One hundred years after Monet's death, the Marmottan Museum shows how landscapes, from Impressionism to the present day, have become witnesses to the upheavals of history.

We went there.

A century after Claude Monet's death, his museum could have woven him a wreath of water lilies. It chose a different path. To pay tribute to him, the Marmottan Monet Museum dedicates its exhibition to questioning the place of landscape and its representation in art. From a simple background to a backdrop for religious scenes, before emancipating itself with modern painting and achieving strong autonomy with Impressionism,representing the world has become one of painting's primary missions. The Marmottan Monet Museum uses this as the thread of a journey that links the master to contemporary artists.

Yet it all begins with a refuge: in the aftermath of the armistice, Monet offered his Water Lilies to France. At the time, panoramas of battles and war fronts were very popular, but Monet took the opposite approach to this imagery: his shoreless water garden is displayed as a painting in the form of an anti-war statement.

In eleven sections, the landscape unfolds through the eyes of 69 artists, including 30 contemporary artists. It appears as the embodiment of our relationship to the world, a world in times of crisis: the hallucinatory Verdun of Vallotton, the devastated Ukraine of Nikita Kadan, the wounded America of the Farm Security Administration, the abstraction where Nicolas de Staël seeks less a motif than an energy. Elsewhere, Georgia O’Keeffe makes a mountain her intimate property, proof that the first landscape is always our own. It also encompasses what is disappearing: under the lens of Johanna Quillet, a sun-drenched forest, which is none other than Sobibor, erased by nature.

Finally comes the “Anthropocene,” where humankind, creator of landscapes, becomes destroyer of the world. What can landscape still do? Alex Katz responds by painting not from, but after Monet, as a tribute that borders on emulation, as if painting could only continue to bring the landscape to life by finding new ways of looking at it.

MARMOTTAN MONET MUSEUM
From September 24, 2026 to January 31, 2027
2 rue Louis-Boilly, 75016
Metro: La Muette (Line 9) - Tue. to Sun.
10am-6pm, Thu. until 9pm - Closed Mon.
Price: €14 - Reduced price: €9 - Free for children under 7