Reaffirming, as soon as once more, “its want to anchor its dedication to modern creation in a historic perspective,” the Fondation Louis Vuitton is providing this fall a flamboyant dialogue between the precursor of abstraction, Claude Monet (1840-1826), and certainly one of its most dazzling exponents, Joan Mitchell, who was born in 1925 in Chicago, a yr before the grasp Impressionist’s demise, and died in 1992 in Paris.
A face-to-face confrontation between the monumental canvases of the American artist and the paintings of Monet’s last period, that of the Water Lilies, thought-about because the precursor of abstraction by the painters of Summary Expressionism, which led to a veritable “Monet Revival” in the USA within the 1950s. From the fiery Backyard at Giverny (1922-1926) to the blue and orange maelstrom of The Great Valley (1983), from the immense triptych of The Agapanthus – stretching over almost 13 meters – to the imposing and bewitching Quartet II for Betsy Jolas, we see the sensations of both artists surfacing on the canvases and, in the middle of intoxicating visible correspondences, the fleeting impressions retranscribed by the liberated touch (freed from contour and type) of Claude Monet turn out to be emotions in Joan Mitchell’s work… In truth, though the 2 artists are almost a century apart, and although the first is affiliated with Impressionism and the second with “abstract Impressionism “1, their pictorial strategy, but in addition their inspiration and their method are very comparable: it's the similar emotion in front of the same recomposed landscape that Monet and Mitchell need to retranscribe beneath the assaults of their brushes.
That is clearly demonstrated by one of many works within the collection of the Fondation Louis Vuitton that we now have chosen to research: a stunning quadriptych, almost three meters excessive and greater than 6 meters lengthy, soberly entitled Minnesota, painted in 1980. A flamboyant opera by which the oranges burst, the yellows resound, the blacks ring and the grays thunder in a wild and matted explosion of the contact…
In addition to the monumentality of the immersive format harking back to the collection of huge panels fitted collectively to type the immense panorama of the Water Lilies – “an infinite entire, a wave with out horizon and with out shore” (Monet, sic) -, one sees many similarities with the strategies of absorption of the gaze carried out in these giant shimmering surfaces: similar exaltation of the colour, similar lyricism of the gesture, similar method of apprehending the area of the canvas by means of the rhythmic of the colors, the all-over and using the silences and the gaps (parcels of virgin canvas), similar dilution of the motive and the contours… And above all, the identical conception of the murals as a delicate and meditative experience.
Stéphanie Dulout
L’article JOAN MITCHELL / Minnesota, 1980 / Fondation Louis Vuitton est apparu en premier sur Galerie Joseph.
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