MADRID?A major exhibition of works by Claude Monet opens in Madrid on Tuesday with organizers hoping it will give a "new vision" of the French artist by comparing him to his successors, the great names of abstract art.

The 107 paintings, most of them works by Monet, will be on display at the Museum Thyssen-Bornemisza (www.museothyssen.org) and the Caja Madrid Foundation until May 30 under the title "Monet and Abstraction".

The exhibition will then be on show from June 16 to September 26 at the Marmottan Museum in Paris, which has lent many of the paintings to be exhibited in Madrid.

"We wanted to present a new way of seeing Monet," said the exhibition's curator, Paloma Alarco, who brought pictures from several museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum.

"It's also a way to help the public understand abstract art, often less accessible, through Monet, who everybody loves," she said.

The exhibit displays works by Monet, who died in 1926, alongside paintings by post-World War II artists such as Mark Rothko, Andre Masson, Sam Francis and Jackson Pollock.

It focuses on works from Monet's later years, when he was installed in his house at Giverny in Normandy where he ended his career, and which seem to herald abstract painting, Alarco said.

The paintings focus on the inspiration Monet found in his garden, including his famous studies of flowers especially water lilies.

"Once settled in Giverny, Monet, who was the leader of Impressionism, seemed out of fashion.

"He remained a few years in purgatory, before artists realized that they had a lot to learn from him," said the artistic director of the Thyssen museum, Guillermo Solana.