SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 14 (Xinhua) -- A major exhibition of French Impressionist master Claude Monet will open Saturday in San Francisco.
The exhibition entitled "Monet: The Late Years" will run through May 27 at the de Young Museum in downtown San Francisco.
It is the first exhibition in more than 20 years dedicated to the final phase of Monet's career. Several paintings will be on view for the first time in the United States.
Assembled from major public and private collections in Europe, the United States and Asia, the exhibition will showcase 50 original paintings of Monet, including more than 20 examples of his beloved water lily paintings.
"What's extraordinary about this exhibition is that most of these works were in Monet's studio when he died," said Thomas Campbell, director and CEO of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, at a preview event on Wednesday.
"It wasn't until the 1930s that market began to develop for them," he said.
Monet (1840-1926) is considered very influential on abstract expressionists in the mid-20th century. In recent years, his garden at Giverny, France, where his well-known water lily series were painted, has become a hot destination for tourists.
The exhibition is thematically arranged with a prologue concentrating on scenery from Monet's outdoor studio at Giverny, the period between 1914 and 1919 when the artist reinvented himself, and his late garden series as the epilogue.
By his final years, Monet's cataracts had affected the tonal balance of his perception, but the artist triumphed over this adversity by producing his most radical works yet.
"In his mid-70s, Monet decided to reinvent himself, mining his past, yet creating works that looked like nothing he had ever done before," said exhibition curator George Shackelford, deputy director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.
The exhibition will be on view at the Kimbell Art Museum from June 16 to Sept. 25.
