Norton’s Monet in Major Exhibition at the Grand Palais, Gauguin Goes to Tate

WEST PALM BEACH, FL.- The Norton Museum of Art announced its participation in the first major exhibition of Claude Monet’s work in over 30 years, taking place at the Grand Palais in Paris from September 22, 2010 to January 24, 2011. The extensive exhibition will display over 200 paintings from international museums, including the Norton’s revered Monet, The Moreno Gardens at Bordighera.

In December of 1883, Monet traveled to France’s Mediterranean coast with Pierre Auguste Renoir and visited Paul Cézanne at his home in Aix-en-Provence. The natural beauty of the region inspired Monet, and the following month he returned to focus upon his art. He settled in the Italian town of Bordighera for ten weeks, where he produced thirty-eight paintings. The Norton’s painting depicts the gardens of landowner Francesco Moreno, who welcomed Monet. The Norman painter considered the gardens a “pure fairyland”; indeed, historians credit Monet’s experience in Bordighera as the impetus for his own gardens at Giverny, as well as later painting excursions to Antibes (1888) and Venice (1908).

This extraordinary exhibition will trace the 19th century painter’s long career, starting with his early landscapes in Normandy and the Paris region from the 1870s through to the iconic and well known depictions of his garden and ponds in Giverny.

Following a major Picasso show at the Grand Palais in 2008 that attracted 784,000 visitors, the Monet exhibition is predicted to attract in excess of half a million visitors.

For the next several months the Norton Museum’s celebrated painting by Paul Gauguin, Christ in the Garden of Olives, 1889 will be featured in the exhibition Gauguin: Maker of Myth at the Tate Modern, London, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Gauguin is undoubtedly one of the most influential and celebrated artists of the late nineteenth century. Remarkably, this is the first major exhibition in London to be devoted to his work in over half a century. Opening at Tate Modern on September 30, 2010, Gauguin: Maker of Myth will trace the artist’s unique approach to storytelling. Bringing together over 100 works from public and private collections from around the world, the exhibition will take a fresh and compelling look at this master of modern art.

In Christ in the Garden of Olives Gauguin portrayed himself in a tragic, iconic mode as Jesus Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night of his betrayal by Judas Iscariot. In a poignant reference to his attempted artistic liaison with Vincent van Gogh, which had recently ended in a debacle, Gauguin has given himself bright orange-red hair—like that of his erstwhile colleague and friend. During much of the painting’s absence from West Palm Beach the Norton will display, instead, an almost exactly contemporaneous self-portrait by Van Gogh on loan from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, which was likewise painted in the immediate aftermath of the contentious and aborted sojourn with Gauguin, at Arles, which lasted from October through December 1888.

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