Word: marmottan
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...Marmottan Museum, a three-story town house in Paris' tony 16th arrondissement, shares the elegant Rue Louis-Boilly with embassies and mansions. The neighborhood's air of tranquillity was shattered one morning last week when five armed robbers invaded the museum, held some 40 tourists and eight guards at gunpoint, and made off with nine paintings valued at more than $10 million. Included in the haul was Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise, a 19th century masterpiece from which the Impressionist school takes its name...
...thieves will not be able to ransom the pictures to an insurance company, the frequent fate of stolen art treasures, because the Marmottan could not afford the enormous insurance premiums on its permanent collection. Police doubt that the intention is to sell the purloined paintings to a collector, because their fame makes them, as a French journalist put it, "about as negotiable as the Eiffel Tower." One possibility is that the robbers are terrorists who hope to exchange the pictures for a captured colleague. Said Police Superintendent Thierry Boulogne, who is involved in the case: "No one hypothesis is being...
...mark the event, Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art has put on a sumptuous show titled "Monet's Years at Giverny: Beyond Impressionism." It contains 81 paintings-a third of them lent by the Musée Marmottan in Paris, all of them images from the garden. We see, lined up, the different versions of each motif that Monet so obsessively worked at, in every possible variation of light, laboring to divide nuances into further nuances and stabilize their intervals with the devotion of a particle physicist: the poplars, the haystacks, the rose-twined tunnel of the arbor...
Nobody knows exactly how much of the collection thus leaked away, but Michel Monet scrupulously respected his father's wishes in one area. He left the collection not to the French government (old Monet never forgave the Louvre for ignoring him) but to the Marmottan...
From Memory. The word Impressionism was coined by a hostile critic from one of Monet's paintings of 1872, Impression: Sunrise, which by virtue of a chance bequest in 1948 was one of the few paintings the Marmottan already owned (and may be the only clue to why Monet fils chose the Marmottan). To the end of his life, Monet insisted that his one achievement was to have worked "directly from nature, striving to render my impressions in the face of the most fugitive effects...