Of Susanna Daniele
PADUA – The exhibition “Monet. Masterpieces from the Musée Marmottan” in Padua is dedicated to the man who involuntarily gave his name to the artistic movement that would revolutionize the painting of the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century with his painting “Impression, soleil levant”, from 1872, in which it is imprinted on canvases the impression of the rising sun.
Exhibitions dedicated to an artist well known to the general public are usually disappointing because, alongside very few paintings by the artist, most of the works belong to contemporaries or followers of the same artistic movement.
The exhibition in Padua, however, does not disappoint expectations because it displays forty masterpieces by the French artist preserved at the Marmottan Monet Museum in Paris and around twenty works by contemporary artists such as Delacroix, Boudin, Jongkind, Renoir and Rodin.
The collection of Monet’s paintings, donated by his son Michel to the French State in 1966, includes the works that Monet had kept in the famous studio house in Giverny until his death.
The works are divided into six sections ranging from the origins of Monet’s painting to the anticipation of abstractionism in the large panels of his latest Water Lilies, in the middle two corridors with projections which, in a game of mirrors, immerse the visitor in the colors of the garden by Monet.
I was struck by a very abstract panel of Water Lilies dating back to the last period of his life, when progressive blindness altered the perception of shapes and colour. The water lilies are reduced to lines of color on a white background. In each room there is a phrase Period photos and portraits of Monet enrich the exhibition. You can get close to the paintings and photograph them, and this makes the experience even more exciting.
The exhibition can be visited at the Centro Altinate San Gaetano, in the ancient heart of Padua. it is produced by Arthemisia in collaboration with the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris and is curated by Sylvie Carlier, general curator of the museum together with the art historian Marianne Mathieu.
