Books & Blooms: “Why Water Lilies? Claude Monet and the Art of the Garden”

On Friday at 6pm, Ann Temkin, the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, will speak about how Monet’s gardens on his extensive property at Giverny formed the basis for his much-loved water lilies paintings, created during the last two decades of his life.

Monet was a serious gardener, and there was a strongly reciprocal relationship between his landscape design and his paintings. While the water lilies paintings are now recognized as pioneering landmarks of 20th-century art, they were harshly disparaged for the first half of the century. The talk will discuss why they were so unpopular, and what brought about the public’s eventual embrace of these boldly experimental canvases.

Ms. Temkin, who was born in Torrington and weekends in Cornwall, is the first woman to hold the premier curatorial position at MoMA. Before coming to MoMA, she was the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum. It is a huge honor for the Cornwall Library to have Ms. Temkin as this year’s guest speaker and her presentation is sure to appeal to art lovers as well as garden aficionados. It will be held at the United Church of Christ, 8 Bolton Hill Road in Cornwall Village, and will be followed by a cocktail reception in a nearby private garden.

Tickets are $40 for the talk, $30 for the garden tours or $65 for both. Please register and purchase via the link.