Tickets are 10USD and include the use of an audio tour thingie. (I'm kind of up in the air about those - because they do/can provide background and also a way to not hear everyone else in the room (because you know how freaking crowded these exhibits can be), but still. You're looking at something mind-blowingly beautiful and you've got alien buds stuck in your ears or pads on your ears, and if your ears are anything like my ears, you know how quickly that can get terribly uncomfortable.) Tickets on Friday are free. The audio tour thingie runs 3USD on Friday.
I love this. I love that St. Louis voted to pay for this out of tax monies to make the museum available to all for free. No admission. It's been this way for over a century. Also, I found this gorgeous image of the building at night through bootsnall.com.
From the web-equivalent of the liner notes:
The Agapanthus triptych was inspired by Monet's pond in his famed garden at Giverny, just west of Paris. Monet himself gave the title Agapanthus to the 42 foot triptych after the plant (also known as "African lily" or "Lily of the Nile"). His large-scale water-lily compositions represent the culminating achievement of his career, and were described by the artist as his Grand Decorations.
Monet began work on these three massive canvases, each measuring approximately 7 feet by 14 feet, in about 1915, and continued to rework and obsessively change the composition of the triptych until his death more than 10 years later.After Monet's death, the three panels of Agapanthus remained in Monet's studio until the mid-1950s when they were acquired by the New York dealer Knoedler and Company and first exhibited in the United States in 1956. The three compositions were acquired by The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City between 1956 and 1960. There are only two Monet triptychs in the United States; the other is in New York's Museum of Modern Art.
The three sections were first reunited in the 1978 exhibition, Monet's Years at Giverny: Beyond Impressionism, sponsored and exhibited by the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The three canvases were joined together again at the Saint Louis Art Museum in a 1980 exhibition cosponsored by the three holding institutions.
The Water Lilies are a massive event just as paintings on walls, but to have the opportunity to see them all together in one room is something that has not been available since 1980 when I was 7 and deeply uninterested in anything that wasn't committing perpetual motion.
Sarah tips: when traveling with teh Sarah, if you need to get away for awhile, find something making small repeated motions (public art, a fountain, a bridge over a river), leave her there with ice cream and go live your life. Guaranteed to work since 1977.
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