Comparisons to Monet Bothered This Artist. Now They’re Side by Side.

“Don’t talk to me about Monet!”

That command, from the American artist Joan Mitchell, indicated how much she hated being compared to Claude Monet, as the art historian Suzanne Pagé discovered when she visited her in Vétheuil, near Paris, in 1982.

“She was a very strong personality” and “could be very direct,” said Ms. Pagé, who, that same year, staged a major solo show of Ms. Mitchell’s work at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. She described the painter’s residence as “a very pretty house” with a terrace and garden, where she hosted and mentored many young artists, with music always playing in the background.

“It was as if she was painting the musical notes,” Ms. Pagé said.

Thirty years after her death, Ms. Mitchell is now being officially paired with Monet. Two exhibitions — collectively titled “Monet-Mitchell” — at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, illustrate the parallels. Ms. Pagé, the foundation’s artistic director, has curated one of these shows, “Claude Monet-Joan Mitchell, Dialogue,” which puts the artists’ works together.

The Fondation Vuitton, which has a dozen works by Ms. Mitchell in its collection, has co-produced the “Dialogue” exhibition with the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, which possesses the world’s largest collection of Monet works — including several monumental paintings of water lilies — donated by his son Michel.

However much Ms. Mitchell disliked the Monet comparison, it is not unreasonable. Her terrace overlooked a house that Monet occupied from 1878 to 1881, as well as a landscape that he painted. Vétheuil is near Giverny, Monet’s final abode, where he produced large-scale works, including the celebrated water lilies series, which were inspirational to Abstract Expressionists, including Ms. Mitchell. And some of her own late works unmistakably hark back to the paintings that Monet produced in his twilight years at Giverny.

“It’s thrilling for Joan Mitchell to be paired in dialogue with probably the most popular artist in the Western world,” said Katy Siegel, who curated the second “Monet-Mitchell” show, “Joan Mitchell, Retrospective,” with Sarah Roberts. The retrospective has opened at the Fondation Vuitton after being presented at the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Why was Ms. Mitchell so irritated by the parallels drawn to Monet?

“Artists can be very prickly when it’s implied that they’re influenced by someone,”…