The ALBERTINA Museum

c.1917-1919

Claude Monet

Location📍  The ALBERTINA Museum (Level 2 - The Batliner Collection)

Late works by Claude Monet were created in seclusion at his estate in Giverny and focus on a limited number of motifs, particularly the flower garden and the Japanese-inspired water lily pond. While earlier compositions presented scenic views with the pond and bridge at the center, his final years concentrated on selected aspects, especially the surface of the water and its reflections. The special character of these paintings lies in the abandonment of symmetry, the absence of a horizon line, and the merging of reflection and reality. This created a play between objectivity and abstraction that goes far beyond Impressionism. From 1914 onward, Monet produced large-scale panels intended for a specific architectural setting. After the Armistice in 1918, he dedicated these “grandes décorations” to the French state, which were installed posthumously in the oval rooms of the Musée de l'Orangerie. The present painting is one of the works prepared for this monumental decoration. In 1918, Monet ordered twenty canvases measuring 100 × 200 cm and painted them over the next two years. The composition features a unique asymmetrical distribution: dark reflections occupy nearly three-quarters of the right side, while sky light reflections are shifted to the left. This motif was later translated into a much larger format for the monumental triptych now housed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

1881

Claude Monet

Location📍  The ALBERTINA Museum, Level 2(The Batliner Collection)

Monet lived and worked in Vétheuil, a small village on the Seine northwest of Paris, from 1878 to 1882. Although this period was marked by financial difficulties and the illness and death of his wife Camille, he continued to produce numerous light-filled landscapes of the idyllic river valley using his studio boat and working along the banks. Throughout his life, he pursued "Pleinairmalerei" painting—the spontaneous rendering of nature as a phenomenon of light and colour—and in this work, he captured the atmosphere of a hot summer day and the air glistening in the sunlight with brilliant colours and nervous brushstrokes. In this particular painting, Monet was primarily interested in the sudden change in colour intensity from nearness to distance. He applied vigorous yellows and greens to the foreground consisting of a ripe grain field and an embankment. For the middle ground, he used a light blue brightened with white to depict the town and its characteristic church tower. The background hills and the sky above are rendered in delicate, blurred pastel hues. This work, painted from a slope south of the village, captures the transition of light and colour across the landscape toward the soft blue summer sky.

c.1905

Edgar Degas

Location📍  The ALBERTINA Museum, Level 2(The Batliner Collection)

Ballet became a central theme in Degas’s art for several decades following his discovery of the theatrical world around 1870. Trained by Louis Lamothe, a pupil of the famous French Classicist Ingres, Degas had free access as a preferred subscriber of the Paris Opera to the 'Foyer de la Danse,' the dancers' practice room. He obsessively observed and sketched not only the stars or the corps de ballet on and behind the stage but especially the young dancers in training, known as the 'petits rats.' What fundamentally fascinated Degas was the stylized art form of dance and the artificiality of movements that in no way corresponded to reality. This included not only their hard training at the barre but also ordinary gestures like tying shoes or adjusting a costume during breaks. Degas believed that "nothing in art must look like an accident, not even movement." Accordingly, he first studied anatomically correct body postures using nude models before concerning himself with costumes and scenery. The pastel "Two Dancers" is a characteristic example of Degas’s late style. The number of figures is reduced, yet they are conceived as larger and space-filling, with the surrounding environment simplified into a neutral background. Forms are radically simplified, and the luminosity of the colors is intensified. The masterful interplay of multi-layered strokes, which allows the underlying pastel layers and paper to shimmer through, creates a sparkling, mosaic-like impression that brilliantly expresses the glamorous illusory world of the theater.

1909

Paul Signac

Location📍  The ALBERTINA Museum, Level 2(The Batliner Collection)

In 1884, Paul Signac joined Georges Seurat to form the core of the Neo-Impressionist movement. Following Seurat's early death in 1891, Signac became the chief ideologue of Neo-Impressionism, systematizing Divisionism through his 1899 treatise D'Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme. A passionate sailor, he discovered port towns such as La Rochelle and Saint-Tropez. Captured by the charm of Venice during his second visit in March 1908, Signac created this large-format work. Due to its significant dimensions, it was not painted en plein air but was completed in his studio the following year, based on studies made on-site. The viewer is positioned on the Giudecca (or Fondamenta delle Zattere), looking towards the Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore bathed in evening light. Palladio’s characteristic church façade and the slender tower—reminiscent of the campanile on St. Mark's Square—glow in the soft light of the setting sun. A pink cloud hovering above reflects brightness, enveloping the sailing ships in the foreground in emerald green shadows. Like Claude Monet in his Venetian pictures of the same period, Signac allows cold and warm colors to resonate simultaneously.