From the 1870s onward, he was regarded as the impressionist artist par excellence, although he took part in only five of the group's exhibitions. His work quickly came to be identified with the "new painting", so fully did it embody its characteristics (most often executed outdoors, with a rapid brushstroke and clear harmonies revealing the impression of a moment), before giving rise to one of its most singular and remarkable extensions. In the 1890s, with series such as Les cathédrales, Les meules, Les peupliers, the painter revealed an approach close to the dissection of time, leading up to the final testament of the Nymphéas, which resolves the insurmountable difficulty of fragmentation within the series by merging into the continuum.
A selection of nearly forty paintings by Monet, drawn mainly from the collections of the musée d'Orsay and the musée Marmottan Monet, but also from loans from French and international public and private collections, will highlight these different moments, dwelling more particularly on the cycle of the Nymphéas. From this unprecedented angle and with a detached gaze drawing on different fields of research, the exhibition will propose to re-examine a body of work whose significance, one hundred years later, remains more fundamental than ever.
The exhibition naturally finds its place at the musée de l'Orangerie, which houses the great decorations of the Nymphéas. This unique ensemble, a true "Sistine Chapel of Impressionism", according to the expression of André Masson in 1952, offers testimony to the work of the late Monet, conceived as a genuine environment and crowning the cycle of the Nymphéas. The route invites reflection on the sense of accelerating time and on modernity during the artist's impressionist period, on the capture of instantaneity through series, and finally on the cycle of the Nymphéas, in the search for a transcription of duration. Monet developed a painting that responds to the challenges and upheavals of his era concerning the notion of time, from a point of view that is at once lived, felt, but also tangible through the concrete signs of transformation of urban space and landscape. The nineteenth century was that of the proliferation of clocks in public space and the synchronisation of measured time; it was also that of the transport revolution and the development of railways. The impressionist moment in Monet thus appears, echoing this revolution in the apprehension of time in the nineteenth century, as that of a painting increasingly intent on inscribing itself in instantaneity.
After the years in which the impressionist exhibitions took place, the artist shows a tendency to explore the effects produced at different times of day on a single subject. It is in Normandy that he ultimately develops his famous series of Meules (1888-1891), Peupliers au bord de l'Epte (1891-1892), Matinée sur la Seine (1896-1897), as well as those of the Cathédrale de Rouen (1892-1898). Through these series, the painter pushes the logic of representing the moment to the point of fragmenting time in order better to grasp its essence. In 1895, the Cathedrals of Rouen, exhibited at Durand-Ruel, were for Clemenceau "a revolution without a gunshot" (Clemenceau, "Révolution de Cathédrales" in 1895 in La Justice). With these pictorial researches, Monet seems to take part in his era's fascination with the meticulous, almost scientific observation of the world around him.
In the 1890s, Monet began the final cycle that would occupy him until his death in 1926, that of the Nymphéas. It comprises more than two hundred and fifty canvases around a single subject, and is crowned by the creation of two rooms made specifically to house his large panels, offered to France in the aftermath of the 1918 armistice, the painter's ultimate work, inaugurated a year after his death in 1927. Everything combines to offer the viewer an immersion in the work close to duration in the Bergsonian sense of the term.