On March 25, 2023, the Saint Louis Art Museum opened Monet/Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape, on view through June 25. The museum presented it as the first United States exhibition devoted to the dialogue between Claude Monet and Joan Mitchell. Curated in St. Louis by Simon Kelly and organized with the Fondation Louis Vuitton and the Musee Marmottan Monet, the show brought together 24 paintings, twelve by each artist. It argued that Monet's late gardens and panoramic water landscapes helped illuminate Mitchell's large-scale abstract paintings made after she settled near Vetheuil, close to a house Monet had occupied. The exhibition emphasized shared interests in gardens, water, trees, light, color, and expansive formats rather than treating Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism as isolated histories.
The exhibition sharpened the case for Mitchell's work as a sustained modern response to Monet's late landscape painting.
