Why Did Monet's Bridge Turn Red?

Two paintings of the same wooden bridge, over the same pond, by the same man. In the first, from 1899, everything is cool and green. In the second, painted some twenty years later, the bridge has almost dissolved into red and brown. Claude Monet was nearly eighty, and he was going blind. This film follows Monet from the water garden he built at Giverny, through the cataracts that slowly turned his world yellow, the deaths of his wife and his son, and the vast water-lily decoration he offered to France the day after the Armistice. It tells the story of his eye operation in 1923, the colours he saw afterwards, and how the paintings he could barely see came to fill two oval rooms at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris. 🔎 Explore every painting in this film in high resolution: https://openartgallery.xyz Chapters 0:00 Two bridges 0:51 The garden 1:56 The fog 2:56 The great decoration 4:08 Painting in the dark 5:22 The operation 6:21 Blue again 7:17 The rooms 8:22 Coda Sources Musée de l'Orangerie: history of the Water Lilies cycle, and Monet's letter to Georges Clemenceau of 12 November 1918 · The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies (1899) · Anna Gruener, "The effect of cataracts and cataract surgery on Claude Monet", British Journal of General Practice, 2015 · Michael F. Marmor and James G. Ravin, The Artist's Eyes (2009) · James G. Ravin, "Monet's cataracts", JAMA, 1985 · Daniel Wildenstein, Monet, or the Triumph of Impressionism (Taschen). Credits Artworks: public-domain reproductions (Open Art Gallery; originals in the Musée d'Orsay, Musée de l'Orangerie, National Gallery of Art Washington, Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art and others). Photographs: Claude Monet, 1899, by Nadar (public domain) · Georges Clemenceau, Atelier Nadar, Bibliothèque nationale de France (public domain) · Monet in his studio, February 1926, and Monet's funeral, December 1926, Agence Meurisse, Bibliothèque nationale de France (public domain) · The Water Lilies rooms, Musée de l'Orangerie: photographs by Brady Brenot and by Dudva, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Music (via Wikimedia Commons): Ravel, Jeux d'eau, Anna Sutyagina (CC BY 3.0) · Debussy, Arabesques Nos. 1 and 2, Patrizia Prati, live at the Museo del Romanticismo, Madrid (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Fauré, Élégie Op. 24, Hans Goldstein (cello) and Eli Kalman (piano) (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Chopin, Nocturne in C minor (posth.), Diana Hughes (public domain). #Monet #WaterLilies #ArtHistory