CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Cleveland Museum of Art’s free, new Focus Gallery exhibition on late works by the French Impressionist Claude Monet is all about visual choreography.
The second you walk from the museum’s lobby through sliding glass doors into the gallery, your eye zooms to the far end of the space, where the museum’s immense water lily painting by Monet (1840-1926) dominates the view, and the room.
The selling point of the show, which opened Sunday and is on view through August 11, is that it has been built around three beautiful late-period Monets on loan from the Musee Marmottan Monet in Paris. The museum is housed in the palatial onetime residence of Paul Marmottan, a wealthy lawyer, collector, patron and art historian who died in 1932.
The borrowed paintings are: “Rouen Cathedral, Sunlight Effect, End of the Day,’’ 1892; “Water Lilies,’’ 1907, an earlier treatment of the motif in the big Cleveland painting; and “Japanese Bridge,’’ 1918. The latter two works portray the pond Monet created in his garden at Giverny in Normandy, 50 miles west of Paris.
Despite the emphasis on the loans from Paris, the show’s real focus is the big Cleveland painting, titled “Water Liles (Agapanthus)’’ 1915-1926. The borrowed paintings are installed around it like a supporting cast. The message is that the Cleveland museum’s painting is pretty hot stuff. The paintings from the Marmottan serve to enrich and amplify its meaning and importance.
Displayed against a deep blue-purple wall in brilliant overhead lighting, the Cleveland painting is a shimmering bath of reflections in shades of pale green and rose, cobalt violet and soft ultramarine. There’s no horizon, nothing solid to hang on to. The inclusion of agapanthus in the title refers to a perennial flowering lily that Monet ultimately painted out of the image to simplify it.
It’s all water and reflections of the sky, except for strokes of pale pink and gold that skitter across the surface, indicating sunlight gleaming on water lily pads. Monet laid down those strokes so quickly that they have the dry, grainy sparkle of pastel, which adds to the overall shimmer. His paint moves; it’s full of life-giving action that channels the soft breezes and watery ripples of a brilliant summer day.
Institutional anchor
The big Monet, purchased by the museum in 1960, measures more than six feet high and 14 feet wide. It’s an institutional anchor normally on view in gallery 222 in the museum’s East Wing, the big gallery focusing on French Impressionism on the museum’ second level. In that setting, the Monet holds court over other works by the artist, and by Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and other Impressionists.
Downstairs, in the Focus Gallery, the painting looks so big under the relatively low ceiling that it makes the room feel somewhat compressed. Otherwise, however, it looks terrific in the space. Highlighted against deep blue-purple walls around it, it virtually emits light.
Heather Lemonedes Brown, the museum’s curator of modern European art, said the institution wanted to create a beautiful, meditative experience as a counterpoint to shows opening later this month on Byzantine art in Africa and Korean couture that will present visitors with a great deal of new visual information and art history.
Monet’s art is more familiar territory. By placing the big Cleveland painting among the Marmottan loans, the museum is offering visitors a closeup view of Monet’s late evolution, when he gradually dispensed with portraying solid objects to focus solely on light and color.
That direction is suggested by a second Monet in the show from the museum’s collection, “Gardner’s Cottage fisherman’s cottage at Antibes,’’ 1888. In it, blazing Riviera light almost seems to dissolve the sea and sky and the slanting tile roof of a laborer’s house.
By the late 1880s, around the time of the Antibes painting, Monet had established himself in the village Giverny in Normandy, where he won a fight with farmers and local councilors to divert a tributary of the River Epte onto his property so he could create the water lily pond as a source of artistic motifs.
The results include the 1907 water lily painting from the Marmottan, a vertical composition that presents an upside down world of willows and a sunset sky reflected on the pond, with water lilies indicating the recession of space across the surface of the water. It points the way toward the big Cleveland painting, although it’s more tightly brushed.
Refusing to coast
By 1914, when World War I started, Monet was a wealthy man who could have settled into senescence. His second wife, Alice Hoschedé, had died and he was losing his eyesight to cataracts. But the war — with a battlefront just 200 miles east of his home — motivated him to create a vast work of public art that he would eventually present as a gift to the nation, the “Grand Decoration’’ of eight giant water lily murals now on view in the Orangerie des Tuileries in Paris.
The Marmottan’s 1918 painting of the Japanese footbridge, painted months before the Nov. 11 Armistice, treats its motif in ways that render it almost unrecognizable. If you stand close to its surface, at the distance from which Monet painted it, it can be hard to tell solid from void, and what’s nearby from far away. Step back a few paces, and the image begins to cohere.
As numerous art historians have stated, Monet’s late Giverny paintings anticipate the large-scale gestural paintings of postwar American Abstract Expressionists such as Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
Submerged narrative
Alongside this typical art historical interpretation, the Monet show offers another submerged narrative, which has to do with the evolution of taste. Hard-edged Cubism was the rage in Paris in 1927, when the French government unveiled the water lily murals in the Tuileries shortly after Monet’s death. They were greeted with a yawn. By then, Monet’s late style was considered passé.
As the website of the Musee Marmottan puts it: “Monet’s last work then went into art historical purgatory.’’ Michel Monet, the artist’s youngest son and sole surviving heir, found that “he was the owner of an inheritance that was denigrated,’’ as the Marmottan website states.
Discouraged that none of France’s national museums showed interest, he bequeathed more than 100 paintings to the Musee Marmottan in 1966, making it’s the world’s largest repository of his father’s work.
By the 1950s, interest in Monet and his late work was rising, but the Cleveland Museum of Art was behind the curve. Museums in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago had already amassed extensive collections of his work and that of other Impressionists.
In contrast, the Cleveland museum only had four Monets, none of them major works. (Jumping ahead to 2012, the museum sold one of those four paintings, “Wheat Field,’’ of 1881, for $12.1 million at auction at Sotheby’s in New York to raise money to buy other artworks).
In 1958, by a huge stroke of good fortune for Cleveland, the museum received a $34 million bequest from industrialist Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., worth nearly $370 million in 2024 dollars. For a short time, Cleveland’s art museum became the richest in America in endowment wealth.
Under its then-new director, Sherman Lee, the museum moved quickly to build up its collections of Asian and Western art to the stature they enjoy today. His agenda included Monet. In 1958, the museum bought “The Red Kerchief,’’ painted in 1868-73, a pivotal early Monet that portrays a glimpse of Camille Doncieux, the artist’s first wife, as she walks by a pair of French doors on a snowy day and glances inside a darkened room.
It’s a classic early Monet that conveys more of the innovative impulses in his work than the large floral still life painted by Monet in 1864 and purchased by the museum in 1953.
The power of three
In 1960, the museum followed up by buying its big waterlily painting from the New York gallery Knoedler & Co. It was one of the paintings left in the artist’s studio at his death. It was also part of a trio intended to be shown side-by-side as a single “immersive” installation.
The paintings were available for purchase because Michel Monet had previously sold them in 1950 to Katia Granoff (1895-1989) a French art dealer and writer, who held them for six years before selling them to Knoedler. Cleveland bought one and the other two went to the St. Louis Art Museum and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.
Occasionally, the museums have brought the three water lily paintings together for a reunion. That happened most recently in Cleveland during the 2015-2016 exhibition “Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse.’’ The Cleveland painting occupies the left side of the group; the St. Louis painting fits in the middle and the Kansas City painting is on the right.
More recently, in 2022, the three museums loaned the water lily triptych to the Fondation Vuitton in Paris for an exhibition comparing Monet to the American Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell. Brown said that in return, the Musee Marmottan, which participated in the project, loaned the three Monet paintings now on view in Cleveland to St. Louis and Kansas City. Cleveland is the final beneficiary of that loan.
Choreography continues upstairs
Moving the big Monet water lily painting downstairs to the Focus Gallery has had an additional benefit for the Cleveland museum. It opened up wall space upstairs in Gallery 222 to display works from the permanent collection that had been in storage.
The big wall usually occupied by the Monet is now occupied by the museum’s three excellent landscapes by Paul Cezanne. The space occupied by the Cezannes now features paintings by Giovanni Segantini of Italy, Jan Verkade of the Netherlands, and Maurice Denis and Henri Le Sidaner of France.
The new display brings richness and complexity to the museum’s presentation of early modern art, an area of art history made stronger by recent gifts from Shaker Heights collectors Nancy and Joseph Keithley.
Visitors will also see that in addition to the museum’s display of three paintings by Vincent van Gogh from its collection, it’s also showing a fourth painting by the artist depicting a couple walking along a canal. It’s a fragment of a larger painting that van Gogh cut down because he was only satisfied with the couple.
All of this suggests that despite the new gallery space created by the $320 million expansion and renovation completed by the museum in 2013, the institution can still be hard-pressed to find the room to show off its growing collection. As the collection continues to expand, the museum will need to keep finding ways to share all of its riches. It’s a nice problem to have.
