VIENNA.- From 24 October 2014 to 8 February 2015, the exhibition Looking at Monet in the Orangery of the Lower Belvedere will present icons of Impressionism within a survey unique across Europe, as well as their multiple impacts on domestic art production. Thanks to first-rate loans from around the globe, the exhibition will assemble key works by Claude Monet, some of which have never been on view in Austria. Eighteen years after its legendary Monet exhibition in 1996, the Belvedere will again be featuring the master of Impressionist painting with light in a spectacular temporary show. The exhibition's focus will be on Monet as a source of inspiration for contemporary artists who came to emulate his motifs and brushwork. Selected works by this pioneer of modernism will enter into a dialogue with those by Austrian artists who referred to Monet's works in their own production, having encountered them in a direct or indirect fashion.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Claude Monet's works were reproduced magazines and books and displayed in Vienna in exhibitions at the Künstlerhaus, the Secession, and the legendary Miethke Gallery. The large-scale exhibition The Development of Impressionism in Painting and Sculpture of 1903 at the Vienna Secession can be said to have been the most impressive among these shows. It was then that the so-called "Modern Gallery" (today's Belvedere) acquired Monet's painting The Chef (Monsieur Paul) (1882), to which the artist's Fishermen on the Seine near Poissy (1882) and eventually one of his masterpieces, Path in Monet's Garden in Giverny (1902), were added later on. Besides these three paintings from the Belvedere's collection, this show will present some 30 principal works by Claude Monet, some of which have never been on view in Austria, including the world-famous paintings of Rouen Cathedral, several versions of Waterloo Bridge in London, and the late paintings of the water lilies. These will be juxtaposed with works by such Austrian contemporaries and followers as Gustav Klimt, Herbert Boeckl, Heinrich Kühn, Carl Moll, Emil Jakob Schindler, Max Weiler, and Olga Wisinger-Florian. Their works exhibit and visualise the traces the Frenchman left in Austrian landscape painting and photography.

Monet as a Source of Inspiration

The Belvedere's show, whose venue, the Orangery, also provides an impressive architectural framework, seeks to reunite as many of Monet's paintings as possible that were originally on display in Vienna at the fin de siècle. These are complemented by works that are known to have been published at the time or which evidently served as models for works by Austrian artists. Monet s influence on Austrian painters and photographers immediately set in with the first exhibitions of his works and extended over many decades. The impact of Monet's achievements on Austrian artists can be recognised in diverse ways: while some borrowed his style and appropriated the rhythm of his brush, others were interested in motifs and themes they had seen in Monet's pictures or relied on him as a model for their compositions. And still others adopted such conceptual approaches as the idea of the series, which will be highlighted in the exhibition with several variations of Monet's Water Lilies a subject Monet was preoccupied with for almost thirty years. In addition, the show will include five admirable versions of Waterloo Bridge. Juxtaposing them with Max Weiler's four large-sized paintings of the Four Walls and Herbert Boeckl s five variants of Erzberg is meant to illustrate the importance of Monet as a source of inspiration for artists of the past and present. Monet s deliberate limitation to pure vision (with natural motifs frequently being mere starting points for increasingly liberal formal compositions), his concentration on pure colour values, and his sweeping and impulsive brushwork were important prerequisites for the evolution of abstract or non-objective art.

Impressionist Tendencies in Austrian Painting

Particularly French art produced from the late nineteenth century on undoubtedly paved the way for modern European painting of the early twentieth century. Many artists felt attracted to Paris as an art metropolis. However, around the turn of the century there were also more and more possibilities to study French art in the German-speaking area.

Nonetheless, it took a while until Austrian artists began to deal with Impressionism in their art: first Impressionist tendencies can be observed around 1890. It was primarily younger artists who adopted typically Impressionist themes and depicted such motifs as urban life or the epoch's technological accomplishments. This went hand in hand with palettes brightening up: while artists increasingly employed unmixed colours, they abandoned the tonality of earth tones associated with atmospheric painting.

Austrian painters also voluntarily embraced the Impressionist principle of perceiving an object as a manifestation of light. Younger artists increasingly felt at ease with Impressionism, so that references to the style were openly made from the turn of the century onwards. Claude Monet's work was relied on as a model time and again, as were the Pointillist developments of Impressionism, which made themselves felt in Austrian more or less distinctly.