After many years taken up with restoration and the revaluation of spaces, the Museum of the Orangerie finally re-opens to the public, to host as well as possible its two most important collections: the series of Water lilies of Monet and the collection of Paul Guillame.
Built in 1852, by the architect F. Bourgeois and completed by the architect Ludovico
Visconti, the Museum of the Orangerie was not designed in the first place as a museum, but as a spatial annex to the most celebrated Garden of the Tuilerie, to protect during the winter the citrus fruits in the park.
In 1921 the space was given over to the Musem of Luxemburg, as a venue for modern art along with the Museum of Jeu de Paume..
Here, as proposed by G. Clemenceau, Monet decided to install the grand mural collection of
Water lilies, on which he had been working since I914 . The presentation of them as an official gift to the French, was envisaged for 1918.
It is important to point out that the opening of the museum of the Orangerie did not take place that year, but in May 1927, a year before the artist's death.
The time necessary for the opening of the Museum was taken up with studying how to set it up. Both Art Deco taste and Monet himself influenced the project of the architect Lefvre, who had the responsibility for realising the architectural project.
In the beginning the gallery was set up on only one level, of which a good part was left for the works of Monet and the rest destined to other exhibits.
Thanks to this restoration, the building constitutes new conception of spaces and is permeated by light used in diverse ways -- all the ground floor and entrance to the museum dedicated to the collection of the Water lilies, and the basement floor occupied by the Paul Guillame collection.
To better understand the best of the Cycle of Water lilies of Monet, we have to bear in mind the period in which the artist lived and the moment when he created his laboratory-garden at Giverny. This was an idyllic place, in which he had created an artificial basin, and fount of artistic inspiration, from which more than three hundred works, including forty of large dimensions, like those of the Orangerie.
With these canvasses the master of impressionism seized the occasion to demonstrate a profundity of conception, a creative liberty, and a delicate blending of different historical traits common to western art.
These forty works on a grand scale culminated in the cycle of the Water lilies of the Orangerie; there is a sharp contrast between these and the garden that the artist himself had constructed, which over the years was transformed, into a real laboratory of aesthetic research.
This place may still today be "confused" with a painting , and can change its aspect with every hour of the day and every season.
It is precisely here that the characteristics of Monet's pictures may be found: the taste for limitlessness, changeableness, the fleetingness of time as well as the perfect and natural fusion between objects and subjects, that from reality melt into each other on the canvas. Everything happens thanks to a strong and efficient unifying trait:: the underlying form of beams of light, of shadows no longer dark, but lightly coloured, of clouds and reflections.. A real show, where the hand of the artist is confused with that of nature, a scenario from which the spectator cannot opt out. The sensation that he has, in looking at these limitless water lilies is one of total immersion in a work of nature.
And it is the light that makes the colour material, that flattens the third dimension, a sensation made strengthened by the absence of picture frames. The colour in certain tracts fuses into nature, making our reading of the work more ephemeral and fleeting.
In effect, Monet himself had imagined realising, in his grand project, a panoramic ensemble, which grouped together all subjects in a unicum, with an effect of spatial and temporal continuity. A spatial unity made still stronger, if one considers that the walls where here have an oval shape, which welcomes visitors and at the same time causes them to lose any spatial notion of the finite, leading them towards the infinite.
