Monets Küste. Die Entdeckung von Étretat

Excitingly beautiful and threatening at the same time: the characteristic cliff landscape of Étretat was of particular interest. Painters and writers traveled to the remote location and made it famous beyond the borders of France with their works. Gustave Courbet painted his famous wave pictures here, Guy de Maupassant elevated Étretat to a literary place of longing and the composer Jacques Offenbach had a spacious villa built in the small coastal town.

With the increasing development of tourism around 1850, Étretat became a popular seaside resort and a meeting place for artists, intellectuals and the Parisian bourgeoisie. It was in Étretat, under the constantly changing light and weather conditions, that Monet first began to paint series of motifs, a working method that would later become his trademark. Étretat thus played an important role in the emergence of a new style of painting, which later went down in the history of art as Impressionism.

In spring 2026, outstanding paintings, drawings, photographs and historical documents from French, German and other international museums and private collections will be on display in Frankfurt. The works of modern and contemporary artists - from Félix Vallotton and Henri Matisse to Georges Braques and Elger Esser - also illustrate the enduring fascination that this place still exerts today. Étretat has been a vacation resort and international tourist destination for more than 150 years. However, the flow of people is threatening the cliffs, as are erosion and climate change. Examining the myth of Étretat therefore also makes it possible to trace the ambivalent effects of the popularization of a place and the role that art has played in this.

Curators
Alexander Eiling (Head of the Modern Art Collection, Städel Museum)
Stéphane Paccoud (Conservateur en chef, Peintures et sculptures du XIXe siècle, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon)
Isolde Pludermacher (Conservatrice générale peinture, Musée d'Orsay, Paris)

Project management
Eva-Maria Höllerer (Curator, Städel Museum)
Nelly Janotka (Research Volunteer, Städel Museum)