Monet's water lilies light up the MUNAL in Mexico

The Mexican impressionist painter Joaquín Clausell meets again with the great French master Claude Monet.

This time at the National Museum of Art (MUNAL), in Mexico City.

Both share a room in the exhibition that Monet and Impressionism is organized by the MUNAL, in which the stars are three paintings by the French creator and works by Mexican painters influenced by the Impressionists.

The first time that Clausell and Monet met was in Monet's studio in Giverny, in Normandy, where the French painter showed an interest in the Mexican art.

“My father maintained that it had been [Monet] who [on seeing his grandfather] entranced by one of his paintings for the second time, approached him and began to talk to him, invited him to his studio to paint and he accepted [ …].

In the painter's workshop in Normandy,

he discovered the meaning of the maxims of the Impressionist movement”, said Clausell's granddaughter, Patricia Clausell de Latapí, according to the organizers of the MUNAL exhibition.

And this is how, in the 21st century, Monet's Norman water lilies come face to face with the flora of the Zempoala lagoons, by Clausell.

Héctor Palhares Meza, curator of the Claude Monet exhibition, at the National Museum of Art. Mónica González Islas

It is the first time that one of the famous

painted in 1908 by Monet, as well as

, from 1884, have arrived in Mexico. Both works are part of the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art, United States, and together with

(1883), from the Soumaya Museum collection, make up the Monet exhibition that the MUNAL presents to the public from this Thursday until August 27.

“It is an unprecedented exhibition in the history of the museum”, said Héctor Palhares, curator of the exhibition and director of the MUNAL.

"Monet is a pioneer artist of the Impressionist movement, who was reviled in its origins," said Palhares, who recalled the negative reaction generated among the public by creators who opted to reproduce in their works the luminosity of forests and lakes, the splendor of cities, the passion of peasant landscapes.

The light, the color, the life.

While at first the press made the sign of the cross to these art revolutionaries, they continued to break the mold and open an important space for themselves in universal painting.

“It is a painting that left the art of the academy behind”, said Palhares.

"Today it is the movement that attracts the most public, the one that generates the greatest expectation," he stated.

The work Water Lilies, from 1908, oil on canvas, which is part of the Claude Monet and Impressionism Exhibition organized by the National Museum of Art. Mónica González Islas

Monet turned water lilies, those aquatic plants with beautiful flowers that take root at the bottom of lakes, swamps and streams, into a symbol of 20th century painting and the hallmark of his creation.

The Frenchman finished the work exhibited at the MUNAL in 1908, after being dazzled by the landscapes of the Normandy countryside.

“Monet moved into his long, rustic country house at Giverny in 1883. In 1890, he acquired more property and set about creating from it an ideal garden, distinct from the rural subjects he had painted.

For Monet, the theme of the paintings turned more and more towards the surface of the water.

By 1910, he had transcended the conventional limits of easel painting and had begun creating immense decorations that culminated in the series of water lilies commissioned by the French Government for two oval galleries in the Orangerie,

In the case of the other Monet work that lands for the first time in Mexico,

, it is a colorful journey through a landscape on the Franco-Italian border.

“Monet represented this scene during his first pictorial trip to the Mediterranean.

In 1884, he spent January through March in Bordighera, an Italian spa, and the month of April in nearby Menton, ”explain the organizers of the show.

The third painting,

, which is part of the collection of the Soumaya Museum and the Carlos Slim Foundation, dazzles with the way in which the painter captured the reflections of the Seine water as it passes through a town, the movements of the plants and the light, the great protagonist of the works of impressionism.

"He dedicated his life to capturing the beauty of nature," director Palhares said this Wednesday during a tour organized by MUNAL for the press.

Valle Buona, near Bordighera (Liguria, Italy), 1884. Oil on canvas, from the Dallas Museum of Art collection, is part of the exhibition 'Claude Monet and Impressionism', organized by the National Museum of Art. Mónica González islands

Together with Monet, a group of Mexican painters attracted in their time by impressionism and who created valuable works that are part of the MUNAL heritage, “dialogue” from today.

Among them, Clausell (Campeche, Mexico, 1866 – Lagunas de Zempoala, State of Mexico, Mexico, 1935), the Mexican ecstatic by Monet's works, stands out.

It is, they explain from the MUNAL, an artist "with impressionist echoes who leaned towards the new avant-garde postulates by eliminating the traditional rules and methods within painting, while following the subjective guidelines of fin-de-siècle modernism".

Along with his works are exhibited those of Francisco Romano Guillemín, Armando García Núñez and Mateo Herrera,

who “dabbled into landscape painting through wonders of light and color to portray that beauty of the environment with a new vocabulary of brushstrokes”, according to the art historian George TM Shackelford, quoted by the MUNAL.

In this way, in a beautiful room of that impressive palace that is the seat of the museum —a construction devised in 1911 by the architect Silvio Contri to house the Secretariat of Communication and Public Works— the visitor will be able to appreciate the beautiful light of the painted French landscapes. by Monet and the dazzling flora, mountains and volcanoes of Oaxaca, Campeche or the Valley of Mexico immortalized by the Mexican Impressionists.

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