This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Sept. 29, 2011 - Remember the 1990s "Saturday Night Live" skit in which an assortment of unworldly, drawling Southerners in Paris raved over the "Mo-nette" paintings they'd seen in the "Lou-ver?" The spoof worked because the 19th- and 20th-century artist is so ubiquitous that you'd have to live in complete cultural oblivion to not know how to pronounce his name (or even the Louvre's).
The name alone is sure to be a big draw when an exhibit of Claude Monet's work comes to the St. Louis Art Museum Sunday, Oct. 2. But this particular display is more significant than most. In "Monet's Water Lilies," the museum's one-third of the triptych "Agapanthus" will be joined by its accompanying panels -- marking the first time in 30 years that the 42-foot-wide triptych has been shown in its complete form.
The panels are on loan from Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art. The triptych, a depiction of the artist's garden in Giverny, France, is also known as "African lily" or "Lily of the Nile."
In another artistic reunion, two-large scale oil studies for "Agapanthus" that reside in the Musee Marmottan Monet in Paris will be also displayed in St. Louis. A total of eight paintings make up the exhibit.
The seven-foot-tall triptych was displayed in Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art this summer and will travel to Cleveland at some point after its St. Louis showing. "Monet's Water Lilies" curator Simon Kelly talked with the Beacon about the exhibit, its challenges and its meaning.
Why is reunification of the triptych important?
Kelly: The individual paintings look great by themselves but the point is to reunite the three together -- that's what Monet himself intended. I saw the exhibit in Kansas City. When you put them together, they just look wonderful; they complement each other. To see them together is to see the best of each work, and it gives them a new kind of life.
What is unique about the St. Louis display of the triptych?
Kelly: The challenge, in a way, was to maintain the flow between the pantings. Each of them has an individual frame, and having the individual frames kind of breaks up the flow. For the Saint Louis Art Museum exhibit, we commissioned one frame for the whole of the triptych. It's in line with what Monet wanted.
This hasn't ben done before. When the paintings were shown in past, they kept their original museum frames.
What other display considerations are unique to this exhibit in every venue?
Kelly: The idea of the panoramic view was important to Monet. [In his day] the triptych would have been shared in the context of other triptychs, and the spectator would have stood in the middle of the room and, in effect, have been surrounded by paintings.
When we show the triptych, we show the side panels at a slight angle, angling inward toward the spectator for a panoramic effect.
Can you say more about the studies for the triptych, "The Agapanthus" and "Water Lilies, Harmony in Blue," as well as the other works in the exhibit?
Kelly: It's the first time the studies from Paris have been shown with triptych, and it's exciting to see how they relate to it. There are also others from a private collection in St. Louis including a diptych that relates closely to the triptych.
Those coming from Paris are are full-scale studies, each the same height as the triptych. The diptych is also a large painting -- it's two paintings together and it is four meters [13.1233 feet] wide.
Monet worked on "Agapanthus" for 10 years. What can you tell us about its long progression?
Kelly: That kind of period of time is quite typical. His earlier work tends to be much more rapidly completed.
One of the points about this show is the extent to which Monet revised his late work. We've also done some conservation work around the triptych. We've taken X-rays and paint cross sections.
He changed the painting a lot so there are whole areas of the painting that were revised. It's not absolutely clear why, but I think in the later work [in the triptych] there is a move from naturalism to abstraction. If you look at the way it changed over time, it became more abstract, it became flatter and more diffused.
In Monet's work you have these abstract fields of colors that were taken up by the American painters of the '50s, along with the brushwork, which is very rapid and gestural. I think in terms of the water lilies, there was quite a bit of influence on American abstract expressionist painters.