Blockbuster Exhibition: Monet’s Years at Giverny: Beyond Impressionism in 1978

The “Blockbuster Exhibition” series highlights past exhibitions that had mass appeal, drawing up to 200,000 visitors or more. 

Claude Monet’s meticulously designed gardens in Giverny served as the greatest single source of inspiration for his work for over 40 years. In the decades after his 1926 death, the once-celebrated flower beds, Japanese footbridge, and water lily pond fell into disarray. A restoration effort in the 1970s reopened them to the public, and to celebrate, The Metropolitan Museum of Art organized Monet’s Years at Giverny: Beyond Impressionism. 

Monet’s Years at Giverny traveled to St. Louis in August 1978 and became the Museum’s second-highest attended exhibition, with 260,805 visitors—an average of around 4,300 per day over the course of the 10-week run. (The highest-attended exhibition recognition goes to the 1951 presentation of Imperial Vienna Art Treasures with 289,546 visitors.)  

The Monet exhibition featured 81 of his finest paintings, made between when he arrived in Giverny in 1883 and his death. Including a core of 25 works from the Musée Marmottan in Paris, the selection represented works produced almost every year at Giverny that depicted nearly every subject he encountered, showcasing how central the garden was for his creative output. 

A highlight of the exhibition was Monet’s Agapanthus triptych. Made in the last decade of his life, the three-paneled painting—with each canvas measuring nearly 14 feet wide—was discovered in his studio nearly 30 years after his death. It made its US debut in a short-run 1956 exhibition at Knoedler & Company gallery in New York. The center canvas was sold to SLAM soon after the end of the three-week exhibition in 1956. The right panel was acquired by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in 1957, and the left joined the Cleveland Art Museum collection in 1960.  

The triptych was united in St. Louis for the first time in Monet’s Years at Giverny: Beyond Impressionism. A year later in 1979–80, the triptych traveled between St. Louis, Kansas City, and Cleveland. The panels would not be reconnected again in St. Louis until 2011’s Monet’s Water Lilies organized by SLAM and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Most recently, the three panels were reunited in 2022 in Paris for the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s Monet – Mitchell.  

SLAM’s central panel remains a staple in the Museum’s Impressionism galleries.