An intense adventure. A rich and tragic life due to the blindness of his later years. A story that belongs to the father of Impressionism, an artistic movement celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. A lucid and resolute spirit. Claude Monet (1840-1926) made light his inspiring movement. He painted its reflections, backgrounds, beams, and flashes. "As if he were a sponge - wrote Georges Clemenceau of him - that absorbed all the tears and sweat shed by the sun during his battle with the painter."
The Altinate-San Gaetano cultural center in Padua dedicates an exhibition, inaugurated in recent days and open until July 14, to Monet. It is not a commemoration or a celebration. Instead, it is a narrative - unfolding through 60 works from the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, produced by Arthemisia and promoted by the Municipality - of friendships, understandings, and revelations. Like a theater of memory, within which the entire artistic and human history of the French painter is retraced: analyzed and juxtaposed with critical and philological rigor thanks to the work of curators Sylvie Carlier, Marianne Mathieu, and Aurélie Gavoille.
From the collection - enriched by some immersive installations, a video about the painter, and also works by Delacroix, Boudin, Jongkind, Renoir, and Rodin, who were his friends and masters - traces of a sometimes light, but always intense, multifaceted portrait emerge.
Always with a force that is never repetitive, adapting to nature, objects, and landscapes that take shape on a canvas painted outdoors where it gathers, assembles with the speed of a stroke capable of not losing the fleeting magic moment.
The six sections begin with a portrait dedicated to him by Renoir; then the figurative phase. Monet traveled in France but also in England, in Norway at the end of the 19th century, where he tried to find the right nuances between mists and blankets of snow "dressed in sky and sun that changed color continuously," as reiterated by Aurélie Gavoille during the presentation. And the effect is majestic. The coasts of Normandy, its sunsets, and the landscapes of Holland, where he returned in 1886, allowed him to approach the luminous intensities of a still wild nature. After settling in Giverny, he never left the Seine Valley again and it took him twenty years to arrange the house and the garden which became his studio under the sky. The time of willows, water lilies, Japanese bridges arrives, which within the exhibition offer majestic canvases. Then, the figures disappear, both human and those of buildings, and the subjects transform, or rather, focus on the iris, on the hemerocallis. In 1908, the painter began to suffer from cataracts, his palette reduced but still managed to dominate the canvases with browns, reds, yellows in a crescendo of chromatic harmonies. Works of maturity destined to leave a mark on the abstract artists of the second half of the 20th century. C.R.
(GdV, martedì 12 marzo)