Overview
The monumental canvas Waterlilies by Claude Monet is perhaps the most treasured painting in the Portland Art Museum’s collection. Now, after over 65 years, it will finally look much as the artist intended—without varnish. The detailed process of conservation resulted in new color harmonies and brightness. To celebrate the restoration of the painting and the campus transformation project, this beloved icon will be presented in its historical context. Monet and his fellow Impressionists were obsessed with Japanese “floating world” prints that had only been available in Europe and the United States for a few decades, yet transformed the way artists looked at the world. They introduced new concepts of beauty and new ways of seeing the world that decentered the European tradition.
Monet’s startlingly disorienting composition is without a horizon line or depth. It combines floating leaves, blossoms, and the reflections of hanging willow branches, with the suggestion of raindrops, resulting in a mesmerizingly contemplative image of nature. Yet the nature in Portland Art Museum’s Waterlilies painting is artificial—a pond constructed by Monet, stocked with waterlily specimens imported from all over the world, and tended by eight gardeners. Monet created over 250 paintings of his waterlily pond in his final years, an astonishing project.
Monet decorated his expansive house in Giverny, France, with a selection of the hundreds of important woodblock Japanese prints he had collected by masters such as Toyokuni, Hiroshige, and Utamaro. Visitors will experience a recreation of Monet’s collection with prints from the Museum’s Asian Art collection in a section called Monet’s Japanese Prints; followed by a section on the Impressionist and European response to Japanese artists, with works by Henri Rivière, Édouard Vuillard, Jules Chéret, and others. Lastly, the newly conserved painting will be presented alongside the story of the research and restoration project. Waterlilies will be joined by contemporary photographs of Giverny and Portland’s Japanese gardens by Stephen Shore, Susan Siebert, and Stu Levy.
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