LONDON - The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings offers a groundbreaking exploration of a previously undiscovered aspect of Claude Monet’s career: his surprisingly significant role as a draughtsman. This is the first exhibition to be devoted to Monet’s drawings and pastels, and offers a revolutionary new interpretation of the artist’s life and work. With approximately 80 works drawn together from private collections and museums in the USA, Europe and Japan, the exhibition makes the link between the works on paper and on canvas. On exhibition 17 March through 10 June at the Royal Academy of Arts.

This revelatory exhibition uncovers Monet’s hidden talent as a draughtsman, a gift he publicly disavowed. This little-known aspect of the artist’s working method is brought to light, citing largely unknown, never-before-exhibited works that overturn the accepted image of the artist. The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings reveals an extensive group of graphic works created over the course of the artist's career, many of which are unknown to the general public and to scholars: beautiful pastels, stunning black chalk drawings, and fascinating sketchbooks, which include pencil studies that relate to many of his paintings.

 

The exhibition opens with the caricatures and landscape studies drawn by the young artist in Le Havre and Paris, showing Monet’s awareness of the prevailing graphic models of the 1850s. It continues with his use of drawing in the preparation of paintings such as the large but aborted,Déjeuner sur l’herbe and the Normandy landscapes of the 1860s, together with his mastery of pastel and its relationship to the oil paintings of the Impressionist years.

The exhibition additionally reveals links between drawing, pastel and painting in mid-career, as shown in his Étretat scenes; the fusion of pastel and paint in Monet’s London series; and the importance of linear design underlying the Nymphéas (water lilies) panels. A section is devoted to the drawings Monet made for reproduction, including his engagement with lithography. A  considerable number of drawings and pastels as well as around a dozen paintings – including The Cliffs at Étretat from the collection of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, USA – are exhibited.

 

ORGANIZATION

The exhibition is curated by Dr. James A. Ganz, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the Clark, Richard Kendall Curator-at-Large at the Clark, with the consultative assistance of MaryAnne Stevens, Acting Secretary and Senior Curator of the Royal Academy of Arts. The exhibition is organized by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in association with the Royal Academy of Arts.

 

CATALOGUE

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue written by James A. Ganz and Richard Kendall, produced by the Clark and distributed by Yale University Press.