Art’s Watch: Immersive Monet Exhibit

This sto­ry first appeared in The Winchester Sun.

If you’ve ever want­ed to walk on water, have koi swim under your feet, and would enjoy the paint­ings of the French impres­sion­ist painter Claude Monet (1840- 1926) in a larg­er-than-life for­mat, vis­it Monet: The Immersive Experience, now in Cincinnati. 

My son, Elliott, invit­ed us to go to the exhib­it with him and it was an amaz­ing expe­ri­ence.  It starts slow­ly with rooms of exhibits and infor­ma­tion about Monet’s life and paint­ing tech­niques. Typical, usu­al muse­um-curat­ed exhibits. But soon you find your­self walk­ing through a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Monet’s gar­den com­plete with a pond bridge and (pro­jec­tions of) koi swim­ming below it.

And then you come to the main attrac­tion, a very large room—dimensionally it felt like half a foot­ball field by two sto­ries tall—with more koi swim­ming below as you walk around to find a seat, over­whelmed by over­sized, larg­er-than-life pro­jec­tions of Monet’s paint­ings on the walls and floor, sur­round­ing you.

Here you can get a sense of the enor­mi­ty of Monet’s tal­ent. You can see brush strokes, expe­ri­ence trains as they move through the room, paint­ings as they appear on the walls, merge into one anoth­er and then dis­ap­pear — to be replaced by oth­ers. There are the Water Lily paint­ings, the Japanese foot­bridge, his gar­den, Impression, Sunrise (1872), Woman with a Parasol, Madame Monet and Her Son (1875), the Haystacks (Wheatstacks) Series (1890−1891), and many more.

Perhaps the paint­ing I felt most com­pelling was one titled Camille Monet on her Deathbed (1879) because it, she, seemed to swirl and dance upon the walls when it was projected.

I am not an art crit­ic and have not a painter’s soul. But I can say that I enjoyed the vis­it to this exhib­it very much. We spent what I thought was a very short peri­od of time in that final room, among Monet’s art. Turns out we were there more than an hour, very close to two hours over­all. The time sim­ply flew by; the exhib­it was that captivating.

There were bench­es and chairs set around the room in such a way that some­times I would see a per­son “in” one of the paint­ings only to real­ize that he/she was anoth­er patron of the exhib­it. Really quite amaz­ing how immer­sive the event real­ly was.

Monet: The Immersive Experience event is locat­ed at 18 West Fourth Street in down­town Cincinnati. Tickets start at $33.90 for adults, $7.90 for chil­dren. It is nec­es­sary to pur­chase tick­ets in advance. The tick­ets are sold in half-hour group­ings so as to keep the show­ings inti­mate enough that every­one can see and enjoy the exhib­it. The web­site esti­mates vis­its to last 90 min­utes; we were there for close to two hours.

Parking is avail­able near the venue (for $20) or you can park on the street or in a park­ing garage a bit fur­ther away for about $8.

For more infor­ma­tion or to pur­chase tick­ets vis­it https://monetexpo.com/cincinnati/

Image gallery

All pho­tos sub­mit­ted by the author. These include lights/peeks into the “back­stage” of the exhib­it. Among the most inter­est­ing pic­tures is of the Koi Pond– that seemed to be in the floor, that you were actu­al­ly walk­ing on the water. (Click on each pho­to to enlarge.)