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Claude Monet, French, 1840–1926; Water Lilies (detail), 1914–1917; oil on canvas; 59 7/16 x 79 1/8 inches; Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris 2023.96; © Musée Marmottan Monet, Académie des beaux-arts, Paris

Monet/Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape

The exhibition audio guide offers multiple voices on the dialogue between the work of French Impressionist Claude Monet and the American Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell. Listen to the Director’s welcome, curator Simon Kelly, museum scholars, and experts in music, horticulture, and art as they share their perspectives on art and nature.

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    Large Print Labels

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    AUDIO GUIDE TRANSCRIPT

    The audio guide transcript is available to view on your own device.

Introduction

  • Speakers

    Min Jung Kim
    Barbara B. Taylor Director
    Saint Louis Art Museum

    Simon Kelly 
    Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art 
    Saint Louis Art Museum 

    [Min]
    Hello, I am Min Jung Kim, Barbara B. Taylor Director of the Saint Louis Art Museum.

    I am delighted to welcome you to the audio guide for Monet/Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape. This is the first exhibition in the United States to explore the fascinating dialogue between the work of a leading French Impressionist painter, Claude Monet, and a preeminent American Abstract Expressionist, Joan Mitchell. The exhibition is the result of a wonderful partnership with the Musée Marmottan Monet and the Louis Vuitton Foundation. To tell you more, I would like to introduce the exhibition curator, Simon Kelly, curator of Modern and Contemporary art.

    [Simon]
    Thank you, Min. The group of paintings in this exhibition have been brought together to highlight the extraordinary ways in which Monet and Mitchell responded to the landscape of northern France, particularly the area around the river Seine to the northwest of Paris. As you will see, Monet was inspired by his famed gardens at Giverny and Mitchell by the nearby village of Vétheuil. Both artists explored similar subjects of earth, flowers, rivers, and water. Both were also inspired by their own gardens. In addition to the similarities of their subjects, the exhibition explores the intriguing parallels between their vibrant colors and equally vibrant brushwork.

    This exhibition guide offers commentaries from several individuals. In addition to my voice, you will hear from other scholars, a horticulturalist, a composer of music, and a conservator, as well as an artist, Bill Scott, who was a friend of Joan Mitchell.

    We encourage you to experience this guide in any order you like; you may follow it in numeric order or pick and choose. Each featured object can be located by following the floorplan on this webpage or by identifying the audio icon on the object’s label in the exhibition. Whether you’re listening from home or in the Museum’s galleries, I hope you enjoy this audio guide and your visit to Monet/Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape.

  • Gallery Text

    Monet/Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape 

    I want to express what I feel.  
    -Claude Monet

    I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me. 
    -Joan Mitchell, 1957

    The French landscape, specifically that along the meandering Seine river northwest of Paris, provided inspiration for the French Impressionist painter Claude Monet, and several decades later, the American Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell. For the first time in the United States, this exhibition brings together paintings by these two artists. Monet’s late works were created at his home in Giverny and those of Mitchell in nearby Vétheuil, where she lived from 1968 until 1992. While from different generations-Mitchell was born in 1925, the year before Monet died-both artists engaged intensely with nature.

    Monet and Mitchell addressed similar themes of trees, earth, water, and flowers, and each was drawn to capture, time and again, the gardens that they cultivated. ‘Both also used vibrant colors and gestural brushwork, and favored similar formats, often working on large-scale, multi-panel compositions. Critics frequently compared their paintings beginning in the late 1960s. Interestingly, Mitchell initially embraced this connection with Monet; however, she increasingly rejected it in later years.

    Monet adopted a highly abstract approach in his late paintings that complicates the traditional idea of this artist as an outdoor painter who engaged closely with the natural world. The artist’s reliance on his memory in his late years creates parallels with Mitchell, who saw her paintings as abstracted memories of nature that she transformed within her imagination.

    The paintings on view are grouped by themes and drawn principally from the collections of the Musée Marmottan Monet and the Fondation Louis Vuitton.

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