The artists went beyond the limits – Newspaper Kommersant No. 197 (7398) of 10/24/2022

The Paris Museum Fondation Louis Vuitton opened the Monet-Mitchell exhibition – a story about what united two completely different artists: Claude Monet (1840-1926) and Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), a Frenchman and an American, a man and a woman, an impressionist and an abstract artist. An unusual experiment, hardly accessible to other museums, admired the correspondent of “Kommersant” in France Alexey Tarkhanov.

The Monet-Mitchell exhibition is divided into two parts. The first compared 35 works by Claude Monet and 35 by Joan Mitchell. The second part, fifty more paintings, is dedicated only to the American artist. The Fondation Louis Vuitton brings together works from the Marmottan Monet in Paris, the Joan Mitchell Foundation in New York, the San Francisco and Baltimore Museums of Modern Art, and, of course, the collection of the Fondation Louis Vuitton itself, among other collections. Things are known, but in our century they have never been brought together.

The best example is for the first time since 1956 Monet’s thirteen-meter triptych Agapanthus (1915-1926), shown in its entirety, divided into three between the museums of St. Louis, Kansas City and Cleveland. This work, brought to the United States in the 1950s and greeted there with the enthusiasm that Monet vainly expected from his contemporaries at the end of his life, was one of those that are considered to have preceded the birth of American abstract expressionism.

In this sense, Joan Mitchell turns out to be the creative heir of Claude Monet, even though she was in no hurry to accept and recognize this legacy: “This is not my artist.” But the exhibition is about “dialogue”, in its first part, the entrances to the museum halls located on different floors are decorated with multi-meter photographic portraits of Monet and Mitchell. On the left – one, on the right – the other, they look at each other, as if they want to talk. Of course, dialogue with words turned out to be impossible, the artists were divorced by time, the Frenchman died a year after the birth of an American woman. But the dialogue with painting is quite obvious. The curators of the exhibition were able to select very accurate pairs of works, similar in stroke rhythm or color, in which Mitchell seems to be answering Monet’s questions.

Monet’s later work is really close to abstraction, especially in his landscapes, which turn the surface of a pond with water lilies or agapanthus into a color mess. He refused to convey contours, even the opposition of heaven and earth, which was once evident in Haystacks or Rouen Cathedrals. The sky is now visible only in the water, dissolving the red color of the sunset in the greenery of the pond.

Impressionism explained to people how they should look at the world, gave the audience a new optics. Towards the end of his life, Monet honestly made an attempt to start anew, to understand what he was seeing, fighting against the approaching blindness. In his newly combined triptych, there is this feeling of not understanding what to do next, how to get out of an imaginary dead end. “These gardens of waters and reflections became an obsession for me… I tried to show what I feel,” said the artist. This was appreciated by Mitchell, saying: “I love Monet at its end, not at its beginning.”

The free “landscapes” of the American woman, where large strokes are adjacent to the left areas of the white canvas, seem to continue the experiments of the Frenchman. She did not paint them from life, carrying sensations in her memory and working in the workshop, often at night under artificial light. What Monet has is the quality of a sketch, Mitchell has the quality of the final work. Where he sought accuracy in nature, she seeks accuracy in feeling. Her landscapes are justified not just by her observations, but by her biography, the series are connected with the events of her life and most often with losses: Mitchell lost friends, lovers, sisters, dogs.

It’s funny to watch how, denying continuity, the American returned to the French. After moving to France, she became a neighbor of the Impressionist half a century later. Joan not only lived on the street that bore the name of Claude Monet, but was also doomed to look at her surroundings – trees, fields, the Seine – through his eyes, because fifty years ago Monet already appropriated all these landscapes. It had to be experienced, surpassed, and Mitchell managed. And to make it more obvious, for the first time in my memory, the curators removed frames from Monet’s works, showing “naked” canvases on stretchers, the same as those of an American woman.

The Louis Vuitton Foundation is easy to envy. After showing the collections of Shchukin, Morozov and Courtauld, the masterpieces of MoMA, it is clear that the curators of this Parisian museum can get almost everything they want for their exhibitions, any artist, from any collection, from all over the world. And that means that the foundation can afford the luxury of making such a strict and subtle exhibition as Monet-Mitchell, spending as much effort and money on it as on any other noisy museum blockbuster.