see a Monet exhibit

I’ve been lucky to have seen a few along with Manet, Gaughan, Renoir, Toulouse Lautrec, Degas, Van Gogh, Picasso, Pissarro, and Dali.

Havent done a thing towards this goal. So should I plan a trip to Boston or Paris for this? Ahh… decisions, decisions!!!

My mother, sister, and I love the impressionists, Monet in particular. When a huge Monet exhibit came to mfa-boston, probably 15 years ago now, we were there. Sadly, I was a little too young to really appreciate the exhibit, or appreciate my mother’s appreciation. I started whining that I had to use the bathroom, and of course she took me. What I didn’t realize is that we were not allowed to go back into the exhibit once we left it. I didn’t even have to pee that badly. I felt horrible – still do, when I think about it. I’m going to make it up to Mom – whether that means waiting for an exhibit to come close to us, or saving enough money to go to his gardens in Giverny together.

in 1998, i had the great fortune to be able to visit my dear friend Dee in Washington, and get to go see a major Monet exhibit of my favourite Monet works: of the Gare Saint-Lazare.

For some reason, these paintings had always haunted me, and seeing them in person brought me to tears. No Catalogue or Art Book can ever do justice to the incredibly indescribly beautiful art of Monet—his technique / brush strokes are so subtle,,,and completely mesmerizing…

take any chance you get to go see any of his work, but especially the Water Lilies / Garden series, and the Gare Saint-Lazare

http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/saintlazareinfo.shtm

In and Around the Station: Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare

You can hear the trains rumbling in, see the smoke billow up under the huge roofs….That is where painting is today….Our artists have to find the poetry in train stations, the way their fathers found the poetry in forests and rivers. —Emile Zola about Monet’s paintings, 1877

The best-known representations of the Gare Saint-Lazare in painting are a group of eleven works by Claude Monet of 1877. Unparalleled in their evocation of the steam and the smoke-filled station, they are also extraordinarily varied in their subject and technique. Some may have been painted entirely on the spot (Monet had requested official permission to paint inside the Gare Saint-Lazare). Others, more fully worked, appear to have been completed in his studio. In spite of their impressionistic treatment of the station, these works reproduce accurately the topography of the area, even allowing one to deduce the precise point where the artist must have stood to paint them. Several include the pont de l’Europe seen from the tracks, through clouds of smoke—a vision drastically different from Caillebotte’s. Monet’s paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare demonstrate his exceptional sensitivity to changing light and atmospheric conditions. They also mark the first time the painter pursued a single theme through a series of variations, a method he would develop later with other subjects such as grainstacks and Rouen Cathedral.

at the musee d’ orsay

I’m no where near completing this goal :(

I’ve always wanted to have walls in my house like the giant sized paintings Monet did. I saw an exibit in Kansas City several years ago and I just stood in front of this enormous Monet painting for like half an hour and soaked it in. It just felt good.