October in Paris: openings in museums, galleries, culminating with Paris Art Week with its main anchor Art Basel Paris at the Grand Palais. "Histories of Landscape from Monet to Hockney (1890-2026)", the enticing title of the exhibition at the Musée Marmottan Monet brought me all the way to La Muette, a leafy upscale neighborhood in the 16th arrondissement. Claude Monet with his revolutionary technique for capturing light contributed to the Impressionist movement. Decades later, David Hockney, a great admirer of the Master, brought his flair to the genre, drawing and coloring on his iPad to render landscapes from England to his paradise in Normandy before his recent death in London. The show is introduced as "a chrono-thematic history of our century" divided into eleven sections filled with paintings, photographs, sculptures, and video works of landscapes.
An intimate rotunda decorated with golden crown molding and a heavy crystal chandelier offers the perfect stage for three paintings by Monet. Surrounded by water lilies and reflections of weeping willows in a pond, the viewer is drawn into an aquatic atmosphere conducive to a serene, meditative state, Monet's goal. The display also evokes the donation to the nation of the Nymphéas, now in the Musée de l'Orangerie, in celebration of the armistice bringing an end to WWI. The contrast in the following room is shocking. Through drawings, photographs and paintings of ravaged battlefields, from Félix Vallotton's evocative fiery scene of Verdun during WWI, Pierre Buraglio's memories of bunkers on beaches and Paul Nash's piles of crashed airplanes during WWII, to ruins from Iraq and Ukraine, the display bears testimony to the destruction and scars left by wars on the landscapes. The grim scenes are followed by a sample of black and white photographs from the American FSA (Farm Security Administration) (1935-1942) made during the Great Depression on the right side, and on the left, photographs from the French photographic mission of the DATAR (1984-1989). Featured artists include renowned American photographers Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, alongside French counterpart Raymond Depardon and Josef Koudelka, among others. The overall grayness of the exhibition gives way to the colors from a selection of paintings in the next room. Arbre (1908) and Composition Arbres I (1912) from Piet Mondrian illustrate his shift to abstraction just as Anna-Eva Bergman, a Norwegian modernist painter who mingled in the same circles than Mondrian in Paris, adopts geometric shapes for her two trees to move away from realism. Back in his studio, Nicolas de Staël drew upon memories of landscapes bathed in a blinding sun for his Sicily series. In Sicile, (1954), the scenery is rendered as a juxtaposition of bold blocks of color that veer into abstraction. Crossing the Atlantic, expressionist abstraction is represented by two paintings: Richard Diebenkorn's Albuquerque #7 (1951) and Charles Pollock's (Jackson's older brother) Untitled (Post-Rome), green, (1964). Back to Europe and figuration, the show goes on with two masterpieces facing each other, creating a bottleneck in the narrow space between the partitions: the famous, tormented Paysage (ca. 1922-1923) by Chaïm Soutine from the Musée de l'Orangerie and a tranquil, glacial painting from Monet made in Norway in 1895. Among the tightly packed display, the wall texts provide an anchor and guide visitors through the exhibition's path. A return to a primordial state through art is perfectly captured in Terres théâtrales (prune or et souffre) (1957) by Jean Dubuffet and four works by the multitalented Danish painter-geologist Per Kirkeby. Both evoke primordial elements by layering textures to suggest geological strata and deep earth. Rarely shown, the self-taught Jean Degottex is also included in the show. His spare Eastern calligraphy-inspired technique breathes life into a piece of paper, using only a few strokes in colored China ink in search of a poetic, minimalist, and universal beauty. His peer Pierre Tal-Coat is also represented. Both were associated with the Seconde Ecole de Paris. In the section labelled Inner Landscapes, Henri Michaux's mescaline inspired rare oil on wood - he favored drawing on paper - is found next to a dream-like work from Yves Tanguy and a moody, wintry scene from Edvard Munch. Outsider art is represented by works from Gilbert Legube and Eugène Gabritschevsky who through their creations communicate their rich inner world.
The titles of the next two chapters Past, Present, Future and Local, Global, Total feel better suited for a corporate ad campaign than an exhibition on landscape history. I was perplexed to find a nude by Henri Matisse next to a sunset by Pierre Bonnard and close by, a blurry photograph by Bernard Plossu that attempts to render an impressionistic view of the scenery from Monet's "cabinet de toilette" window in Giverny. The selection of works, other than being landscapes, appears increasingly random as the exhibition looses its thread: an imagined scene depicting a wandering elderly man lost among menhirs and wind turbines by Marc Desgrandchamps hangs next to a work from Frédéric Poincelet featuring a dead tree in the foreground, at sunset. A drawing of an inverted tree (the artist's stylistic hallmark) by Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer's provocative self-portrait photograph in a Wehrmacht uniform performing the Nazi salute against a seascape represent the German artists. They are followed by a series of mixed-media works from contemporary artists. A succession of figurative landscapes from loosely connected artists includes a view of farmland by Balthus, a light house by Edward Hopper, a Provençal scenery by Auguste Élysée Chabaud and finally a small but lively painting of trees by David Hockney. Throughout their careers the moon inspired the couple Hartung/Bergman, and each contributes to the show with their own vision of the nocturnal orb. A small gouache of chimneys on a roof by Buraglio is the only cityscape before the exhibition shifts to photographs of forests and the sea. The two cyanotypes by Emeric Lhuisset feature a tranquil sea, heavy like a coffin, swallowing migrants who disappear, fading into the infinite blue of the water, the sky, and oblivion. In March 2024, geologists rejected a proposal to recognize the Anthropocene epoch with a 1952 start date to mark human activity's destabilizing impact on the Earth. The section labeled Anthropocene features photographs of bare, rocky landscapes and industrial sites, representing an Earth dying from our actions.
The exhibition concludes with a wall text labeled "Paradises Lost?" and a large-scale painting by Alex Katz, Reflections (2007). It depicts the threatening dark shadows of giant leaves invading a blue-turquoise expanse of water dotted with yellow lily pads. In the final text, the curator questions the role of art and the future of our civilization: "Can art re-enchant a world whose end is foretold? What functions can a civilization that no longer believes in its future attribute to these works we call landscapes..."
Let's not let the doom and gloom in the comments cast a shadow on the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Monet's death.
photographs by the author:
David Hockney "Tree Tunnel, 20 August" (2005)
Edward Munch "Nuit d'hiver" (1923)
Alex Katz "Reflections" (2007)
Claude Monet "Nymphéas" (ca. 1916-1919)
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