Word: monetize
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...prints that helped forge that mutual infatuation have long been out of sight. For decades they graced the walls of Monet's home at Giverny, an hour outside of Paris. In the years after his death in 1926, the delicate, light-sensitive engravings were largely replaced with copies. Now the originals can be seen again, until Feb. 25, in "Claude Monet's Japanese Prints" at Paris' Marmottan Monet Museum...
...collector, Monet had a sharp eye. Though he never went to Japan, he befriended writers, curators and art dealers who did, and they steered him toward quality. His treasures, all hand-printed from wood blocks, encompass the best of ukiyo-e - "images of the floating world" of geishas, Kabuki actors and pleasure houses that flourished in 18th and 19th century Edo, as Tokyo was known. These include works by such giants as Utagawa Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai and Kitagawa Utamaro. Rarer still are the fierce battle scenes from the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95 that Monet collected, as well...
Oddly, the Marmottan has not put any of Monet's Japanese prints side by side with his paintings to show the influences, even though this relatively small museum has one of the world's most important collections of his works. But if you're wondering how the prints inspired him, you need only descend one floor to the museum's main holdings. There you will see why Monet is hailed as one of art's more inventive geniuses. But you may have to look closely to discern how Japan made him that...
...Monet was not shy about his fascination with the country and its art. In 1876, five years after that encounter in the food shop, he painted La Japonaise, depicting his first wife Camille in a kimono against a background decorated with uchiwa (Japanese paper fans). At Giverny, where he moved in 1883 at age 42, he built a Japanese bridge over a Japanese pond in a Japanese garden, and he spent the rest of his life painting that private paradise - and especially its water lilies. But like the tale of the food shop, the reality of how Japan influenced Monet...
...Monet worked in the Netherlands not just in 1871, but again in 1874 and 1886, and biographers offer wildly varying accounts of that first, life-altering Japanese print he bought: it was in Amsterdam, or Delft or Zaandam; at a food shop or a porcelain store; it was being used as wrapping paper or hanging on a wall. Monet himself recalled: "My true discovery of Japan, the purchase of my first prints, dates from 1856. I was 16. I spotted them at Le Havre, in a shop that dealt in curiosities brought back by foreign travelers." But even here...