Art show explores Claude Monet’s late years

Art lovers visiting San Francisco have a chance to trace Claude Monet's evolution to a bold and abstract style at a major exhibition dedicated to the final phase of the French master's career.

Monet: The Late Years, which features 50 paintings, including more than 20 examples of his famous water lily series, will be on view from Feb 16 through May 27 at the de Young Museum, part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Assembled from major public and private collections in Europe, the United States, and Asia, the exhibition marks the first time in 20 years to focus Monet's works from 1913, when he started reinventing his painting style that led to increasingly bold and abstract works, up to his death in 1926.

The exhibition will showcase many other extraordinary and unfamiliar works from the artist's final years, several of which will be seen for the first time in the United States.

Monet (1840–1926) is a beloved artist in China. Recent years have seen an unprecedented interest from Chinese people in the Impressionist master. His works have been put on numerous exhibitions in the country since the first major Monet exhibition in Shanghai in 2014, which drew more than 350,000 visitors.

"This exhibition is an opportunity for Chinese tourists to really get a very intense exposure to one of the most important artists of the 20th century, and to see a remarkable display of his influential works that you'll travel all over the world — Paris, London, New York, Toledo — to see what you see here for the next three months," said Thomas Campbell, director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

What's special about this show is that most of the paintings were still in the artist's studio when he died, said exhibition curator George Shackelford, deputy director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

During the last decade of his life, Monet (1840–1926) suffered from personal losses, deteriorating eyesight and the threat of surrounding war. He remained close to home to paint the varied elements of his garden in Giverny, France.

Despite the setbacks and intense personal tragedies, the artist worked even more diligently, which is reflected in his ambition to paint on a large scale and experiment with colors and light.

Far removed from his earlier, more representational production, the artist's late paintings close in on a stylistic threshold into abstraction.

In the prologue concentrating on scenery from Monet's outdoor studio at Giverny, visitors will see "classic water lilies" and feel "comfortable", and then they will see a "different Monet", featuring several dynamically rendered water lily paintings.

With feverish, dramatic brushwork, Monet depicts the "truly beauty of reflected light" and the "wonderful game of dimension", said Shackelford.

This exhibition is a sequel to Monet: The Early Years on view in Fort Worth and San Francisco in 2017. The previous exhibition focused on the artist's youthful pre-Impressionist years, when he developed his unique visual language and technique.

Contact the writer at liazhu@chinadailyusa.com