This autumn, the Albertina is mounting Austria’s first broad-based presentation of works by Claude Monet (1840–1926) in over 20 years. The 100 paintings to be shown include important loan works from over 40 international museums and private collections such as the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the National Gallery London, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

Monet stands like no other painter for the impressionist style, and as the French “Master of Light”, he was also a central pioneer of painting’s 20th-century development. He painted by the seaside, at Normandy’s rugged coastal cliffs, and on the banks of the Seine, with the water surfaces in his pictures reflecting the bright, vivid colors of lush vegetation in his summer landscapes and the frozen mist’s mysterious grey and blue in his winter ones. Monet’s light and colors shift on the canvas in accordance with nature’s constant transformation, as well as with the diversity of the atmospheric impressions that the painter gleaned from his motifs—and his urge to capture this diversity moved him to paint many such motifs in series.

This exhibition runs the gamut from Monet’s initial pre-impressionist paintings to those final works created in his garden in Giverny. Monet thereby reveals a world constantly in flux owing to the power of nature, the weather, and the cycle of the seasons. Furthermore, the element of water is present throughout his oeuvre, be it on the Seine or on the Creuse, at the Atlantic or in his water garden with the iconic lilies. Nature’s changeability, with landscapes dissolving into fog, snow, or ocean waves, is thus the central theme of this exhibition.