Word: marmottan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...mark the event, Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art has put on a sumptuous show titled "Monet's Years at Giverny: Beyond Impressionism." It contains 81 paintings-a third of them lent by the Musée Marmottan in Paris, all of them images from the garden. We see, lined up, the different versions of each motif that Monet so obsessively worked at, in every possible variation of light, laboring to divide nuances into further nuances and stabilize their intervals with the devotion of a particle physicist: the poplars, the haystacks, the rose-twined tunnel of the arbor...
Nobody knows exactly how much of the collection thus leaked away, but Michel Monet scrupulously respected his father's wishes in one area. He left the collection not to the French government (old Monet never forgave the Louvre for ignoring him) but to the Marmottan...
...Louvre, everyone knows, is the most famous museum in Paris. But which is the least famous? Until lately, a good candidate for the laurels of obscurity was the Musée Marmottan, a two-story mansion in the outer regions of the 16th Arrondissement near the Bois de Boulogne. From its opening in 1934, the place attracted about 30 visitors a month to admire a lugubrious clutter of porcelain, stained glass and Napoleonic furniture. Guidebooks ignored the Musée Marmottan. Even its hours were absurd: two afternoons a week, except during the tourist-laden summer, when the museum perversely...
From Memory. The word Impressionism was coined by a hostile critic from one of Monet's paintings of 1872, Impression: Sunrise, which by virtue of a chance bequest in 1948 was one of the few paintings the Marmottan already owned (and may be the only clue to why Monet fils chose the Marmottan). To the end of his life, Monet insisted that his one achievement was to have worked "directly from nature, striving to render my impressions in the face of the most fugitive effects...