Still Waters
Visitors to the "Monet in
the 20 th Century" exhibition in Boston are in for a surprise,
especially if they arrive in one of the museum's pastel shuttle buses decked
with water lilies as if it had been dredged from a swamp. There are
Monet-inspired munchies to sample and a gift shop crammed with the inevitable
Giverny-ana--everything for the fantasy gardener except bulbs. All this
soft-focus packaging conveys the popular image of Claude Monet (1840-1926) as
the painter of weekend pleasures, puttering around in his aqueous garden and
filling his canvases with sunlit lilies reflected in the pink and blue water--a
rococo Fragonard or Boucher marooned in the early 20 th century.
Then you enter the
exhibition itself, and a different Monet takes over. This one is a bold
experimentalist way ahead of his time. A huge blowup of a of the man in his
garden towers over the entryway. Imperious Monet, his legs buried in the
wisteria covering his Japanese bridge, looks like the proprietor of some
tropical plantation. His eyes shaded by a Panama hat and a full white Walt
Whitman beard pointing to the water, he seems to be saying, "This is my
terrain. Enter at your own risk."
The timing of this lavish
show, which includes some paintings never before exhibited, could hardly be
better. Just as the art world is revving up for the Jackson Pollock
extravaganza at the Museum of Modern Art in November, it's good to be reminded
just how far along the line of abstraction and monumentality Monet had traveled
by the end of his long life. As these late canvases wash over you with their
great swaths of paint, you can immediately see why Clement Greenberg, writing
during the late 1950s, spoke of the "rehabilitation" of Monet and why "the most
advanced of advanced painters" (Greenberg names no names) "were
enthusiastically rediscovering him."
Actually, as Michael Leja
points out in an interesting catalog essay, there's little evidence that
Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock and Mark Rothko had much interest in
Monet. Nor did Monet need Pollock's validation--or Greenberg's, for that
matter. But it's true that by the 1950s, when MoMA purchased one of Monet's
boldest big panel paintings (which later burned in storage), Monet was no
longer viewed as merely a safe painter of pretty suburban sights.
In a sense, Monet had been
torn between pleasing the crowds and taking risks all his life. Born in 1840
into a family of modest means, he lacked the financial security net of
aristocrats such as Degas, Manet, and Berthe Morisot. He always had one eye on
the market, finding a motif--gardens, beaches, cathedrals--that would sell and
making multiple versions of it. He pretended that he did all his work outside
and on the spot, when actually he sketched rapidly in paint, then carefully
finished his canvases in his studio. He even used photographs on occasion,
furtively, and was furious when he was caught in the act in London while adding
details to his series of pictures of the Houses of Parliament. Monet, ever
respectful of his audience (and potential buyers), never indulged in the harsh
jokes of his urbane contemporaries. He was happy to disguise his first wife as
a geisha (in a painting hanging elsewhere at the Museum of Fine Arts), but
there are no prostitutes dressed up as odalisques in his work, no probings into
the murky secret lives of Parisians.
And yet Monet was, in his
way, as unyielding and uncompromising as any of his contemporaries. Never much
interested in the human figure, he kept the Impressionist faith of showing the
effects of changing light on landscape. One of his early pictures, his
Impression, Sunrise of 1874, gave the movement its name. (A couple of
London views in the Boston show, with orange sun setting in the fog over the
Thames, closely resemble that painting.)
Monet turned 60 in 1900, and
he was finally his own man. Building on the huge success of his series
paintings of the 1890s--the cathedrals and haystacks (now awkwardly renamed
"grainstacks") and rows of poplars--Monet could afford to paint for himself
alone. He still kept track of the market, though. In the opening rooms,
especially, there are highly finished paintings of London bridges (painted from
Monet's luxury suite at the Savoy) and--in a glorious sunlit corridor--views of
Venice. An early cluster of smallish water lily paintings, two on circular
canvases, that Monet exhibited in Paris in 1909 are almost saccharine in their
placid beauty, visual equivalents of some of Debussy's prettier preludes.
But shadows were beginning
to intrude. In 1911, Monet's second wife, Alice, died of leukemia; a year
later, he learned that he had cataracts; in 1914, Monet's son Jean died. Under
the weight of these shocks, Monet took some time off from painting, then
announced a bold new shift in his work, toward huge decorative panels. During
the last decade of his life, working incessantly in the new white-walled and
high-ceilinged at Giverny (resembling a SoHo loft) built specifically to house
these enormous canvases, he turned out paintings by turns ominous, terrifying,
sublime. In calligraphic studies such as (1916-19), we feel like we've plunged
a few hundred feet below the surface, into a midnight realm of Medusas and
colorful anemones. A strange human skull seems entangled in the reflected
weeping willow branches scrawled at the lower left. Such paintings, which Monet
never intended for exhibition, prefigure to a remarkable degree the work of the
most gestural Abstract Expressionists, such as De Kooning.
The title of the Boston show
has a double meaning: the work Monet created during the 20 th
century, and his work in relation to the various Modernist movements of the
20 th century. While inviting comparison with New York art during the
1950s, the show also insists on Monet's involvement with contemporary French
history. Several years ago, the MFA devoted an exhibition to Monet's series
paintings of the 1890s. Paul Tucker, guest curator of that show and the current
one, made a convincing argument that Monet was celebrating the great motifs of
the French nation: her land, her agriculture, her religion, and her
architecture.
Then came the Dreyfus
Affair, and Monet's faith in French nationalism was shattered. A passionate
Dreyfusard, Monet supported his friend Zola in his defense of the French army
officer falsely accused of passing secrets to the Germans. Henceforth, as
Tucker sees it, Monet searched for a more private and less jingoistic tie to
the French landscape and discovered it in the multiple layers of his own water
garden. Like Melville's Ishmael, who noted that "meditation and water are
wedded for ever," Monet found that all his moods found echoes in the reflected
weeping willows and tangled lilies. During World War I, as he conveyed
vegetables to the troops quartered nearby and refused to leave Giverny as the
German line advanced, Monet's panels took on some of the dark mood of war. At
war's end, he arranged to contribute some of his panels as a sort of victory
monument to the nation--the gift that eventually became the glorious circular
water lily chapel at the Orangerie in Paris.
"How terrible it is to reach
the end of one's life," Monet had written in 1899, after the death of the
landscapist Alfred Sisley. Intimations of his own mortality turned out to be
premature. As his fellow Impressionists died one after the other--Pissarro in
1903, Cézanne in 1906, Degas in 1917, Renoir in 1919--Monet ended up, once
again, like Ishmael, at the end of Moby-Dick : "Now I am the last
survivor of the group," he sighed. He was the last Impressionist, but he also
traveled the farthest, pushing the limits of landscape until he broke right
through them.
