This fall the Saint Louis Art Museum presents Monet's Water Lilies. Opening on October 2, 2011, this highly anticipated exhibition reunites the Agapanthus triptych for the first time in more than 30 years.
French artist Claude Monet (1840-1926) is one of the most significant and best-known Impressionists, and his water-lily paintings- a series of approximately 250-represent the culminating achievement of his career. The exhibition Monet's Water Lilies presents the Agapanthus triptych as the artist intended and will provide an unforgettable experience for the people of St. Louis and the region.
The exhibition also includes two large-scale oil studies for the Agapanthus triptych, on loan from the Musee Marmottan Monet in Paris; they are The Agapanthus, 1914-1917, and Water Lilies, Harmony in Blue, 1914-1917. These studies, for the right and left panels of the triptych, provide valuable insight into Monet's working methods and are to be reunited with the triptych for the first time.
With a total of eight works, the exhibition will also showcase the diptych Wisteria Numbers 1 and 2, c.1920. These two paintings were intended by Monet to be installed with Agapanthus in a pavilion that was never built in the garden of what is today the Musee Rodin in France. Also on view is Water Lilies, c.1916, which was included in the 1956 Knoedler Gallery exhibition at which Agapanthus was first displayed in the United States.
Monet painted around 3,000 works during his lifetime. His later years were spent at Giverny, approximately 40 miles from Paris, where he constructed and expanded his gardens. The artist began work on the massive paintings of the Agapanthus triptych, measuring approximately 7 feet by 14 feet each, in 1915, and continued to rework and obsessively modify the composition of the triptych until his death more than 10 years later. The three large canvases of the triptych, stretching a combined 42 feet, were described by Monet as his "Grandes Decorations." |
