Monet, Renoir, and Chagall

‘Monet, Renoir, and Chagall: Journeys Around the Mediterranean’ presents you with an itinerary that spans the period between Impressionism and modernism. The new digital exhibition highlights the link between artistic creativity and the Mediterranean shores, as the principal centres of the modernist movement.

The exhibition will immerse you in the masterpieces of twenty artists: Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Signac, Derain, Vlaminck, Dufy, and Chagall, amongst others. In the 1880s, the Mediterranean attracted many artists: abandoning Paris and the northern regions, they flocked to the southern shores, between Collioure and Saint-Tropez.

It was at this point that they developed a new approach to the representation of light and colour. All these artists had links with the Mediterranean, either through their origins, or via their stays in the Midi. The digital exhibition shows how their artistic personalities were brought to the fore by these seascapes and how pictorial modernism emerged.

In around forty minutes, you are taken from one artistic movement to another: from Impressionism, with Monet and Renoir, to Pointillism with Signac and Cross, and Fauvism with Camoin, Derain, Vlaminck, and Marquet.

The immersive exhibition also retraces the fascination of Bonnard and Dufy for the Mediterranean, and eventually focuses on one of the greatest colourists of modern art Chagall. The unique style of each painter is illustrated: Bonnard’s depth, Dufy’s insouciance, and Chagall’s boldness.

More than 500 works, which are now held in collections around the world, will fill the Bassins des Lumières with their bright colours and highlight the variations in the works of these great artists on the Mediterranean shores, which inspired them to take their work to its finest expression.

Listen to the playlist of the exhibition