Galerie Claude Lemand

Claude Monet, A Legacy of Gardens.
Exhibition from July 11 to November 1, 2026.
Les Franciscaines, Deauville, France.
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Les Franciscaines: MONET, A Legacy of Gardens.

One hun­dred years after the death of Claude Monet (1840-1926) on December 5, 1926, in Giverny, Normandy is paying tribute to him in numerous ways. At the heart of this pro­gram, the Musée Les Franciscaines in Deauville offers a sen­si­tive and con­tem­po­rary rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of the legacy of the painter of the Water Lilies, placing his work in dia­logue with that of artists around the world who share the same fas­ci­na­tion with light, gar­dens, and color. Drawing on excep­tional loans from the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée Marmottan, the museums of Dreux and Saint-Étienne, and the Institut du monde arabe (Claude & France Lemand Donation), the exhi­bi­tion cre­ates a dia­logue between Monet and those who claim him as an influ­ence. From Japan to North Africa, from Europe to North America, the exhi­bi­tion reveals the uni­ver­sality and vitality of a her­itage that has con­tin­u­ally tran­scended bor­ders and gen­er­a­tions : the Algerian Abdallah Benanteur, the Japanese Reiji Hiramatsu, the Canadian Jean-Paul Riopelle, and the pho­tog­ra­phers Jean Gaumy, Bernard Plossu, and Jorma Puranen.
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Claude Lemand: BENANTEUR, Les Élus (The Chosen) cycle.

Born in 1931 in Mostaganem, Abdallah Benanteur grew up in an Algerian family and cul­tural envi­ron­ment steeped in writing and illu­mi­nated manuscripts, Muslim mys­tical poetry, and Andalusian music and song. After studying at the School of Fine Arts in Oran, he set­tled in Paris in 1953, which became his home and cre­ative center. He passed away on December 31, 2017, in Ivry-sur-Seine, France.

Despite the his­tor­ical back­drop of a colo­nial war with tragic con­se­quences and the unfa­vor­able social cir­cum­stances in which he lived - fac­tors that kept him apart from the group of American artists who redis­cov­ered the late Monet’s painting in Paris - Abdallah Benanteur (Algeria 1931-France 2017) was the only artist from the Arab world to inte­grate the spirit of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies into his own work so early and so pro­foundly. Having arrived in Paris in 1953, he suc­ceeded in estab­lishing a fruitful dia­logue with the late Monet’s painting as early as his first pow­erful series, Nymphéas de la Douleur (Water Lilies of Pain, 1959-1961), cre­ated in Paris during the Algerian War of Independence, a time when Algeria was suf­fering the rav­ages of colo­nialism.

The young Abdallah Benanteur quickly became familiar with the Water Lilies of the Musée de l’Orangerie, and in 1980, the Grand Palais exhi­bi­tion Homage to Claude Monet gave him a com­pre­hen­sive view of them. A con­nois­seur of early Italian painting, which he studied every summer from 1981 to 1985 and which trans­formed and illu­mi­nated his own work, Benanteur rein­vented him­self and devel­oped a per­sonal uni­verse of "Gardens of Paradise", a syn­thesis of his Eastern and European sources of inspi­ra­tion and the Water Lilies of the Orangerie and the garden at Giverny that fas­ci­nated him and to which he paid homage, as in the admirable Pour Monet. Giverny (1983) from the Barjeel Art Foundation, with its cen­tral white light radi­ating the deep blue across the entire canvas.

Comprising a polyp­tych and two trip­tychs of iden­tical dimen­sions, 150 x 350 cm (Les Élus, L’Élu, and Les Élus du soir), the Élus cycle is a sym­phonic work made up of three move­ments that echo and com­ple­ment one another. It stands as Benanteur’s tribute to the great mon­u­mental works of clas­sical European painting and, above all, as the cul­mi­na­tion of a thirty-year dia­logue with the Water Lilies at the Musée de l’Orangerie, a vast cycle of paint­ings con­ceived and exe­cuted by Claude Monet as the "Monument to the Fallen and to Peace" that he wished to gift to France. He had promised it to his friend Georges Clemenceau, a patri­otic and uni­ver­salist politi­cian, a staunch anti-colo­nialist and anti­cler­ical, and a man pas­sionate about Art and Buddhist thought.

The Élus (The Chosen) cycle rep­re­sents a pin­nacle of Benanteur’s career, the finest "Monument to the Fallen for Algerian Independence and the End of Colonialism", and a hymn of hope that the Life instincts of fragile Humanity will pre­vail over Death instincts, finally ush­ering in the long-awaited uni­versal peace and broth­er­hood of a plan­e­tary Garden of Eden. Visitors will be able to make a pil­grimage to view the work in the Salle des Élus, a room ded­i­cated to it within the Institut du monde arabe museum’s new exhi­bi­tion layout, as a place of memory, reflec­tion, con­tem­pla­tion, and aes­thetic appre­ci­a­tion.

Les Élus (The Chosen), 1986. Polyptych. Oil on canvas, 150 x 350 cm.
A vast, peaceful land­scape tra­versed by broad, white, ethe­real, and diaphanous open­ings, rem­i­nis­cent of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies series of 1907-1908. It depicts the gentle, suc­ces­sive waves of the res­ur­rec­tion of the dead. Nature and humanity are caught in an upward move­ment through a par­a­disi­acal garden (of forms, colors, and light), ascending toward the sky. While some of the chosen appear alone, they are more often grouped in twos, threes, or larger clus­ters. They seem happy to be reunited, floating in bunches around the branches. All dressed in white and bearing no dis­tin­guishing gender markers, The Chosen are believed to rep­re­sent the Algerian fighters who died for their country’s inde­pen­dence.

L’Élu (The Chosen One), 1987. Triptych. Oil on canvas, 150 x 350 cm.
The land­scape depicted is that of Algeria, caught in a seismic upheaval, an image of its anti-colo­nial uprising and war of inde­pen­dence, fea­turing erupting vol­ca­noes and the spewing of lava and earth into the ocean. The Chosen One is clearly iden­ti­fied as Charef, Abdallah’s younger brother, who died in battle on Algerian soil; he is depicted weight­less and dressed in radiant attire, like an appari­tion at the very top of the cen­tral panel, con­versing with his older brother, who stands atop the moun­tain, seen from behind and wearing a tra­di­tional red chechia. The Chosen One holds great sym­bolic impor­tance, con­trasting with the very small amount of space he occu­pies within the trip­tych; the work is almost entirely filled by the land­scape, the vast Algerian "Nature" that bears The Chosen One. This approach dif­fers from European painting, where fig­ures of the Christian faith take center stage and fill nearly the entire space, yet it aligns with Chinese and Japanese painting, where the minus­cule scale of human fig­ures con­veys the immen­sity of the Nature of which they are a part and which they do not dom­i­nate.

Les Élus du soir (The Chosen of the Evening), 1987. Triptych. Oil on canvas, 150 x 350 cm.
The tel­luric move­ment con­tinues, but is now sub­dued. Figures rise amidst noc­turnal hues, and the atmo­sphere remains dra­matic. Les Élus du soir is ded­i­cated to the French cit­i­zens and for­eign nationals who cam­paigned for Algerian inde­pen­dence, for jus­tice and peace. The dead are depicted in white; the more numerous living are in blue. In inter­views, Benanteur often spoke of his ideal of equality and fra­ter­nity among all human beings. These Chosen of the Evening rep­re­sent the "laborers of the eleventh hour" from the Gospel parable (Matthew 20:1–16): hired at the end of the day, they work for only a single "hour", yet when evening falls, the master of the vine­yard pays them a full day’s wage. Thus, the humanist and uni­ver­salist Abdallah Benanteur asserts that the French cit­i­zens and inter­na­tional activists who stood in sol­i­darity are equal to the Algerian mar­tyrs and deserve to be honored in the same way.

Religious and Secular Conceptions of The Chosen
The Chosen con­sti­tute a reli­gious cat­e­gory within Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They also rep­re­sent a sec­ular cat­e­gory, a cel­e­bra­tion of a glo­rious chapter in human his­tory and of a future uni­versal hap­pi­ness and broth­er­hood across the vast plan­e­tary garden. This vision reflects the utopian and paci­fist spirit with which Benanteur iden­ti­fied, pic­to­ri­ally ren­dered as The Ascension of the Chosen into Paradise. The com­mis­sion for this mon­u­ment seemed to come from the mul­ti­tude of the dead, among whom he felt he lived, and from the Algerian people, who believe in a Paradise that is simul­ta­ne­ously reli­gious and sec­ular: the Paradise of the East and that of Islam, its heir.

Benanteur’s work belongs to a pres­ti­gious lin­eage. Like Monet, the young Picasso, or Khalil Gibran, he deeply admired the Symbolist painter Puvis de Chavannes. The weight­less­ness in which his fig­ures float - from his Bois d’Amour (1981) to Les Élus (The Chosen) - echoes William Blake, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Khalil Gibran, the author of The Prophet, whose hero, Al-Mustafa, means pre­cisely The Chosen One. Benanteur shared with Gibran the intu­ition that the dead live among the living; he spoke of sensing the pres­ence of his mother and brother beside him, and regarded artists, poets, and Sufis as brothers, vision­aries charged with making the invis­ible vis­ible.