I loved the theme of the garden in modern art and the chance to see more than 100 master works by the likes Claude Monet and fellow Impressionists, post-Impressionists, and 20th-century avant-garde artists. It’s a roster that includes Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, John Singer Sargent, Edvard Munch, Wassily Kandinsky, Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse.
It’s a stunning exhibit, and I don’t use the adjective lightly. Cleveland is the only U.S. venue for this collaborative effort between the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
The paintings are borrowed from 19 private collections as well as museums in London, Paris, Munich, Madrid, New York City, Washington D.C. – and oh yes, our very own Dayton Art Institute, which loaned its cherished 1903 painting of Monet’s “Water Lilies” to the exhibit.
Just as with a great musician or actor, there is no substitute for seeing these masterpieces live, in person.
And the experience is even more intimate than a live performance. When you stand before the painting, you are swept into the world of the artists, into the vibrant colors of their gardens.
I expected that. But I didn’t expect how contemporary it would feel, how much it would relate to the turbulence in today’s world.
The gardening craze in painting started as a way to explore the new phenomenon of middle-class leisure. Monet was nearly as visionary in his gardening techniques as he was in his painting.
By 1914 – at the dawn of World War I – painting his garden had become, for Monet, an act of defiance, consolation, and, ultimately, re-creation.
In September, 1914, German armies were advancing on Paris and civilians were fleeing the region. Monet stubbornly remained in Giverny to continue working on his monumental “Grande Decorations,” a series of paintings inspired by his water garden. “As for me, I’m staying here all the same, and if those savages must kill me, it will be in the middle of my canvases, in front of all of my life’s work,” Monet wrote.
That month, France suffered 250,000 casualties in a single month. Even Monet couldn’t help being distracted from his work and by the deployment of his stepson Jean-Pierre and his son Michel. He resumed work that December. “It’s the best way to avoid thinking of these sad times,” he said. “All the same, I feel ashamed to think about my little researches into form and color when so many people are suffering and dying for us.”
Monet’s “little researches” have lived on, grown in significance, as the strife of The Great War gradually faded from living memory.
And now they form the heart and soul of this major exhibit. Monet’s paintings grow darker in tone, more somber, during the war years, but true to his vow he never stopped painting.
“Before WWI, Impressionists were exploring the effects of industrialization and things that were happening in everyday life,” said Eva Buttacavoli, executive director of the Dayton Visual Arts Center. “During the war, artists responded to the terror around them by creating beauty.”
Can art help us work through the troubles in our own time? Can it help us to grapple with the tragedies in Paris and San Bernardino?
Buttacavoli thinks that it can.
“Today’s artists are responding to these turbulent times,” she said. “It’s all so overwhelming an confusing. How do you deal with that? How do you make decisions, and how do you use your critical eye and wade through all this muck?”
She also believes that artists can promote understanding among cultures: “An artist from the other side of the world can create a painting that makes you feel a new way. It can be a comfort and an acknowledgement we are all in this together, trying to makes sense of it and live in it.”
That’s what the Dayton Visual Arts Center does, she said: “We present the art of our time — artists looking at themes and issues important to us.”
Next up for DVAC: an exhibit called “Gesture Control,” running Jan. 14 to Feb. 27, exploring the way that artists use new technology to perform the very traditional art of drawing.
Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Curator of European Art for the Dayton Art Institute, said that Monet’s “Water Lilies” is the museum’s most-requested painting. It’s no light matter to part with it.
“We felt that the curators of the exhibition really did their homework and developed a unique premise that will shed new light on the subject matter of garden painting during the war years, and on the artist and his near contemporaries,” DeGalan explained. “We knew we were going to be in good company as loans were coming from all over the world. To think that Dayton’s painting would be seen in this international and very eminent context is good for tThe Dayton Art Institute and hopefully will make Daytonians proud.”
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