Claude Monet in Albertina: all around the Giverny garden

Three paintings from the museum’s own holdings (The Batliner Collection) as well as important loan works from international museums and private collections illuminate Monet’s development from Realism

Realism (from late Latin reālis — “real”) is considered to be the beginning in the development of modern art. In a strict sense, “realism” is an art movement that faithfully and objectively reproduces reality in all its details, regardless of how beautiful are the objects in the picture. Read more

to Impressionism and onward to a mode of painting in which colours and light gradually separate from the subjects that reflect them, with the motif breaking free from mere observation of nature.

The Batliner Collection

Herbert and Rita Batliner started collecting art almost 50 years ago. Their close friendship with Ernst Beyeler influenced them from the very start to base a specific part of their collection on French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting. Meanwhile, the couple concentrated from the beginning also on works by Pablo Picasso and the Russian avant garde.

To safeguard the indivisibility of this outstanding private collection and its fundamental perpetuity, Herbert and Rita Batliner have incorporated their works of art into a foundation: the Herbert and Rita Batliner Art Foundation. This is the provider of the permanent loan now being transferred to the Albertina, similar to the Austrian Ludwig Foundation, which also brought works acquired over 25 years as the Foundation’s inalienable property into the collection of the Albertina.

Monet’s light and colours change on the canvas in accordance with nature’s constant transformation, as well as the diversity of atmospheric impressions that the painter gleaned from his motifs—and it was his urge to capture this diversity that moved him to paint many such motifs in series.
He repeatedly painted the same subjects in different lights, at different hours of the day, and subjected to the changes of weather and seasons. This practice began in the 1880s and continued until the end of his life in 1926.

After all, even after Monet’s death, these later works could pave the way for abstract Expressionism

You can hardly tell the exact day or year of the birth of Expressionism, which is usual for all powerful art movements. You cannot draw a border on the map and indicate the territory where Expressionism took its start and got stronger. Overall, it’s all roughly known. Except for one rock-solid spatiotemporal benchmark: Northern Europe on the eve of the First World War. Expressionism is an avant-garde art movement, a new tragic worldview, and a whole set of significant motifs, symbols, and myths. Moreover, it is a revolutionary reaction both to the shabby, lifeless traditional academic art, and the light, idyllic southern impressionistic “appearance” of the world. Read more

in painting.

Based on materials from the official site of Albertina Museum.

Title illustration: Claude Monet. The Water Lily Pond, 1917 — 1919. Oil on canvas (© The Albertina Museum, Vienna. The Batliner Collection)