From June 15 to August 28, 2019, the National Gallery will exhibit one of the famous falaises painted between 1882 and 1897 by Claude Monet, one of the most significant protagonists of Impressionism. The canvas, presented in Italy only once until now, in 2016, will be accompanied by some critical texts that will illustrate the work of the great master, underlining its expressive characteristics that, progressively moving away from the immediacy of impressionistic rendering, approach abstract painting.
La Falaise du Petit Ailly à Varengeville comes from an important private art collection, currently in judicial storage at the Pilotta Complex. The exhibition project that revolves around Monet’s masterpiece was born as a moment of scientific study of the work and of awareness about its possible dispersion in the art market.
The precious painting by the French master depicts the stretch of the northern coast of France on the English Channel that goes from Dijon to Pourville to Varengeville, characterized by a long beach surrounded by high cliffs. Attracted by the great suggestiveness of the cliffs and deep gorges that follow one another up to the bridge over the Petit-Ailly river in Varengeville, Monet had stayed in the area for the first time in February-May 1882, creating some studies in which he experimented with the relationship between rock-sky-sea from different perspectives. After more than ten years, in February 1896 Monet returned to the Normandy coast in a period of melancholy, linked to the memory of recently deceased friends, as if on a pilgrimage to the places where he had already happily worked. The sea and the cliffs beaten by the cold wind and rain still arouse in him great enthusiasm for the beauty of the spectacle and offer the painter the opportunity to create a new cycle of paintings, as variations on the same subject. This is the phase of the construction of a ‘series’ concentrated on a limited number of visual angles. Although La Falaise du Petit Ailly à Varengeville bears the signature and date 1882, for Daniel Wildenstein the painting was executed between 1896 and 1897, during the second stay, since, in terms of point of view and style, it appears far from the location of the cliffs of 1882, more ‘naturalistic’, while it fits perfectly into the production of 1896-97. For Wildenstein in fact, on the occasion of other exhibitions at the Durand-Ruel gallery in May 1920, Monet had incorrectly signed and dated some of the works to be exhibited, including this one, based on memory.
It was precisely on the occasion of this exhibition that the painting was purchased by Paul Durand-Ruel, a collector and supporter of impressionist painting. Later, La Falaise passed through various private collections, until arriving today at the Monumental Complex of the Pilotta, awaiting its definitive placement, hopefully in an Italian public collection.
La Falaise du Petit Ailly à Varengeville is a work of great interest for the wealth of artistic and cultural references it contains, representative of a moment in which European art measured itself against the new compositional research of Far Eastern art and experimented with paths from which the historical avant-gardes would arise a few decades later. The dawn, investigated from life, illuminates the rocks in pink, which become vaporous theatrical wings, creating asymmetrical cuts with the sea. Water, with its colors, constitutes the reflective medium par excellence on which the artist can concentrate his studies on atmospheric fusion.
The painting is also an example of the centrality of the ‘series’ in Monet’s artistic production in the 1890s, when the optical instantaneity of Impressionism moved towards a progressive rarefaction of figurativeness, anticipating abstract art, thanks to a true inspiration that Kandinsky experienced in Moscow in 1891.
