The sprawling “Water Lilies (Agapanthus)” painting at the Cleveland Museum of Art is a crowd favorite. With its white flowers and clouds floating across blue, lavender and green reflections in a pond, the approximately 6.5-by-14-foot work of art from French Impressionist Claude Monet has been a major attraction for visitors since its acquisition in 1960.
“It’s really a pilgrimage destination,” says Heather Lemonedes Brown, deputy director and chief curator at CMA. “It’s very rare you go into the gallery and no one is looking at it.”
The painting was the catalyst for a new exhibit at CMA called Monet in Focus, which sheds new light on his later works through three paintings on loan from the Musee Marmottan Monet, a Parisian museum devoted to the painter’s art, and two paintings from CMA’s permanent collections.
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In 2022, CMA loaned “Water Lilies (Agapanthus)” to the Fondation Louis Vuitton Museum’s Monet-Mitchell exhibit in Paris. In exchange, the Musee Marmottan lent CMA three paintings that became the foundation for the new exhibit, running March 31–Aug. 11.
“We knew we wanted to show Monet and his late work, because that’s the great strength of the Marmottan’s collection,” says Brown. “So, we chose three very different pictures that could tell a story about how Monet uses light and atmosphere in his paintings in three really different ways.”
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For example, “The Japanese Bridge, 1918” depicts the rough shape of an arching footbridge emerging from shadows. In “Rouen Cathedral at the End of the Day, Sunlight Effect, 1892,” Monet chose to paint the historic Gothic cathedral as part of a series on several canvases at different times of the day over six months. The painting “Monet in Focus” shows the upper portion of the cathedral bathed in late-afternoon light, and the lower third is in shadows. It’s contrasted with CMA’s own “Gardener’s House at Antibes,” depicting a warmer light on a sloped building.
This morphing of his work is shown through the contrasting of the third painting on loan from the Musee Marmottan, “Water Lilies, 1907,” with “Water Lilies (Agapanthus).”
Not only has “Water Lilies (Agapanthus)” inspired Monet in Focus, but it’s played a role in shaping CMA itself. During the 2015 exhibit Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse, the piece, which is the left panel of a room-sized, three-piece triptych, was reunited with its other panels.
“That just goes to show how special it is to have one here,” says Brown. “I think owning the painting inspired us to develop the strength of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in our collection.”
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