Monet/Lichtenstein: Rouen Cathedrals

Monet/Lichtenstein: Rouen Cathedrals presents a group of Monet’s impressionist Rouen Cathedral paintings together with Lichtenstein’s 1969 appropriation of the same subject.

Monet painted thirty views of the Rouen Cathedral from 1892 to 1895 from different viewing positions, all quite close to one another, at different times of day. The series stands as the hallmark of the revolutionary impressionist movement. Over six decades later, Lichtenstein was inspired to paint his Cathedral series in the style of pop art as a response to the exhibition Serial Imagery at the Pasadena Art Museum. Pop delved into the nature of repetition and seriality by taking an iconic image, cheapened by overexposure, and reinvesting it with renewed, ironic vigor and relevance.

For both Monet and Lichtenstein, the subject of the cathedral is less important than the act of seeing; the installation investigates the nature of this obsession with sight.

These paintings by Monet and Lichtenstein, essential to the formation of modern and post-modernism, present a visual narrative that unites the thematic concerns and visual strategies of these chronologically disparate artists.