September 22, 2019: Mario and Steve's Wedding
	June 25, 2019: The Dior Exhibit at the DMA
	Return to the Index for 2019

On Sunday, August 11th, Fred and I were invited to join the San Antonio group (Prudence, Ron, Nancy, Karl, and Guy) for a visit to the Kimbell Museum's exhibit "Monet: The Late Years". We visited the exhibit on Sunday afternoon, and then had dinner with the group that night. We did return on Monday evening to have dinner with them again before they returned to San Antonio on Tuesday. We only took a couple of pictures worth including here aside from those we took at the exhibit itself. The second of them was Fred's picture of me at the Worthington Hotel. If you are wondering, I recently had cataract surgery, and there was a problem that will require a second one. Until that happens in a few days, I am wearing an eye patch.

Getting to the Kimbell Museum

You have probably seen our route to the Kimbell numerous times before (if you've been to other pages in my photoalbum that involve trips there. It is really pretty straightforward.

Sometimes when we go meet Prudence and Nancy in Fort Worth, they are staying downtown at the Worthington, and when we meet them there we take a little different route (using TX 183, the Airport Freeway) to get over to Fort Worth. But to go directly to the museum district west of downtown, it's easier to take I-30, the old toll road, west to Fort Worth.

Just west of Fort Worth, we get off I-30 to head north on University Drive:

The Museum District consists of the three art museums (the Modern Art Museum, the Kimbell, and the Amon Carter) plus the Natural History and Science Museums that are just west of the Will Rogers Convention Center. A couple of years ago, a large parking area was built just south of the Modern Art Museum and so it is now a lot easier to find a spot. We parked there and walked over to the Kimbell, entry to which is free. We were to meet the San Antonio folks over in the Piano Pavilion, the new exhibit hall built to the west of the original building a few years back. So we walked through the main building and then across the courtyard to the west and into the large lobby of the Piano Pavilion.

"Monet: The Late Years"- An Introduction

The First Exhibition in More Than Twenty Years Dedicated to the Final Phase of Monet’s Career

Through 52 paintings, this exhibition traced the evolution of Monet’s practice from 1913, when he embarked on a reinvention of his painting style that led to increasingly bold and abstract works, up to his death in 1926. Assembled from major public and private collections in Europe, the United States, and Asia, including holdings from the Kimbell Art Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, "Monet: The Late Years" included more than twenty examples of Monet’s beloved water-lily paintings.

In addition, the exhibition showcased many other extraordinary and unfamiliar works from the artist’s final years, several of which were seen for the first time in the United States. Majestic panoramas displayed alongside late easel paintings, demonstrated Monet’s continued vitality and variety as a painter. This exhibition redefined Monet (widely known as the greatest landscape painter of the Impressionists) as one of the most original artists of the modern age.

About the Exhibition

"Monet: The Late Years" focused on the period when the artist, his life marked by personal loss, deteriorating eyesight, and the threat of surrounding war, remained close to home to paint the varied elements of his garden at Giverny. His worsening vision and a new ambition to paint on a large scale stimulated fundamental changes in the tonality and intensity of his palette, toward vivid color combinations and broader, more apparent, application of paint. The complex surfaces of his canvases reveal layers of activity spread out over the course of days, months, and years. The result was a remarkable new body of work with increasingly feverish, dramatic brushwork. Far removed from his earlier, more representational production, the artist’s late paintings close in on a stylistic threshold into abstraction.

As we walked through the exhibit, we could see that it was thematically, rather than chronologically arranged. The exhibition opened with a prologue concentrating on scenery from Monet’s outdoor studio at Giverny. Paintings from the late 1890s and early 1900s include depictions of the Japanese footbridge, the newly created lily pond and the artist’s house as seen from the rose garden— all sources of inspiration that he would revisit in his late career.

Next, the exhibition entered the period between 1914 and 1919, when Monet returned to painting anew after a hiatus in work prompted by the loss of his second wife, Alice, and his eldest son, Jean. Opening with the vibrant 1914–17 Water Lilies from the Fine Arts Museums’ collection, the section featured a number of the dynamically rendered water-lily paintings from this period, juxtaposed with audacious large-scale floral studies from the evolving scenery of his garden.

Continuing to study natural phenomena, the artist focused on elements that had been relegated to the fringes in earlier works, such as day lilies, agapanthus, and yellow iris, in addition to water lilies; for this section, the exhibit relied on twenty paintings on loan from the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.

Monet’s ambitions as a muralist, in contrast with his renewed activity as an easel painter, were explored next. With the completion of a vast studio building on his property in 1916, Monet was able to undertake significantly larger canvases, measuring between 14 and 20 feet wide, forming a series of mural-style paintings now known as the Grandes Décorations. In such immersive, panoramic paintings as Agapanthus from the Saint Louis Art Museum— more than 6 x 14 feet in size— the artist paralleled themes undertaken in an important series of paintings of his water-lily pond, each about 3 x 6 feet, their number rivaling the scale and ambition of his mural project.

Groups of paintings from his late garden series— several on view in the United States for the first time— concluded the exhibition. During his final years, while continuing to perfect his largest panels, Monet returned to working in smaller-format paintings, on the scale of his famous series paintings of the 1890s and early 1900s. Working again in his classic serial method, he revisited familiar motifs on his property, such as the Japanese bridge and the rose-covered trellises over the path leading from his house to the edge of his flower garden. The exhibition showcased these works in greater numbers than ever before attempted: in addition to seven studies of the Japanese bridge at Giverny, six compelling portrayals of a tree with a twisting trunk and craggy outreaching branches were part of the exhibit. Among these was Weeping Willow, a masterwork from the Kimbell Art Museum’s collection, painted in 1918–19 in mournful response to the tragedies of World War I.

By his final years, Monet’s cataracts had affected the tonal balance of his perception. Nonetheless, as seen in Path under the Rose Arches and The Artist’s House Seen from the Rose Garden, both on loan from the Musée Marmottan Monet, the artist triumphed over this adversity by producing his most radical works yet. The expressive style of these paintings, with a complex layering of gestural strokes in red and yellow hues over blue and green, affirmed Monet’s continued vitality as a painter and redefined him, in the near abandonment of subject matter in favor of increasingly rapturous execution, as a pioneer of abstraction.

"Monet: The Late Years" was a sequel to "Monet: The Early Years", which focused on the artist’s youthful pre-Impressionist years— from ages 17 to 31— when he developed his unique visual language and technique; we came to see this exhibition a little over two years ago, although I did not create an album page for it.

"Monet: The Late Years"- A Walk Through the Exhibit

As I have done with other museum exhibitions in this photo album, I want to try to give you as much as I can the impression of having walked through the exhibit with us. In that vein, I would like you to see the artworks we saw, read the posted information that we read, and hear the commentators we heard through our audio headsets.

Click on the Image Above to View the Slideshow

To accomplish all of this, I have created a slideshow of the exhibit. Each slide will include some combination of the descriptive plaques introducing sections of the exhibit, the artworks themselves, the descriptive plaques about the individual artworks, and the narrative spoken occasionally into our ears through the Audioguide system. The sequence of the slides will be (with a few minor departures) the sequence in which the exhibition was arranged.

Pictures that were "stops" on the audioguide tour are marked with an "AUDIO" logo in the upper right corner. To listen to the audio, just click on that logo, and what I heard will play through your speakers or earphones. Sometimes, the narrators refer to other paintings nearby, and you can go back and forth through the slides while you listen to the audio. Don't forget to close the little audio window (which will pop up just to the right upper corner of the slide) when you are done listening.

As with all the slideshows in this album, use the little arrows in the lower corners of each slide to move from one to the next, and track your progress by referring to the sequence numbers in the upper left of each slide. Putting my photographs into this slideshow was time-consuming, but I hope that the final result was worth it- particularly since very, very few of you had the opportunity to see this exhibit, whose tour is now concluded. Just click on the image at left and enjoy!

We enjoyed the Monet exhibit immensely, as we have enjoyed every exhibit that we have seen at the Kimbell in recent years.  

A Final Dinner in Fort Worth

On Monday evening, Fred and I returned to Fort Worth to meet the gang, now expanded to include Soon Y. Warren, one of Prudence's gallery artists, and Vicki and Dan Pier, longtime friends of Prudence and Nancy, for dinner in downtown Fort Worth. Before dinner, we happened to be in Nancy's room at the Worthington, and I made a panoramic picture of the view north from downtown Fort Worth:

Prominent in the center of the view is the old Tarrant County Courthouse.

We enjoyed seeing everyone from San Antonio, and we certainly enjoyed the Monet exhibit at the Kimbell.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

	September 22, 2019: Mario and Steve's Wedding
	June 25, 2019: The Dior Exhibit at the DMA
	Return to the Index for 2019