TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/032690/0326400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.5 KB | 167 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 54

Letting Nature Reign Resplendent


A superb Monet show proves how much more than "only an eye" the
painter was

By ROBERT HUGHES


    Claude Monet, the quintessential impressionist painter, was
born in 1840. That year Queen Victoria married Prince Albert,
and in France both Ingres and Delacroix were at work. In 1926,
when Monet died, Lenin was two years dead, and Picasso was
already a middle-aged man of 45. Having lived such a span,
Monet in old age looked like a relic of the 19th century --
hardly a modern artist at all. What could his painting offer
a postcubist culture?

    A great deal, as it turned out. Ripeness was all. Monet
produced his best work after he turned 50, and it came to form
the essential link between symbolism, with its cult of the
nuance and its obsession with "getting behind" ordinary
reality, and abstract painting. You can hardly imagine Jackson
Pollock's all-over drip paintings, for instance, without the
example of late Monet. But the real value of Monet's work lies
not in what it predicted or how it was used by later artists
but in itself: its intensity and breadth of vision, its lyrical
beauty and the disciplined subtlety of its address to the
world. One can hardly get enough of late Monet, which is why
the exhibition currently on view at the Boston Museum of Fine
Arts, "Monet in the '90s: The Series Paintings," is so
rewarding. It samples all his series in depth -- notably
grainstacks, Rouen Cathedral, Japanese bridges, poplars --
except the Water Lilies, which come after 1900 anyhow.

    With this show and its catalog essay, curator Paul Hayes
Tucker, the leading U.S. expert on Monet, has set out to amend
a number of received ideas about the artist. Chief among them
is Cezanne's opinion: "Only an eye, but my God! What an eye!"
In this view, Monet becomes a painter of mere sensation,
exquisitely attuned to every sense impression but lacking
social point and intellectual fiber.

    Such a reaction against impressionism was strong among
younger painters of the 1880s. They were led by Georges Seurat,
whose Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,
1884-86, is a manifesto of anti-impressionist aims: a hieratic,
pseudo-scientific, heavily theorized paean to timelessness,
edged with mordant social irony about the mechanization of
bourgeois life. For some it made sensuous pleasure look like an
insufficient message for art. Impressionism was gaining no new
adherents and losing some of its original ones: Sisley had run
out of steam by the '80s, and Pissarro had gone over to the
younger side, doing pointillist dots.

    Monet's reply to anti-impressionist prejudice, Tucker
argues, was to broaden the base and subject matter of his work.
He wanted to show that the greatest landscape painting in
France could still be produced by impressionist means. "Nature
should not be submitted to harsh, premeditated analysis, as in
the Grande Jatte," he writes of Monet's attitude. "It should
be allowed to reign in the painting as it does in the world --
resplendent in all its nuances, variants, subtleties and
surprises."

    So from the late '80s on, Monet labored to take
impressionism out of Paris and the immediate environs of the
Seine. He painted all over the country. Tucker suggests that
much of his work, seemingly without social content and often
without people in it at all, is actually a long lyrical
evocation of a timeless France, a rebuke to the political
imbroglios and financial scandals that obsessed Paris. Monet
wanted to fix impressionism (especially his impressionism) in
people's minds as a healing, patriotic style.

    At the same time, he took to painting in series: the same
image over and over again. Why so many versions? The reasons
are complex, as the motives of any great artist are, but one
was his desire to prove the ordering power of impressionism,
its ability to set forth infinite discriminations of
experience. How many times can you see the same thing and find
it different? Monet's serial paintings look for an answer.

    The first great achievement among his series was the
Grainstacks of 1890-91. Monet painted at least 25 of them, and
they seem almost polemical because their subject looks so odd
and raw. What are these things? Anonymous structures of oats
and wheat, circular, with conical tops. They look like
primitive lumps, soft rocks. Why paint a lump? Partly, no
doubt, because the grainstacks implied abundance, the nurturing
power of deep France. But mainly because, in their very
simplicity, they were a superb matrix for the changing effects
of light and color. Sometimes Monet's grainstacks glow like
furnaces, their shadow lines breaking into excited flurries of
crimson and blue; sometimes they are dirty brown, between the
inert pewter sky of winter and the white crust of snow.

    The grainstacks also correct the often heard notion that
Monet did them from start to finish in the open air. In fact,
nearly all his work from the '90s was elaborately "harmonized,"
finished in the studio. One has only to look to see why: the
surface is so built up with grainy scumbling over creamy licks
of the brush, with thin glazes on top, that the layers needed
plenty of time to dry. He would line up the growing series of
canvases in the studio and stress the differences between one
image and the next by incessant retouching.

    Slow reflection governed all his work. The pressure of the
motif was sublimated in the demands of the painting. Monet also
made quite conscious gestures to art history. His series of
poplars near his house in Giverny -- their slender, stately
trunks along the banks of the Epte reflected in the water and
forming an almost abstract palisade, the S shape of their
bushed-out tops strung along like a festive garland -- pays
homage to French rococo, Fragonard in particular. Like his
lyric images of a stretch of the Seine from 1896 to 1897, the
paintings show how unrelentingly conscious Monet was of the
abstract basis of design, even when painting the mistiest veils
of color.

    The climax of this show is, inevitably, the Cathedrals,
Monet's repeated views of the west front of the Gothic
Cathedral of Rouen: art about art. Between 1892 and 1895 he
produced 30 of them; ten are lined up in Boston. Some critics
have shied away from them as pictorial near absurdities, Gothic
rendered as melting ice cream, architecture without a line
anywhere. It would be hard to argue this for long in front of
the paintings themselves. How could such an endlessly
complicated form as this Gothic facade, with all its peaks,
hollows, spires, bosses and moldings, be so fully rendered in
terms of color and the space that color creates? Monet's
control is astounding. With the sun behind it, the facade is
a looming cliff of blue shadows; as the light moves onto its
face, it becomes a stupendously intricate cellular structure,
a vertical reef of stone, its grain and warmth evoked by the
texture of the paint, flushed by radiance, in which every last
touch of pigment seems operative.

    Monet's power to evoke substance through paint was as strong
as Rembrandt's. The next 100 years would be full of art about
art, but one may doubt whether any of it quite equaled the
level of intelligence and passion -- both seizing the motif and
respectfully deferring to it -- that is figured forth in
Monet's Cathedrals.