“This partnership speaks to the role that visual arts can play beyond aesthetic enjoyment. Every time we work with a different audience we learn so much more about how our works of art are meaningful to other people.” Dale Hilton, Cleveland Museum of Art, February 2010

Yesterday, 24 February 2010, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Clinic jointly hosted a symposium exploring the possibility of making art accessible to dementia patients. [Read more →]

Claude Monet, Wisteria, 1917-1920. Oil on canvas (100 x 300 cm). © Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris. On display at the Fundación Caja Madrid, as part of Monet and Abstraction.

The Spanish Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, in collaboration with the Fundación Caja Madrid, is currently hosting an exhibition of a selection of Claude Monet’s paintings that presents an innovative perspective. ‘Monet and Abstraction‘ demonstrates Claude Monet’s influence on the development of abstraction in in Western art during the second half of the 20th century. [Read more →]

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People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it’s simply necessary to love.” Claude Monet, 1902.

As Claude Monet painted the Rouen Cathedral 30 times at different times of the day and in different weather conditions over a period of a few months, it is not that surprising then that the Cathedral will play an important part in this year’s summer festival to celebrate the impressionists in Normandy. [Read more →]

Camille Pissarro, View of Rouen, 1898, oil on canvas. © Honolulu Academy of Arts

The role played by the city of Rouen in the history of Western art at the end of the nineteenth century is immense. Camille Pissarro is said to have remarked that “Rouen is a beautiful as Venice”.

This summer the museum of Fine Art in Rouen will host a major exhibition of Impressionist artists as part of the Normandie Impressionniste 2010 festival:

President Sarkozy of France is said to be considering whether Claude Monet’s remains should be removed from the church cemetery in Giverny to the Panthéon in Paris.

The Panthéon (the name derives from an ancient Greek word meaning ‘every god’), located in the Latin Quarter of Paris, is the chosen burial place for France’s national heroes, and currently includes the likes of Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Louis Pasteur, Pierre and Marie Curie, to name but a few. An act of Parliament is required for a person’s remains to be interred therein, the last person person being Alexandre Dumas whose remains were reburied in 2002. [Read more →]