MonetWild and Tamed
Monet – Wild and Tamed brings together some of the most celebrated works by one of the defining figures of modern art. Offering a rare insight into Monet’s landscape painting, the exhibition explores a central tension in his work: the relationship between his interpretations of “wild” nature and landscapes shaped by human intervention.
The exhibition follows Monet through the final four decades of his career featuring over 50 works. It traces the artist’s journeys to rugged environments along the Mediterranean coast, in Brittany, the Creuse Valley and, not least, in wintry Norway. These landscapes are contrasted with the carefully cultivated world of the garden he developed at Giverny, which became his principal subject from the mid-1890s onwards.
At the centre of the exhibition are the water lilies – among the most iconic images in modern art. The later works include some of the most daring and freely painted works Monet ever created. Made as his eyesight deteriorated, these pictures reveal an artist continuing to push the possibilities of painting with extraordinary freedom, intensity and determination. The exhibition closes with a consideration of the ecology of Monet’s garden at Giverny, inviting new perspectives on some of his best-loved images.
The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, home to the world’s largest collection of Monet’s works. It brings together important paintings from the museum’s collection alongside major loans from the Musée d’Orsay, The National Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and private collections across Europe and the United States. The exhibition is curated by Professor Richard Thomson, a leading specialist in Monet and nineteenth-century French art, in collaboration with Jon-Ove Steihaug, Senior Curator at MUNCH.
About Claude Monet
Claude Monet (1840–1926) is best known as a leading artist of French Impressionism. His early works captured the profound transformations of nineteenth-century France shaped by rapid modernisation. At the heart of his artistic practice, however, was a sustained engagement with landscape. Working outdoors for much of his life, he studied nature in its constantly changing forms, fascinated by the challenge of translating fleeting impressions of light, atmosphere and season into paint. A century after his death in 1926, Monet’s experiments with perception and the painted surface remain central to how we understand the emergence of modern painting.
The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, and is generously supported by BNP Paribas and Sparebankstiftelsen DNB.
