Monet’s water lilies hung at High
Exhibit on loan from New York’s MOMA opens June 6
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
The High Museum of Art set its Monet exhibit Tuesday, deciding the precise placement of the last two of four priceless paintings that will go on view June 6 before the freshly uncrated works were hung.
With news cameras taping at a media preview, High director Michael Shapiro was talking about one of the two works already on the walls, the 19½-foot-wide “Water Lilies” (circa 1920). The French master had “taken his vision to the farthest extent he could” late in life while capturing his garden in Giverny, near Paris, Shapiro said.
JOHN SPINK/jspink@ajc.com
Prepartors Brian Kelly, Justin McNeight and Caroline Prinzivalli carefully move ‘Agapanthus’ after it was uncrated.
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But Cayse Cheatham, chief of the five-member preparator staff that hangs the works, was not, like his big boss, lost in Monet’s liquidy greens and purples. He was still recovering from its “nerve-wracking” 2½-hour installation on Monday.
“When it starts being a national treasure, you start being concerned about it,” Chatham said, adding that one of his fellow installers had bolted awake at 3 a.m., worrying if the masterpiece was still on the wall.
But in the light of a new day, the painting was still firmly fixed. High director of collections and exhibitions David Brenneman, hearing about the nightmare, sounded as serene as a Monet.
“They’re masterpieces, but at the same time, they’re physical things, things that have to be moved around,” Brenneman said. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, which is loaning the four works, leaves little to chance, though, sending a staff courier to watch the paintings’ journey from crate to wall.
In the next gallery, Monet’s 42-foot-wide triptych “Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond” (circa 1920) commanded the entire space. Shapiro, speaking of the abstracted merger of its puffy white shapes and placidly floating plants, said, “It’s as if Monet’s complete world had been compressed and expanded at the same time.”
Chatham and his staff were back in the other gallery, focused on the final two paintings that had to find secure homes before the preparators’ careful work was done.
