places from which Claude Monet (1840–1926) drew inspiration for his Impressionist plein-air painting—from Paris and the Seine villages of Argenteuil, Vétheuil, and Giverny to travel destinations such as London and Venice. The show brought together numerous key works from every period of Monet’s oeuvre, and was the first exhibition to illustrate his artistic development by examining his choice and awareness of places.
David von Becker
“Scholars have rigorously explored Monet’s art, but our focus on the places that inspired him offers new insights into his artistic interests and methods. We wanted to show how important certain landscapes and topographies were at decisive turning points in his career, and to examine more closely how and why these places influenced the course of his painting.”
The concept of place was key to Monet’s artistic vision This is where light, which depends on the weather, the seasons, and the time of day, plays out over a landscape. He explored the fleeting effects of atmospheric phenomena—the layer between him and his motif. Monet did not shy away from challenged and was always in search of topographies that were difficult to capture in paint. From the dazzling light of the Riviera to the windswept Atlantic coast of northern France, Monet reacted spontaneously to uncontrollable factors such as weather conditions and light in order to transfer his impressions as directly as possible to the canvas.
The exhibition Monet: Places revealed the strategies pursued by the artist in deciding where to live and what cities to visit, from his first recorded composition to the famous water lilies painted in his garden in Giverny in the final decades of his life.
“An entire room of our retrospective was devoted exclusively to Monet’s garden in Giverny. In his iconic paintings of water lilies, a free play of color and form is carving out its way, making him one of the most important precursors of abstract painting in the early twentieth century.”
David von Becker
The exhibition drew primarily on the Hasso Plattner Collection and the Impressionist holdings of the Denver Art Museum, augmented by numerous loans from museums and private collections in many different countries, including the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, the National Gallery in London, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.
An exhibition of the Museum Barberini, Potsdam, in cooperation with the Denver Art Museum, under the patronage of Her Excellency Anne-Marie Descôtes, Ambassador of France to Germany
Retrospect
Around 110,000 visitors attended the exhibition despite the coronavirus pandemic. Due to the pandemic, the museum was forced to close shortly after the exhibition opened; new online offerings each day, however, enabled visitors to experience the works and their histories in a digital space, even during the museum’s temporary closure. The website was visited by 1.8 million users. Two months later, the museum opened its doors again; as one of the first museums in Europe to do so, it received major international attention from media outlets including the BBC and NBC.
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