Impressionist Normandy, a contemporary getaway in the footsteps of Monet

Normandy. To celebrate the centenary of the death of Claude Monet (1840-1926), Impressionist Normandy dedicates to the father of Water lilies a tribute edition placed under the sign of contemporary art: a first since the creation of the festival in 2010. From the Seine estuary to the gates of Île-de-France, the 75 selected projects unfold along the loops of the river like so many stages along the “Monet’s life line”, to use the words of Philippe Platel, the director of the event. And if tributes to the master of impressionism are legion in Norman cultural institutions (museums, art centers, art libraries, Regional Contemporary Art Funds), a good number of proposals also take up residence in the parks, gardens, churches and public squares of around forty municipalities in Eure, Seine-Maritime and Calvados. THE Arts Journal offers an itinerary in three stages – three cities, three crucial phases of Monet’s life and work – punctuated by interesting contemporary counterpoints to discover until the end of September as part of this 6th edition of Impressionist Normandy.

Ai Weiwei’s Lego “Water Lilies”

A harbor filled with fishing boats with inflated sails and canoes, rocky cliffs silhouetted against a cloudy sky… The Seine estuary, from the Le Havre commercial port to the Pointe de la Hève in Sainte-Adresse, is the genesis of the Impressionist odyssey: the young Monet set up his easel there at the end of the 1850s in the company of Eugène Boudin. One hundred and seventy-five years later, the MuMA (André-Malraux Museum of Modern Art) inaugurates an exhibition on the painter’s training years in Le Havre, an exhibition presenting a version of the Water lilies painted in 1904 and offered by the artist to the City in 1910, which opens the perspective onto two monumental frescoes signed Ai Weiwei, Waterlilies (2022, [voir ill.]), shown for the first time in France on the occasion of Impressionist Normandy.

The artist of Chinese origin, deeply marked during his childhood by reading beautiful books on impressionism brought back from Paris by his father, the poet Ai Qing, then by the discovery of Water lilies from MoMA (New York) in the 1980s, offers here two very personal versions of the Water lilies each made up of 650,000 Lego pieces and presented face-to-face (like at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris) in the nave of the MuMA. “Ai Weiwei scrupulously respected the architecture of the Water lilies“, notes Géraldine Lefebvre, director of MuMA. With a palette reduced to around twenty colors, the artist manages to deploy a vibrant homage to the touch of Monet.

Then, direction Rouen and its Gothic cathedral, whose facade is famous throughout the world thanks to the thirty views painted by Monet, from his ephemeral studio between 1892 and 1894. However, it is impossible to reduce the artist’s Rouen period to this series: relatively little known, the garden of plants of the prefecture of Seine-Maritime plays a capital role in the development of the garden of Giverny, where the painter has been living for ten years – the director of the botanical garden of Rouen him offers a variety of exotic plants to accompany the construction of its water lily pond. Two contemporary proposals presented in Rouen as part of the Normandy Impressionist festival also put flowers in the spotlight, and more particularly the process of blooming.

Flowering in Rouen soil

With its installation Meadow (meadow), the Dutch studio Drift deploys a constellation of moving flowers in the Sainte-Croix-des-Pelletiers church [voir ill.]. “Flowers have a shy energy”, explains Lonneke Gordijn, the co-founder of the studio. Suspended from the ceiling in the nave, the delicate mechanical flowers slowly bloom to create a palette of spring colors. Sensation and technical progress: a resolutely impressionistic project that is worth the detour.

On weekends in June and September, and every day during the summer, the facade of Rouen Cathedral is adorned with the dazzling colors of Mika Ninagawa. Twice a evening, the screening Wild flowering forms a ballet during which the serenity of Monet’s garden in Giverny, photographed by the artist, meets the hyper-modernity of the Japanese capital, with its neon lights and advertising panels in a thousand colors. If the mapping plays very little with the architecture of the building, the video enchants with its ultra-pop tone.

The basin and its silt

Claude Monet’s house, the water lily pond, the Museum of Impressionism: there is no need to introduce Giverny, where the painter composed his greatest masterpieces and resided until his death in 1926. Just five kilometers away, the town of Vernon also keeps traces of Monet (the silhouette of its church can also be seen in numerous paintings from the 1880s and 1890s). The former Alphonse-Georges-Poulain municipal museum, renamed the Blanche Hoschedé-Monet Museum in 2024, is the only museum in Eure to preserve original paintings by the master, like the tondo of the Water lilies (1908) offered by the artist in 1925. It is in this setting that Lionel Sabatté presents “The memory of the silt: tribute to Claude Monet”. To create his large canvases with an earthy appearance, the artist used silt from the water lily pond, recovered during its curettage in 2025, and golden powder to reveal screen-printed images based on photographs of the Giverny garden from the collection of Philippe Piguet, eminent art critic and handsome great-grandson of Claude Monet. “This pond is the story of nature but it is also that of a family,” declares Lionel Sabaté. An intimate and elegant tribute to the transmission of this heritage.

By turns playful – the sound swings installed by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot in the courtyard of the Frac Normandie in Caen will delight young and old alike – poetic and spectacular, this 6th edition has many surprises in store.