Monet’s 70 Works to Thrill Koreans
By Seo Dong-shin
Staff Reporter
A massive Claude Monet (1840-1926) exhibition will begin in Seoul early next month, revealing the artistic world of the ``painter of light'' at a scale unrivaled year before.
The Hankook Ilbo, the sister company of The Korea Times, will bring some 70 works of Monet to the Seoul Museum of Art in cooperation with about 20 museums and private collections around the world. Among them, 38 are from Musee Marmottan-Monet in Paris, which houses the world's largest collection of Monet works thanks to the contribution from Michel Monet, the painter's younger son.
Monet was a prolific leader in the French Impressionist movement in the late 19th century. It was his famous work ``Sunrise, Impression,'' depicting the port city of his childhood hometown Le Havre with loose brush strokes, that gave the movement its name.
Being the first-ever Monet-only exhibition to take place in South Korea, the show is aimed at covering the master painter's entire artistic career, themed on various water scenes Monet dwelled upon in his life and art.
``The Seine and Sea'' section, for example, will shed light on his early years. Born in Paris, the artist grew up by the sea in Le Havre, Normandy, starting out his career with playful caricatures at school there. Later, living near the Seine River in Paris, he met and befriended many masters-to-be such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edouard Manet and bloomed into the founding father of the Impressionist movement. ``Garden in Giverny'' will present the paintings of the large garden with a pond, in which Monet lived in his later years.
But of particular interest to the general public as well as art lovers will be the some 20 paintings in the ``Water Lilies: Landscape on the Water'' group, which are being shown here for the first time.
Two other sections _ ``Portraits of Family'' and ``Lights in Europe'' _ will also help visitors understand the world through the eyes of Monet, who was famously described by another master painter Paul Cezanne as ``just an eye _ but what an eye!''
Tickets are 5,000 won for children and 12,000 won for adults. The exhibition runs from June 6 through Sept. 26.