Roy Lichtenstein: Monet’s Garden Goes Pop!
“Roy Lichtenstein: Monet’s Garden Goes Pop!” continues through June 27, 2021, at the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, 1534 Mound Street,
Sarasota, Florida.
This exhibition showcases the legendary Pop artist’s screen prints based on Claude Monet’s paintings of water lilies and haystacks. Lichtenstein’s rarely seen Water Lilies and Haystacks provide an unexpected homage to a staple of the public imagination — Monet’s paintings of his garden and home at Giverny that inspired them. The display of these large-scale, rarely seen artworks will be accompanied by a complete transformation of the Downtown Sarasota campus’s 15 acres into Monet’s garden at Giverny as imagined through the aesthetic of Lichtenstein.
“It will be like stepping into Lichtenstein’s world – if he had created a world based on Monet,” says Jennifer Rominiecki, president and CEO of Selby Gardens. “Our horticultural team is taking the principles that Lichtenstein applied to his artwork and applying those to our interpretation of Monet’s garden at Giverny. This innovative, immersive interpretation has never been done before.”
“We’re basically saying that if Lichtenstein had created Monet’s garden, this might be what he would have dreamed up,” says Rominiecki. “By giving our gardens the Monet treatment with an innovative and playful Pop Art twist, our guests will be able to explore Lichtenstein’s interpretation of Monet in a variety of ways.”
Selby Gardens, transformed into Monet’s famed gardens at Giverny, France, through the Pop Art lens of Roy Lichtenstein, includes iconic elements of Monet’s garden such as the green Japanese bridge, trellises, and benches. This conjuring of Lichtenstein’s world also serves as the dynamic backdrop to the lush plantings and mixed borders for which Monet’s paintings were renowned. An avid gardener, Monet once said, “My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.”
The exhibition is part of the on-going Jean and Alfred Goldstein series at the gardens.
Check out the video:
(Photo and video courtesy of Marie Selby Botanical Gardens)
