Outstanding, in the field, with Monet Virtual show designed to put viewers in impressionist master’s shoes By: Alan Small Posted: 6:06 PM CST Thursday, Nov. 30, 2023

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This article was published 30/11/2023 (1023 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

We owe a debt to Claude Monet every time we take a picture of a lovely lakeside or a blazing sunset with our cellphone cameras.

When the French painter set up his easel in front of a pond full of water lilies or a giant haystack in the 19th century and went to work, he rebelled against society’s conventions. Critics called his works vulgar.

“There’s something so easy about the work of the impressionists you almost forget about how radical it was,” says Fanny Curtat, a Montreal art historian and consultant for Beyond Monet: The Immersive Experience, which opens Dec. 1, at the RBC Convention Centre, making its Winnipeg debut.

“It was very revolutionary to bring a subjective point of view, a subjective vision, and we take that very much for granted, but it was something they very much had to fight for. So it is a story worth telling, in that sense.”

Almost a century after Monet’s death in 1926 at age 86, his paintings have become prized possessions, whether they are part of a museum exhibition or hanging on the wall of a celebrity’s mansion.

Beyond Monet beams more than 400 video projections of the painter’s works, curated from high-resolution images from collections around the world, onto the walls of a convention-centre ballroom.

The show transforms Monet’s detailed brushstrokes into pixels that are intended to immerse visitors in the painter’s world, which includes the air around the artist and his subject while he painted.

“When Monet was doing (his final Water Lilies paintings) at the end of his life, he describes what sounds like an immersive experience,” Curtat says. “He describes putting the audience in the middle of this room with these enormous canvases, with no frame, this shoreless landscape where you can really dive and lose yourself.”

His world mostly centred around Giverny, France, where he settled in 1883, just northwest of Paris, and his garden, where he created his Water Lilies series of more than 300 paintings.

The town is also the setting for his Haystacks series, a group of 30 paintings he made in 1890 and 1891 during the varying seasons: some stacks glow in the morning sun, others are covered in wintry snow.

He did this all fighting the elements, but also his fading eyesight. He developed cataracts, resorting to various types of eyeglasses and, eventually, the earliest attempts at cataract surgery, which he would later regret.

“He was truly battling, describing times where his fingers were frozen because he was painting the snow, and times where he almost died when the tide came in and he didn’t see it coming and he was taken away,” Curtat says.

The touring exhibition, which is presented by Winnipeg’s Paquin Entertainment and has sold more than six million tickets worldwide, is created by Montreal’s Normal Studio.

It’s the same company that created similar immersive exhibitions of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings that have appeared in Winnipeg before and which will be shown in combo shows with Beyond Monet throughout the latter’s month-long run at the convention centre.

While the cycle of projections of Monet’s works takes about 35 minutes to complete before it starts again, Curtat suggests spending at least an hour at Beyond Monet, which also includes displays that describe the founder of impressionism’s life and legacy, as well as offering reasons he chose to paint the landscapes he did.

“It’s more akin to a movie, where you’re going through a narrative,” Curtat says. “It’s more about the journey you’re making than the contemplation of each work itself.”

One of the potential frustrations of immersive art exhibitions is that it’s the curator, not the visitor, who decides how long each painting can be viewed before the next one is beamed onto the walls.

When someone visits an art museum, they may walk past a masterwork that fails to catch their eye but later stare at a different, less popular work for a longer period.

While there is no pause button for Beyond Monet visitors, Curtat says Normal Studio has done its research into how people view art in galleries and used the data for their immersive shows.

“It’s fantastic news for the museum and the artist when the audience stays more than 15 minutes in front of an artwork, because on average, in a museum, people tend to stay 10 to 13 seconds in front of any artwork,” she says. “But they do tend to stay longer when they have a connection to the work.

“Particularly for those who are intimidated by museums or feel like it’s not for them, my secret wish is that they have this connection with Monet, that their curiosity is piqued, and the next time they have an opportunity to go to a museum and stand in front of a Monet, they’ll have the inclination of staying longer than 10 seconds … and feel the aura of the painting itself.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

X: @AlanDSmall