[Another] Trip to Fondation Louis Vuitton

Posted on 21/03/2023 by Sheree

When I told someone I was going to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, they questioned why I was going again. I told them I was going to see a new exhibition!

We had booked tickets for opening and made use of the Fondation’s shuttle bus to get there and back from L’Etoile. This meant we had plenty of time to see the exhibitions before enjoying lunch in the Fondation’s Frank restaurant and an afternoon amble around the Jardin d’Acclimatation.

The exhibitions Monet–Mitchell and Joan Mitchell Retrospective are a veritable tour de force, creating a visual, artistic, sensorial and poetic dialogue between the works of Claude Monet (1840-1926) and Joan Mitchell (1925-1992). Both artists left their mark not only on their epoch, but also on subsequent generations of painters.

Monet–Mitchell presents each artist’s unique response to a shared landscape in the French countryside northwest of Paris, which they interpret in a particularly immersive and sensual manner. The exhibition is complemented by a retrospective of Joan Mitchell’s work, the most significant Mitchell exhibition in Europe in almost 30 years, creating an opportunity to become engrossed in her work.

Joan Mitchell Retrospective was laid out chronologically, facilitating an exploration of the pivotal stages of her work: her first abstractions from 1950s New York; the canvases produced during the years she went back and forth between US and France; the early 1960s works in Paris; the large format from 1970s in Vétheuil; the unique links her art maintained with poetry, nature and music.

I have previously seen some of Joan Mitchell’s work at MoMa in the States but was eager to see how the two artists might be associated.

From different generations, Mitchell was born the year before Monet passed.Their paintings were initially brought together within the context of American Abstract Expressionism’s emergence in the 1950s. Hence Monet was rediscovered as a precursor to American modernism, and his later works revived after the critical acclaim in France in 1927 of the Water Lilies in the Orangerie. The association is further strengthened by Mitchell’s move to Vétheuil in 1968, into a house that overlooked where Monet lived from 1878 to 1881.

The exhibition retraces the approaches of both artists as they sought emotion from nature. Monet was committed to a landscape that he created (often endlessly) as a subject while Mitchell immersed herself in the landscape. Both artists seemed fascinated by water and its reflective qualities.

Their works also use a not dissimilar colour palette particularly colour in all its interactions with light but often with very different intensities. Both favoured large formats. The exhibition concludes with Monet’s Agapanthus, a triptych that played a pivotal role in his recognition in US, exhibited in Paris in its entirety for the first time and 10 paintings from Mitchell’s cycle La Grande Vallée. The colour palettes of both favour similar tones.

My beloved and I both agreed that we could see the connection between the two but that we also saw overtones of Van Gogh and Cézanne in Mitchell’s work.