Adieu American art Museum in Giverny
Here’s some sad and some good news on the Franco-American cultural front.
Sad news first.
Friday, October 31, after 17 years of operation, the Musée d’art américain, the American art museum in Giverny, France, the Normandy village where the famed French impressionist master Claude Monet lived and died, will close its doors for the last time.
If you have time to visit it before then, it is well worth the trip.
Just 100 yards or so down the street from Monet’s house and gardens, a tourist site scarcely an hour from Paris that attracts roughly 500,000 visitors a year, the American museum was built and opened in 1992 by Daniel Terra, a Chicago-based, Italian-origin, American multi-millionaire.
and art collector.
Already the creator of an American art museum in Chicago, Terra’s dream was to share with the country that had inspired them, but whose citizens knew little about them, his vast collection of impressionist paintings by American artists who had studied and worked in France and drawn or enhanced their artistic style and vision from the French impressionist movement.
That the museum did, pulling in some 75,000 visitors each year during an April to end of October open season.
Although that figure couldn’t compare with the throngs of essentially garden lovers strolling through the Monet property virtually next door, it still, each year, made the American museum one of the most visited cultural attractions in Normandy.
The museum also provided, a five-minute walk away, an impressionist art collection, albeit an American one, for considerable numbers of those Monet garden visitors who were happy with the flowers but disappointed not to find, as they had assumed they would, any paintings in Giverny done by the master himself.
Now for the good news.
According to the latest information reported in the local press although not officially announced, French cultural authorities not only will be stepping in to take over the American museum’s premises but will put on display there as of next April, when the Monet gardens begin their season, just what Giverny had lacked until now, namely, a collection of Monet’s original works drawn from various state-run museums elsewhere in France.
That the American museum’s buildings and galleries would be taken over by local French authorities as well as the fact that they would be used for some kind of cultural activity had been known for more than a year. What wasn’t known--because French authorities were exploring various options--was just what that activity would be. A lot of ideas circulated--a cultural conference and debate center, an educational activity, or a continuing art museum. But, if so, of what kind of art?
That’s why the good news is that it’s apparently finally been decided to maintain the impressionist nature of the American museum site and put original Monet paintings on display in the galleries that previously had devoted to the paintings of Monet’s American contemporaries.
If those contemporaries didn’t necessarily have Monet’s stature in art history, a lot of them came close. Dan Terra, the museum’s founder had a canny collector’s eye and, in its 16 -year history, the museum abounded with paintings he had acquired by famed American artists such as Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, Lilla Cabot Perry, Theodore Robinson, John Singer Sargent, Theodore Butler and many others.
Many of the painters on display had belonged to the colony of foreign artists, the majority Americans, that had flourished in Giverny from the latter half of the 19th century to the outbreak of World War 1 in 1914.
They were drawn initially by the particularly favourable light effects that prevail there to this day and, as time wore on, also by the prestige that Monet’s presence brought to the village.
Lilla Cabot Perry, for example, lived in the house next door to Monet’s residence, a property that Dan Terra and his wife Judith acquired in the early 1990’s. It was their home in Giverny during the construction period of the American art museum across the street.
Only a short walk away was the house—also acquired by the Terras for their museum---inhabited by Theodore Butler who had married a Monet foster daughter, Suzanne Hoschedé.
For the Terras , getting approval for their museum project was far from easy.
Giverny is an agricultural-origin village with a year-round population of far less than 1,000 inhabitants. Many already been forced, often reluctantly, to accept the change in their lives that an influx of tens of thousands of visitors to Monet’s house and gardens—plus their automobiles---brought then each year during the gardens’ April-October tourist season.
The idea of accepting an additional attraction with the prospect of even more thousands of visitors initially met with strong resistance from the Giverny village council. Adding to that resistance was the fact that Terra’s initial architectural proposal for the museum, although logical for its designers, was drastically out of harmony with the rural character and architecture of the village itself.
Terra was quick to correct his plan and win approval for a new one which blended the museum and its surrounding landscape so effectively into the village countryside that, to this day, it is practically possible to walk by without noticing it.
Dan Terra died in 1996 and those who subsequently took over his Chicago-based art foundation, never really shared his passion for the museum in Giverny. Some years ago his American art museum in Chicago was closed and from that moment on, the handwriting was on the wall for its counterpart in France. It was just a matter of time.
On October 31, that time will have come.
Luckily for impressionist fans, the French appear ready to bring some Monets to the rescue next April.
The Monet Gardens and American art museum in Giverny are just an hour’s drive northwest of Paris near the town of Vernon along the A-13 autoroute.
There is frequent train service also between Vernon and the St. Lazare railway station in Paris, with shuttle bus connections from Vernon station to Giverny. There is ample parking space serving both museums and both have restaurants and well-stocked souvenir stores.
Further details about the American art museum, which is open from 10;a.m. to 6 p.m. every day except Monday, are available at www.maag..org
