There's much to admire about Suzanne Valadon, a very individual, hard-to-categorise painter who truly blazed a trail for women artists in the first half of the 20th century. But could you live with her brutal, unrelenting works on your wall? One of the pictures that first greets you in the Suzanne Valadon retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris is this one -- The Blue Room -- and it certainly slaps you in the face. Valadon takes the tradition of the odalisque and turns it on its head. You've seen those nude women stretched out on a couch painted by men -- by Titian , by Goya , by Ingres and by Manet , but what about Valadon's version? It's not erotic, by any means. Her model is a bit more solidly built than most, and she's wearing a pair of stripy pyjama bottoms. Fag in mouth, she's also got a yellow paperback novel on the go. Could you imagine a man painting this in the early part of the 20th century? Could you imagine an English woman artist like L...
What, another Claude Monet exhibition? It's true, the Monet market does seem a bit saturated at the moment, but this one, at Vienna's Albertina museum, is really very good. And, what's more, it's packed with paintings from galleries in places like Moscow, Boston, Cleveland, Gothenburg and Liege that you're not very likely to have just dropped in on recently.
The show has been organised with the support of the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris and brings together 100 works for what is essentially a straightforward Monet retrospective. The idea is to demonstrate how he moved from realism to Impressionism and on to a way of painting that prefigured abstraction. So no big new idea, just an extremely enjoyable survey of his career.
The first room illustrates how those early realistic works -- views of Harfleur in Normandy and of Paris -- gradually developed towards what we would recognise as an Impressionist style: Here's the Boulevard des Capucines in the capital from 1873, a picture from the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. The depiction is becoming more hazy, the cropping more audacious, as can be seen from the two top-hatted gents on the right.
There are some beautiful works here from the 1870s, when Monet and his first wife, Camille, were happily settled in Argenteuil on the Seine not far from Paris. The railway connected him easily with the capital and was also a symbol of modern life that found an echo in his painting, as in Train Engine in the Snow from the Marmottan. The curators would have you believe that no one painted snow quite like Monet, though Bruegel, the subject of another big Vienna show right now, might have had something to say about that.
The pleasures of domestic life in Argenteuil are depicted here with Camille and a child in the garden, in a painting from Boston. The striped blues of their clothing contrast strongly with the greens, pinks and reds of the grass and flowers, all applied with short brushstrokes. It's a soothing image.
Camille makes a rather more mysterious appearance in The Red Kerchief, from Cleveland. Her scarf draws your eye through the evocatively atmospheric greyness of a winter's day. Is there a narrative in this picture within a picture? And if so, what is it?
After Argenteuil, Monet spent a less happy period in Vétheuil, and there's a selection of melancholy winter pictures from here. His 1881 View of Vétheuil is verging on the abstract, with large blocks of colour depicting the countryside and the village shimmering in the middle ground.
A further room looks at Monet's exploration of light effects and compositional forms in Normandy, such as the view of a Road at La Cavée, Pourville, with its inviting X-shape. He's not yet begun his series examining the same view in different weathers and at different times of day, but that's obviously in store.
If you went to see the Monet & Architecture show at London's National Gallery this year, you'll be quite familiar with the depictions of the Houses of Parliament, Charing Cross Bridge and Rouen Cathedral to be seen in Vienna. But we also get his first series, of the Creuse valley, as well as that classic Monet motif, the haystack.
The poster image for this show, which takes us all the way through to the very late views of his garden, painted when Monet was almost blind, comes all the way from Tokyo -- again, not your local art gallery. Young Girls in a Rowing Boat gives us an impression of a summer's day in pink, blue and white.
If you're in Vienna this autumn for Bruegel or Schiele, do drop in on Monet as well. The Albertina show is a rewarding experience, and one you perhaps weren't expecting to find in the Austrian capital.
Images
Claude Monet, Grainstack in the Sunlight, 1891, Kunsthaus Zürich, acquired from the Otto Meister Bequest, with a contribution from the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt. © Kunsthaus Zürich
Claude Monet, Young Girls in a Rowing Boat, 1887, The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, Matsukata Collection. © The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo
The show has been organised with the support of the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris and brings together 100 works for what is essentially a straightforward Monet retrospective. The idea is to demonstrate how he moved from realism to Impressionism and on to a way of painting that prefigured abstraction. So no big new idea, just an extremely enjoyable survey of his career.
The first room illustrates how those early realistic works -- views of Harfleur in Normandy and of Paris -- gradually developed towards what we would recognise as an Impressionist style: Here's the Boulevard des Capucines in the capital from 1873, a picture from the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. The depiction is becoming more hazy, the cropping more audacious, as can be seen from the two top-hatted gents on the right.
A further room looks at Monet's exploration of light effects and compositional forms in Normandy, such as the view of a Road at La Cavée, Pourville, with its inviting X-shape. He's not yet begun his series examining the same view in different weathers and at different times of day, but that's obviously in store.
If you went to see the Monet & Architecture show at London's National Gallery this year, you'll be quite familiar with the depictions of the Houses of Parliament, Charing Cross Bridge and Rouen Cathedral to be seen in Vienna. But we also get his first series, of the Creuse valley, as well as that classic Monet motif, the haystack.
Practicalities
Claude Monet continues at the Albertina museum in Vienna until January 6. It's open daily from 0900 to 1800, with lates on Wednesdays and Fridays until 2100. Standard admission is 14 euros and tickets, which aren't valid for any particular day, can be bought online here. The museum is on Albertinaplatz, not far from the opera house. Karlsplatz/Oper and Stephansplatz are the nearest Underground stations, and trams run close by on the Ringstrasse boulevard.Images
Claude Monet, The Boulevard des Capucines, 1873, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. © Photo Scala, Florence 2017
Claude Monet, Train Engine in the Snow, 1875, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris. © Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris/Bridgeman Images
Claude Monet, Camille Monet and a Child in the Garden, 1875, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, anonymous gift in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Edwin S. Webster. © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Claude Monet, The Red Kerchief, Portrait of Mrs. Monet, 1873, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Estate of Leonard C. Hanna, Jr.. © The Cleveland Museum of ArtClaude Monet, Camille Monet and a Child in the Garden, 1875, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, anonymous gift in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Edwin S. Webster. © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Claude Monet, Grainstack in the Sunlight, 1891, Kunsthaus Zürich, acquired from the Otto Meister Bequest, with a contribution from the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt. © Kunsthaus Zürich
Claude Monet, Young Girls in a Rowing Boat, 1887, The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, Matsukata Collection. © The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo
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