High on Monet

I have been to many places to see works by Monet: London, Paris, Stuttgart, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, and Giverny, to name a few. So, I was excited to learn that the High Museum of Art in Atlanta was showing his work early this summer. When Alison came to visit, we went to see it. There she is above with Claude himself!


The show was very small, only four paintings, and a bit anti-climatic after the big Henry Moore exhibit at the Botanical Garden. The "big draw" was this huge, room-length, curved water lilies painting. "The highlight of the exhibition is a breathtaking 42-foot painting that inspires a sense of serenity, meditation, and the infinite. Painted at the end of his life, this series became Monet's "obsession," as he wrote in 1908. In these paintings, he sought to capture the beauty he found in nature, especially in his beloved garden at Giverny."

This and the other three, smaller works were all from the New York Museum of Modern Art, but I had already seen a really impressive and large exhibit of the water lilies large curved painted at the Orangerie in Paris in 1998. Now that is a Monet exhibit not to miss! Nor was the Monet at Midnight show I saw in 1999, which was the largest collection of Monets (80 works!) ever assembled in the world. Atlanta, and the High, are, however, trying.