MONET - MITCHELL / Fondation Louis Vuitton.

The exhibitions "Monet - Mitchell" create an unprecedented "dialogue" between the works of two exceptional artists, Claude Monet (1840-1926) and Joan Mitchell (1925-1992).

"Claude Monet - Joan Mitchell, Dialogue" will be introduce by the "Joan Mitchell, Retrospective", enabling the public in France and Europe to discover her work.

The "Monet - Mitchell" exhibitions present each artist’s unique response to a landscape and nature, illustrated in a particularly immersive manner. In his last paintings, the Water Lilies, Monet aimed to recreate in his studio the motifs he observed at length on the surface of his water lily pond in Giverny. Joan Mitchell, on the other hand, would explore a memory or a sense of the emotions she felt while in a particular place that was dear to her, perceptions that remained vivid beyond space and time. She would create these abstract compositions at La Tour, her studio in Vétheuil, a small French village.

CLAUDE MONET - JOAN MITCHELL, DIALOGUE

Claude Monet's Water Lilies found recognition in the United States in the 1950s, where they were seen as precursors of abstraction by the painters of Abstract Expressionism. Following André Masson, Clement Greenberg, the famous American critic, took a stand in defence of their modernity: "What [Monet] found in the end was, however, not so much a new as a more comprehensive principle; and: it lay not in Nature, as he thought, but in the essence of art itself, in art’s 'abstractness’”.

In the context of “Monet’s Revival”, in 1957 and 1958, Mitchell took part in exhibitions devoted to the notion of "abstract impressionism," a term coined by her friend Elaine de Kooning. The rapprochement between the two artists was further reinforced by Joan Mitchell's move in 1968 to Vétheuil to a house close to where Monet lived between 1878-1881. Joan Mitchell nonetheless asserted full artistic independence.

https://www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr/en/events/claude-monet-joan-mitchell