Monet & Friends Alive

Immersive Monet experience at the LUME

The Monet & Friends Alive exhibit was open to the public from July 3rd, 2022, till the end of May 2023. It is an immersive experience that combines impressionistic paintings and classical music in a calming and cozy setting at the LUME at the Newfield’s Museum in Indianapolis.

Impressionism art differs in many ways from art created in other time periods. Contrary to the existing concept of beauty, they often chose to paint ordinary people in authentic scenes rather than important personalities in staged poses. The impressionistic style was in reaction to the agitated political and social situation in Paris at that time. During the late 19th century, rapid urbanization, and technologic advancements, sparked a new movement in all the arts that challenged the traditionalists. Some of the brave artists igniting the impressionistic movement were Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Morisot, Cézanne, Degas, Monet, Guillaume, and Cassatt. They flooded their canvases with bright colors and texture, paying more attention to how they felt about the scene rather than realism. They developed a new approach to landscape painting, called “en plain air”.

Claude Monet, also called the father of impressionism, was one of the first artists to move his studio out into the open air. He was introduced to plein-air painting by Eugène Boudin and subsequently studied informally with the Dutch landscapist Johan Jongkind. As seen in all of Monet’s works, his profound love of nature is being reflected with every dab of paint. What many people don’t know is that his most famous work “Water Lilies” consists of a series of 250 oil paintings. Throughout his career, he painted his flower garden at Giverny over and over again. Japanese woodblock prints were a huge influence. Monet’s asymmetrical arrangements of forms emphasized their two-dimensional surfaces by eliminating linear perspective and abandoning three-dimensional modeling. Monet’s earlier works show a vibrant and metropolitan city, preserving the atmosphere and sensations of the era. By using light to depict the architecture of metropolitan cities like London, Venice, and Paris, he creates a sense of grandeur and foreboding. Comparing his style as time passed, it shows how cataracts has affected his work. Claude Monet’s visual problems began in 1912. Over time he suffered from significant loss of vision, and you may notice how his later paintings are more blurry, and the colors became gloomier, and murky. To avoid mixing up the colors, Monet started to label his paint tubes and kept them in a strict order on his palette. In 1923 he underwent a risky three stage surgery which brought back some of his vision but resulted in him seeing everything in a bluish tint and objects seemed to be curved abnormally. Seeing all his postoperative works enraged Claude Monet to such an extent that he destroyed most of them. Shortly, after his death at the age of 86 (he died a wealthy and well-respected man), the French government installed his last water-lily series in specially constructed galleries at the Orangerie in Paris, where they remained to this day. 

Unfortunately, Monet enjoyed quite limited success during his career. Out of his many paintings, only a handful of landscapes, seascapes, and portraits were accepted for exhibition at the annual Salons during the 1860s. The continued rejection of his more ambitious works (notably the large-scale “Woman in the Garden”) inspired Monet to join with the other Impressionists in establishing an independent exhibition in 1874. 

Art critics of the time accused the Impressionists of taking modern painting too far into the realm of the fleeting, the accidental, the subjective, and the non-heroic. This lead, contrary to all expectations, to admiration. The artists saw it as a great honor, and subsequently called themselves “Impressionists” after the title of one of the most criticized paintings, “Impression, Sunrise”. Previously, an artist’s reputation could only be well established when a jury selected their work for a large-scale, annual exhibition known as the Paris Salon. In this new era of art, where painters refused to idealize people, scenes, and suddenly gained fame without the approval of the art establishment, the artworld seemed upside down.

Within a few decades, the impressionistic artists popularity spread far beyond the French borders. Artists and collectors in other countries, including the United States of America, came to value the new stylistic and thematic innovations. Monet and Impressionism shaped art well into the 20th century, inspiring abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell, and Willem de Kooning, among many others.