Monet lends some weight to digital art

Your Spiral View by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson is one of the works of art on display at the Monet exhibition. ProLitteris

A major new Monet exhibition has opened in Basel - but with a digital twist for the 21st century.

The exhibition – entitled “Claude Monet – up to digital Impressionism” – seeks to place the father of Impressionist art in context with artists working in the late 20th century and beyond.

Artists whose works are being put on display alongside those of Monet include Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and the renowned American abstract expressionist, Jackson Pollock.

Other contemporary artists influenced by Monet but who work with television and video have also been given exhibition space inside the gallery.

Organisers expect in excess of 250,000 people from Switzerland and beyond to visit the museum during the exhibition’s five-month run.

Ernst Beyeler, director of the Beyeler Foundation which is hosting the exhibition, says the aim is to show how a wide cross-section of post-Impressionist artists have been influenced by Monet’s work.

“Monet influenced artists not just in Europe but also in America,” Beyeler explains.

“These artists relate to Monet and it’s only normal that they are inspired… and follow such a great master. It’s a kind of recognition and admiration for this artist which guides them,” he adds.

Ancient and modern

The digital Impressionist section of the exhibition juxtaposes original works of Monet – many of them on loan and on display in a public gallery for the first time – with modern works of art which draw on the Impressionist tradition but also make use of the latest digital, audiovisual technology.

Verena Formanek, coordinator of the exhibition, says visitors are encouraged to reassess their own interpretations of Monet’s artistic tradition by interacting with more modern works of art.

“The aim of the exhibition is to look from the contemporary point of view back to Monet and to see just how modern the old man was,” Formanek says.

“And I think the digital Impressionism does that – it gives a new perspective on art,” she adds.

Stretched across the main gallery of the first-floor exhibition hall in Basel is a giant original Monet canvas which depicts one of his most celebrated scenes: lilies on the pond in his garden at Giverny.

One floor below, wide-screen televisions flash a sequence of colourful images, while stereo headphones ensure the assault on the senses is aural as well as visual.

In this apparently virtual world of Impressionist art, the two-dimensional canvas becomes a three-dimensional film, while Monet’s celebrated brush strokes are transformed into pixels on the small screen.

Seal of approval?

Formanek says Monet, who was born in 1840, would have approved of the use of modern technology in the development of new art forms.

“Monet was very much attracted by photography, which at the time was the new media, so though he might not have got involved in digital media, as an artist he was always very interested in modern techniques,” Formanek concludes.

Temporary respite from the flickering screens can be sought directly outside the gallery, where perfectly manicured lawns surround an emerald green pond covered in water lilies.

Even in the fast-paced digital age of new technology, the grand old Master from Giverny would surely have felt at home here.

by Ramsey Zarifeh