Monet’s Water Lilies for Switzerland and the world

From 1914 onwards, Monet painted mainly the water-lily ponds around his house in Giverny. This subject served as the basis for large-scale murals, which were installed in two rooms in the Orangerie at the Tuileries in Paris following his death in 1926. For a long time, they received little attention there. In 1949, the Kunsthalle Basel exhibited works from the series for the first time, and in 1952 Emil Bührle donated two of the murals to the Kunsthaus Zürich. But it was not until 1955, when the MoMA in New York acquired a water-lily painting, that perceptions changed: the murals, previously regarded as ‘decorative’, were now seen as precursors of abstract painting.