Monet. Wild and Tamed

From 1880 onward, Claude Monet sought out storm lashed cliffs, desolate coastlines and fierce weather in Bordighera, Antibes, Belle Île, the Creuse Valley and Norway. In his works from these places, nature emerges as a dramatic encounter between sky, sea and rock. At the same time, the artist shaped his own counterpoint to these landscapes: the garden at Giverny, which from around 1890 became his principal motif, where he tamed water, plants and light according to his own and his era’s ideals.

At first glance, the cliff scenes and the paintings from his own garden appear to be opposites, yet Monet – The Wild and the Tamed shows how the apparent divide between chaos and control is constantly challenged in the works from the last forty years of the artist’s career. In the powerful coastal scenes, Monet’s compositional eye acts as a quiet, ordering force, while the wild continually threatens the garden’s fragile harmony in the pictures from Giverny – not least in the final years, when his brushwork grew increasingly dissolved, intense and unsettled.

This catalogue, with texts by the exhibition’s curator Richard Thomson and by Stephen Eisenman, André Dombrowski, Øystein Sjåstad and Clare Willsdon, offers a new and multifaceted portrait of Claude Monet: an artist who throughout his late production questioned, reshaped and shifted the boundaries between the organic and the constructed.