Portland Art Museum Exhibits Restored Monet Alongside the Japanese Artists Who Inspired Him

“Put me with the old Japanese masters,” French Impressionist painter Claude Monet once said. “The refinement of their taste has always delighted me, and I approve of the suggestives of their aesthetic, which evokes presence by a shadow, the whole by the part.”

Some contemporary viewers might raise an eyebrow at Monet’s statement and bring up charges of cultural appropriation. But the Portland Art Museum’s curators welcome such conversations, and through PAM’s new exhibition Monet’s Floating Worlds at Giverny: Portland’s Waterlilies Resurfaces, they hope to remind readers of how revolutionary Eastern-Western cultural exchanges were during the French painter’s time.

“It’s kind of a shock when you walk in here because you see this Monet show,” says PAM curator Lloyd DeWitt, who manages the museum’s pre-1930 American and European collection. “You come into this yellow room full of Japanese prints, but if you go to Giverny today, they have it set up in the same way that he had it, and guess what? You walk into the yellow dining room lined with some of his 230 Japanese prints.”

Monet’s Floating Worlds opened to the public on Saturday, March 1. Amid a collection of French and Japanese art lies the exhibition’s centerpiece: an unnamed painting from among roughly 250 entries in Monet’s iconic Water Lilies series which has never been shown unvarnished in a major institution outside of the Monet family’s personal dining room (though the museum did loan it out pre-restoration for Monet-related exhibits). PAM conservator Charlotte Ameringer has worked since August to remove varnish the museum originally had applied to the painting when it was acquired from Monet’s estate in 1959.

Before patrons reach it, they will see prints from Japanese masters such as Hashimoto Chikanobu, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Hiroshige II and Kitagawa Utamaro. Other French Impressionists inspired by them, including Edouard Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Auguste Lepére, also have work in PAM’s show. The Impressionists were inspired by the woodblock printing technique ukiyo-e, which translates to “floating worlds.” The show also holds a few photographs, like Portland photographer Susan Seubert’s 1990 photo of Monet’s Giverny gardens, and Jean-Pierre Hoschedé’s snapshot of Monet painting none other than PAM’s painting in 1915.

“What we like is that it shows our painting in an earlier state, because he kept working on it and kept changing it,” DeWitt says. “There are blossoms that he painted over that you can see in the texture of our paint, so he was constantly thinking about it and adding color to it.”

DeWitt says Water Lilies entries have regained prominence over the past 20 years due to the efforts of the art world’s foremost conservators—pop singer Caroline Polachek recently covered Radiohead’s song “True Love Waits” performing in front of Musée de l’Orangerie’s Le Matin aux saules in Paris—and counts Ameringer among their ranks. Monet forbade varnish from being applied to his paintings, as he didn’t want anything to come between his view of nature and the colors he saw, but he didn’t always get his way.

“Even Monet had to say that if it weren’t for the American buyers, he would have starved,” Dewitt says. “He had to acknowledge that Americans had a different way of understanding art.”

Varnish warped Monet’s original color scheme and their shades’ impacts. Dewitt says the only part of PAM’s Water Lilies painting that Ameringer hasn’t changed is the seal which Monet’s estate placed on the canvas, simply because she doesn’t know what materials his son, Michel, used to make the seal.

Mary Weaver Chapin and Jeannie Kenmotsu, who respectively curate PAM’s prints and drawings and Asian art collections, researched which of the museum’s prints also came from Monet’s print collection. For anything in the show that he did not own, they pulled examples of complementary motifs from each culture, such as portraits of mothers with their children.

“Let’s say an artist makes a large edition of 100 prints,” Chapin posits. “Someone’s going to set their coffee down on one, someone’s going to lose one in a move, so over time there are fewer and fewer, and that’s what makes our museum collections important, is that we’re charged with saving them for the future.”

DeWitt also pointed out a throughline from Monet’s Floating Worlds to the rest of the museum, flagging Chinese art influenced by the Dutch masters. He says that PAM and the Portland Japanese Garden will also host each other’s experts for programming related to Monet’s Floating Worlds and the Japanese landscaping that he emulated at Giverny.

“It was really a global movement, and [Monet] was at the forefront of it,” DeWitt says.

SEE IT: Monet’s Floating Worlds at Giverny: Portland’s Waterlilies Resurfaces at Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Ave., 503-226-2811, portlandartmuseum.org. 10 am–5 pm Wednesday–Saturday, through Aug. 10. $25 general admission, $22 for seniors, students with IDs and groups of 12 or more adults. Children 17 and under free.