About this project

Claude Monet: The Revised Catalogue Raisonné; The Pastels marks the first installment of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute’s ongoing initiative to update and expand the scholarship on this celebrated Impressionist artist. Drawing upon the vast archival holdings of the former Wildenstein Institute, as well as new information made available from archival repositories around the world, the WPI’s Monet committee continues to research and compile information on Monet’s artistic production while honoring the grand accomplishment of Daniel Wildenstein’s original magnum opus.

One of the most prescient art connoisseurs of his time, Daniel Wildenstein dedicated his career to documenting the entirety of Claude Monet’s artistic production. Beginning with his first visits to the Giverny home of the artist’s son Michel in the 1950s and until his death in 2001, Wildenstein and a team of scholars at the Wildenstein Institute inventoried and analyzed over 2000 paintings, drawings, and pastels attributed to the artist, amassing one of the greatest troves of information on Monet’s artistic output. This unprecedented art-historical undertaking resulted in Monet, vie et œuvre, a five-volume compendium released in installments between 1974 and 1991 that would become the benchmark against which all future cataloguing efforts were measured. Over the last 30 years, Wildenstein’s Monet catalogue raisonné has come to be relied upon by the art world as the ultimate authority on the artist’s production. But, as is the case with all printed compendia, this publication becomes increasingly obsolete with each passing decade. Hundreds of Monet-related exhibitions have since occurred around the world, providing links to unknown collectors with unrecorded works. Scholars have also discovered new information about select artworks and the various art world participants who have handled these pictures. Because it was impossible for Wildenstein to have examined all of the works published in the original catalogue raisonné firsthand, he often relied on black-and-white archival photographs that posed limitations to his assessments. Wildenstein himself attempted to remedy this issue in 1996, reissuing the paintings section of his Monet catalogue raisonné with some newly acquired color images and large-scale reproductions. However, not all elements of the research were updated or reassessed, and none of the pastels or drawings that Wildenstein originally published in his first edition were reconsidered or republished. Given the art world’s dependence on this vital resource, the WPI’s Monet committee is now actively working to update the catalogue raisonné in its entirety, remedying some of the limitations of the printed version with the capabilities of its online platform.

Since its founding in 2017, the WPI’s Monet committee has reviewed Daniel Wildenstein’s original selection of pastels and made amendments to the roster of included works. Pastels that were verified by the committee are illustrated in color and presented with fully updated cataloguing. Works that had been traditionally attributed to the artist by Daniel Wildenstein and his successors at the Wildenstein Institute, but not yet verified by the WPI's Monet committee, are illustrated herein in black and white. When applicable, some of these works have been assigned a new title and date by the committee during their provisional review. However, the provenance, exhibition, and literature references of these works will only be updated once the works are carefully inspected and verified by our committee. The committee has also verified and included certain works that were unknown to Daniel Wildenstein at the time of his publication, or that he had not had the opportunity to examine with the benefit of our current resources. The Monet committee will continue to consider works on an ongoing basis for possible inclusion in our digital database.

A critical component of the Monet catalogue raisonné is the digital publication, Claude Monet, les pastels. Un recueil d'essais et de commentaires pour accompagner le catalogue raisonné, that accompanies our database. Written by internationally recognized Monet scholar and curator Dr. Géraldine Lefebvre, the thematic and artwork-specific essays provide a contextual analysis of Monet’s renderings in this medium. This innovative digital publication, created with the Getty Research Institute’s open-source software Quire, enables users to read the text in any language from the original French. Additionally, all artworks included in the digital catalogue raisonné database as of December 2023 are documented sequentially in the index of this publication, and the complete publication can be downloaded and printed for user convenience and preservation.

With this dual presentation of database and digital publication, we aim to provide readers with a user-friendly and reliable resource that will be a model for future catalogue raisonné initiatives.

Elizabeth Gorayeb
Executive Director
The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc., New York