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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Claude Lemand: MONET, 4 Water Lilies in Tondo.

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was able to see and hear about the tondo, both rare and fash­ion­able form after 1850, in English painting, par­tic­u­larly among Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Frederick Leighton and Edward Burne-Jones. In Paris, he could observe in the 1900 Universal Exhibition The Turkish Bath, painted by Ingres between 1852 and 1862, as well as admire the mul­ti­tude of tondos on paper that dec­o­rated the ceiling of the Japanese Pavilion, which had caused a sen­sa­tion and which the King of Belgium sub­se­quently had erected in Brussels. In 1905, the appear­ance of The Turkish Bath at the Ingres ret­ro­spec­tive at the Salon d’Automne was a true event. Other painters who fre­quented Monet exper­i­mented with painting on this format: Maurice Denis painted April, or Spring, in 1894; Frederick William MacMonnies, an American sculptor and painter who lived near Monet, painted The Madonna of Giverny in 1901, fea­turing the chil­dren of Claude Monet’s gar­dener on the canvas… and later, the Swiss painter Augusto Giacometti, based in Paris, cre­ated fig­u­ra­tive and abstract tondos in 1905. The master of Giverny even­tu­ally adopted this form and painted four Water Lilies in tondo form in 1907-1908. These works had a pro­found impact on 20th-cen­tury art. (See the cat­a­logue for my exhi­bi­tion Tour du Monde en Tondo - Around the World in Tondo, City of Issoudun Museum, 2017).

His greatest heirs would be the artists who came to Paris after 1945 and who would create their own syn­thesis between the artistic cul­ture of their coun­tries of origin and the dis­cov­eries of the Master of Giverny. Jean-Paul Riopelle was the first to dis­cover Monet’s later work (four tondos in 1964-1966) and would intro­duce the young artists who would become part of his group: Zao Wou-Ki (four tondos in 1966-1974), Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, and many others. But it seems to me an abuse to claim that the founder of Impressionism was the father of one of the abstrac­tions that appeared at the begin­ning or the middle of the 20th cen­tury, as if his 250 Water Lilies had fol­lowed a "nat­ural" evo­lu­tion towards abstrac­tion, per­ceived and pro­claimed as the ulti­mate stage, the ideal and abso­lute form of all artistic cre­ation.

Indeed, Claude Monet was a lover of nature, and his eye had a con­stant need to paint from life. He trav­eled throughout France and Europe as long as he was able, and he cre­ated the Garden of Giverny as his ulti­mate sub­ject, according to his desire and his plea­sure in painting. Whether square, rect­an­gular, or round, Monet’s Water Lilies are a true "water garden," diurnal and never noc­turnal, the fruit of his assid­uous and enchanted obser­va­tion of the real and true Garden of Giverny. The artist needed day­light, with all its vari­a­tions and all the reflec­tions it allows between the sky and the water. His tondos are images of par­adise, of Nature alone, without any human or animal pres­ence.
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Claude Lemand: BENANTEUR, The Tondo cycles.

“I love the Water Lilies infinitely, the exquisite dream­like atmo­sphere that envelops them, as well as the almost liquid tondi; I love this oval of the Orangerie, like a Garden of Earthly Delights, and one of my desires is to sur­round the viewer in this way. This idea of cir­cu­larity is fas­ci­nating. Some poems stay with you for life, and so do some works of art.” (Benanteur, in Djilali Kadid, Benanteur. Empreintes d’un chem­ine­ment, Paris, 1998)

Arriving in Paris in 1953, the young Abdallah Benanteur (Algeria 1931-France 2017) quickly became familiar with the Water Lilies at the Musée de l’Orangerie, fol­lowing André Masson’s mas­terful and enthu­si­astic lec­ture on the defense and illus­tra­tion of “Monet the founder.” But it wasn’t until 1980 that he dis­cov­ered Monet’s tondos, two of which were part of the major exhi­bi­tion Homage to Claude Monet at the Grand Palais. Now familiar with and impressed by early Italian painting, which he had studied every summer from 1981 to 1985 and which had 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 at the Musée de l’Orangerie and Monet’s garden at Giverny that fas­ci­nated him. He painted four tondos in 1986, as a tribute to Claude Monet, in the style of his new "Gardens of Paradise" land­scapes, rather than in the style and reli­gious themes of the dozens of tondos by the great mas­ters of Florence and the Italian Renaissance. From 1986 to 1997, Benanteur took up the chal­lenge of the round form and cre­ated sev­eral cycles of tondo paint­ings, a total of 28 works of varying sizes (from 60 cm to 170 cm in diam­eter).

In 1984, Benanteur gave his Garden of Saadi the form of a quadrip­tych, typ­ical of the Garden of Paradise (from the Persian Firdaws) and the Gardens of Eden as described in The Quran. He pays homage to Saadi, a 13th-cen­tury Persian mystic poet and author of the Bustan (Garden), to whom he had ded­i­cated sev­eral artist’s books. It is also a tribute to Monet’s garden, in its colors, reflec­tions, and styl­ized forms of trees and water lilies. It fol­lows the admirable For Monet. Giverny of 1983, with its cen­tral white light radi­ating the deep blue across the entire canvas… Both paint­ings are in the col­lec­tions of the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

Is the Persian Garden, painted by Benanteur in 1986, a noc­turnal cel­e­bra­tion in one of the Gardens of Eden, with Chosen Ones dressed in white, arranged on either side of the master placed at the center of the canvas, all facing the deep blue starry sky? It is com­posed of three inter­locking zones, ori­ented from bottom to top: the earth with its plants and rocks, the two rows of chosen ones, and a starry blue sky. The overall move­ment of the work is upward, as in all his "opti­mistic" paint­ings of the 1980s.

Whether they adopt a square, rect­an­gular, or round format, simple or polyp­tych, Benanteur’s gar­dens are never the result of observing a par­tic­ular real garden, but rather the reflec­tion of his ideal garden, the fruit of his per­sonal imag­i­na­tion, nour­ished by the imagery of the poets and Sufis he embraced. As in Monet’s four tondos, the land­scape, whether aquatic or min­eral, is without limits or bar­riers at its edges, unlike most nar­ra­tive tondos, which often take the form of an enclosed garden, such as the admirable 1415 Paradise of the Earth by the Limbourg Brothers, which Benanteur so admired.

Unlike Claude Monet, Benanteur did not need day­light; his tondos are not idyllic images of Nature alone, devoid of any human pres­ence. He never painted en plein air, and his imag­i­nary land­scapes are a Nature pop­u­lated by humans. He was accus­tomed to remaining silent for long periods before the land­scape, his mind and senses immersed in the vast ocean as seen from the beaches and cliffs of Brittany, from the island of Ouessant, which he cher­ished, alone on that rock that inspired him.

Benanteur’s Persian Garden is not a tan­gible, sen­sory, and plea­sur­able trans­mu­ta­tion of Monet’s water­scape, pop­u­lated by water lilies floating between sky and water, which nat­ural light pen­e­trates and illu­mi­nates; nor is it the Earthly Paradise of the Bible, nor the Gardens of Eden of the Quran, or those of the Persians or Andalusians. Benanteur’s garden is a trans­fig­u­ra­tion, both sen­sory and sym­bolic, of the ideal and imag­i­nary Planetary Garden, illu­mi­nated by a tran­scen­dental light, a sub­li­mated and enchanting Nature, pop­u­lated by small groups of Chosen Ones living in har­mony on our Earth, the dead dressed in white and the living in blue.