This fall the Saint Louis Art Museum presents Monet’s Water Lilies.  Opening on October 2, 2011, this highly anticipated exhibition reunites the Agapanthus triptych for the first time in more than 30 years.  

French artist Claude Monet (1840–1926) is one of the most significant and best-known Impressionists, and his water-lily paintings— a series of approximately 250—represent the culminating achievement of his career. The exhibition Monet’s Water Lilies presents the Agapanthus triptych as the artist intended and will provide an unforgettable experience for the people of St. Louis and the region.

The exhibition also includes two large-scale oil studies for the Agapanthus triptych, on loan from the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris; they are The Agapanthus, 1914–1917, and Water Lilies, Harmony in Blue, 1914–1917. These studies, for the right and left panels of the triptych, provide valuable insight into Monet’s working methods and are to be reunited with the triptych for the first time.

With a total of eight works, the exhibition will also showcase the diptych Wisteria Numbers 1 and 2, c.1920. These two paintings were intended by Monet to be installed with Agapanthus in a pavilion that was never built in the garden of what is today the Musée Rodin in France. Also on view is Water Lilies, c.1916, which was included in the 1956 Knoedler Gallery exhibition at which Agapanthus was first displayed in the United States.

Monet painted around 3,000 works during his lifetime.  His later years were spent at Giverny, approximately 40 miles from Paris, where he constructed and expanded his gardens.  The artist began work on the massive paintings of the Agapanthus triptych, measuring approximately 7 feet by 14 feet each, in 1915, and continued to rework and obsessively modify the composition of the triptych until his death more than 10 years later. The three large canvases of the triptych, stretching a combined 42 feet, were described by Monet as his “Grandes Décorations.”

After Monet’s death, the three panels of Agapanthus remained in his studio until the mid-1950s when they were acquired by a New York dealer and first exhibited in the United States, introducing the American public to these spectacular works. The sections are held today among the collections of the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Agapanthus is currently one of only two Monet triptychs in the United States— the other is held by New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Monet’s Water Lilies is organized by the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Additional support has been provided by Emerson. Financial assistance has been provided by the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency.

Curated by Simon Kelly, curator of modern and contemporary art, the exhibition will be on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum in the Main Exhibition Galleries from October 2, 2011, through January 22, 2012. The Agapanthus triptych was on view at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art from April 9, 2011, to August 7, 2011, and will travel to Cleveland in 2015.

Catalogue

From new research and technical analysis, the accompanying catalogue, Monet’s Water Lilies: The Agapanthus Triptych, investigates the relationship between Agapanthus and other works and provides new insight into Monet’s relentless modification of the triptych between about 1915 and 1926. This book explores the fascinating and little-known history behind the creation of the Agapanthus triptych and contains original Giverny garden photographs that inspired the triptych as well as the artist’s original plans for its installation. Monet’s Water Lilies: The Agapanthus Triptych is authored by Simon Kelly, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Saint Louis Art Museum, with contributions by Mary Schafer and Johanna Bernstein. Mary Schafer is associate painting conservator at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Johanna Bernstein is a materials scientist at the Institute for Advance Materials, Devices and Nanotechnology at Rutgers. The catalogue is published by the Saint Louis Art Museum with The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and The Cleveland Museum of Art and is distributed by University of Washington Press, 2011. It is available in the Saint Louis Art Museum Shop and online at www.slam.org.