Monet, painting time” at the Musée de l'Orangerie

One hundred years after the death of Claude Monet (1840-1926), the Musée de l'Orangerie dedicates an exhibition to the artist focusing on the relationship of his work with time. Considered since the 1870s the quintessential Impressionist painter, despite participating in only five of the group's exhibitions, Monet moved from the series of the 1890s — such as “The Cathedrals,” “The Haystacks,” and “The Poplars” — to a process of almost dissecting time, until reaching the final testament of the “Water Lilies,” which resolves the fragmentation of the series by merging into a continuum. Bringing together about 40 paintings, mostly from the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée Marmottan Monet, as well as loans from French and international public and private collections, the exhibition follows different moments of this journey, with special attention to the “Water Lilies” cycle — the exhibition naturally takes place at the Orangerie, which houses the grand final decorations of the series, nicknamed by André Masson in 1952 as the “Sistine Chapel of Impressionism.” The route reflects on the sensation of accelerating time and the modernity of Monet's Impressionist period, on capturing instantaneity through series, and finally, on the “Water Lilies” cycle as a quest to transcribe duration — a project that Clemenceau described, upon seeing the Rouen Cathedrals exhibited at the Durand-Ruel gallery in 1895, as “a revolution without a gunshot.”