Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse

On 30 January, Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse opened at the Royal Academy of art The stunning exhibition, which explores the evolution of modern garden paintings, has been wildly successful and will remain open until 20 April.

When I visited Painting the Modern Garden, nearly two months after its opening, it was surprisingly packed for a Monday afternoon. Visitors were swarming around the spacious gallery spaces, admiring ethereal Monets and bold, vibrantly colored Kandinskys. After spending time in the exhibition, I understood why it was as crowded as it was: it is a beautiful and staggeringly impressive collection of over 120 different works that span the early 1860s to the 1920s. The art, which is from private collections and public institutions throughout Europe and the United States, includes 35 legendary works from Monet (who is, perhaps, the most famous painter of gardens and horticulture) and masterpieces from the likes of Renoir, Cézanne, Munch, Kandinsky Van Gogh, Matisse and many more.

Painting the Modern Garden is in the main galleries of the Royal Academy of Art. It spans several rooms and is divided by different themes. The major movements the exhibition covers- Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Avant Garde- is broken into seven smaller sub-sections, which include International Gardens, Gardens of Silence and, the humorously named, Avant-Gardens. It is fascinating to chart the evolution of garden painting from Renoir and Monet to Matisse (as the title suggests).

The exhibition focuses on Monet’s work so it is especially interesting to examine how his work changed from the 1860s when he began painting to his death in 1926. His later work, affected by the war, the loss of his wife Alice and the waning popularity of his style, takes on a moodiness and darkness that is made all the more obvious when contrasted to the lightness of his early work, which hangs a couple rooms away. Monet’s work, which is hung throughout the gallery spaces is consistently dreamlike and entrancing. There is an otherworldly and transformative quality to his work that makes whatever space it hangs in feel special and somehow sacred. Several of Monet’s famous waterlily paintings are on display. The most impressive work in the collection, in my opinion, is his monumental Agapanthus Triptych of 1916 - 1919 that is on display in the UK for the first time. The beauty and grandeur of the painting encompass Monet’s desire to show his viewers that, despite the ravages of the First World War, beauty continued to exist in the natural world. The fact that the Royal Academy managed to acquire such an impressive amount of his work and to display it in such a cohesive and visually stunning way is one of the many things that makes the exhibition so noteworthy.

In addition to Impressionist works, the exhibition features works from Post-Impressionist and Avant-Garde painters. Painting the Modern Garden boasts an array of rarely seen works from artists like Paul Klee and Gustave Klimt. While the subject of the paintings in the exhibition remain the same, the trajectory of style and approach change radically throughout. These differences in style show the tumultuousness and mercurial nature of the art world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century art world. In this exhibition, these changes are all channeled through the lens of the garden, a universal theme that has remained popular for generations of artists. In doing so, the Royal Academy has created more than just an impressive collection of pretty garden paintings, it has made a statement about the varied nature of modern art and the timelessness of nature in art.

Royal Academy of Art
30 Jan – 20 April 2016 10am – 6pm daily (last admission 5.30pm) Fridays until 10pm (last admission 9.30pm)

£17.60 full price (£16 without Gift Aid donation); concessions available; children under 16 and Friends of the RA go free.