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In Monet: A Bridge to Modernity, the National Gallery of Canada brings together thirteen seminal works from collections around the world to explore Claude Monet’s innovative experiments with the motif of the bridge between 1872 and 1875, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War.
At the heart of this dossier show is Monet’s historic painting Le pont de bois (1872), currently on long-term loan to the Gallery. In this and other works painted during a three-year period in Argenteuil, a small town on the outskirts of Paris, Monet emerges as a methodical artist who used the local bridges to work out his aesthetic concerns. What resulted were compositions of startling modernity that cemented Monet’s status as one of the leaders of the avant-garde.