All exhibitions of the paintings of Claude Monet are beautiful, but some are more beautiful than others, and the one opening Saturday at the Art Institute of Chicago is among the most beautiful of all.
This is because, in large measure, the show rescues Monet from his own popularity, the popularity of instant recognizability that keeps him and other Impressionists beloved but not always understood.
The last Monet exhibition in Chicago, in 1975, presented the entire range of his work, and ”A Day in the Country,” the group exhibition of a decade later, showed all the Impressionists to be more intellectual-or, at least, more thoughtful-than casual viewers might have assumed.
”Monet in the `90s: The Series Paintings,” which opens this week in the Institute`s south wing, clearly builds on those achievements by homing in on, through more than 90 paintings, the important serial aspect of the artist`s work and by indicating the complex motives behind it. The Monet who emerges is hardly a graybeard without guile or calculation.
Paul Cezanne once said, ”Monet is only an eye-but what an eye!” And for much of his long career, the simplicity of this assessment accorded well with the image Monet liked to project. After all, it was he who declared, ”I paint just as a bird sings.”
That was the attitude of an artist who, at age 17, fell under the influence of Eugene Boudin, a strong advocate of painting from nature. Boudin believed work created outdoors had a force not found in studio painting. Monet agreed, and the practice led him partly to invent-and most consistently to implement-techniques that duplicated our optical perception of scenes in bright sunlight.
Such techniques-broken strokes, suppressed outlines, shadows in colors complementary to the colors of objects-characterized the movement known as Impressionism, which got its name in 1874 from the title of a Monet painting. In the `70s and `80s, then, he was a recognized figure and quite popular, earning as much money for his work as a Parisian doctor or lawyer.
Still, Monet wrote a friend, ”I would like so much to prove that I can do something else.” And in 1889, almost at the age of 50, he decided to prove it by embarking on the works of the present exhibition, his paintings in series.
The show includes examples from 16 series, large and small, completed during a little more than a decade. They are all of elements in the rural and urban landscape, mostly French. And from the moment Monet created the first of them, his series caused misconceptions.
In general, each series shows the artist repeatedly confronting a small number of motifs from an equally small number of viewpoints. The differences, which often are minute, come from changes in weather, season and light. But only in one of the later series, the exquisitely delicate ”Mornings on the Seine,” did Monet intend for his audience to read the changes as a progression. In other words, he did not conceive his series as visual calendars or time clocks.
As guest curator Paul H. Tucker outlines in the exemplary book that serves as exhibition catalog, Monet could not have been more shrewd in his choice of subjects. He subscribed to two clipping services and always was concerned about how his works were received by critics. Then, too, he was uncannily well attuned to the moods and needs of his countrymen, sensing precisely the kinds of images that would gain him approbation as the strongest of ”national” painters.
Some of his concern came from the position of Impressionism on the Parisian art scene of the 1880s, for all of the members of the group had gone their own ways and some had abandoned Impressionism altogether. Monet stood firm but recognized a need to expand the style, reasserting its strength in the face of challenges by younger artists.
Georges Seurat`s ”Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”
gave the greatest problem, as it proposed a new, ”scientific” kind of painting that went beyond Impressionism in its approach to representation and, hence, appeared more strikingly modern.
Monet did not believe nature should be submitted to the premeditation of a Seurat; for him, the true artist became attuned to nature and did not impose himself. But the popular image of Monet working out of doors in wind and rain no longer was sufficient in the face of Seurat`s cool pictorial architecture and analysis. So by beginning the series paintings, Monet wanted to show his Impressionism had a greater range of subjects than it had before and also a greater rigor.
Tucker writes of Monet`s attempt to ”decentralize” Impressionism by taking it out of the city and underlining its ties to rural France. This was a skillful move that seemed to reaffirm pieties about the French countryside being the home of goodness and natural harmony. At the time Monet created his series of ”Grainstack” paintings, he was well aware that such pieties played a large role in art of the past.
He also knew painting in series would de-emphasize the image of spontaneity that had begun to work against him. He continued to paint out of doors, but as he already adjusted and finished the canvases back in his studio, it would do well to let detractors see more of the order they had attributed to Seurat. This they would see as Monet confronted the same motif again and again, painstakingly recording the many changes.
If surprising to modern-day viewers, the degree of calculation in his subjects and approach allowed Monet only a better opportunity to be himself. For, without question, he loved rural France and had extraordinarily deep feelings about his country, seldom being comfortable anywhere else.
The love he felt when out in the landscape naturally led him to want to record a full range of natural phenomena, from the roughly violent to the evanescent. But this, he understood, would take patience.
He wrote, ”I well realize that in order to really paint the sea, one must view it every day, at every time of day and in the same place in order to get to know its life at that particular place; so I am redoing the same motifs as many as four or even six times.”
It is wrong to assume, however, that the paintings are merely likenesses. Monet`s repeated viewings were necessary to fix in him impressions that rarely proved literal. The paintings were his impressions, subtly combining observation, artifice and feeling. Monet was most faithful to nature when most faithful to himself.
Now, perhaps for the first time, we understand how much of Monet`s faithfulness depended on his responses to the marketplace. Painter Camille Pissarro said as much, meaning it with utmost negativity. But Tucker observes Monet dispassionately, watching him play one dealer against another or drum up business without drawing adverse conclusions. The paintings are no less great because the artist knew what his public wanted and was uncommonly good at marketing it.
In the 1890s the French wanted anything capable of showing the strength that militarily and economically they already had lost. This meant a new conservatism entered the emotional life of even sophisticated Parisians and, inevitably, sought comfort in glories of the past.
Each of Monet`s series engaged public emotion in ways that are lost on contemporary American viewers. For we only read that one of his subjects, poplars, were trees fraught with the symbolism of the French revolution, whereas at the time of the centenary in Paris, the awareness was very much alive.
Moreover, the decorative qualities of Monet`s ”Poplars” spoke of the longtime French enthusiasm for Japanese art as surely as it reawakened memories of something more indigenous, the 18th Century rococo style. Such affinities and affections were part of the lives of Monet`s audience, an audience he was pleased to satisfy.
Viewers did not have to be especially sophisticated to respond to the power of his ”Rouen Cathedral” series, for the evocation there was as much the generalized spirit of Gothic architecture as more specific treatments in the paintings and prints of others. Monet`s richly encrusted canvases were less ”about” religion than the kind of closely knit community that was thought to characterize the Middle Ages, but many French viewers felt they again came in contact with both through his brilliant effects of light.
This is not to say a receptive audience allowed the artist to achieve any of his paintings easily. His letters overflow with complaints about working conditions and, frequently, he gave up in utter despair only to regroup and begin again. On one occasion, Monet hired workmen to pluck the leaves off a tree because spring came more quickly than he painted and he needed the tree bare. Another time, he formed a financial partnership with lumbermen to preserve poplars until he had finished his series of them.
Such struggles do not come into Monet`s paintings; one sees only assuredness and tremendous variety from series to series. And this, too, was pleasing to viewers of his day, as the paintings showed no sign of the stresses that tormented France, not even during the period of the Dreyfus Affair (in which a French Jewish army oficer was wrongfully convicted of treason), an especially difficult time.
Though he rarely involved himself in politics, Monet was not one to shrink from a fight. He took a year off from painting, for example, to get Edouard Manet`s ”Olympia” accepted by the State and did not desist until everyone agreed to his terms. Still, Tucker feels the prolonged strife of the Dreyfus Affair was for Monet simply too much, turning him away from French themes in his art.
At this time he went to London and painted an extensive series that was in all ways stronger than his only other foreign canvases from the `90s, of the Norwegian Mt. Kolsaas. The British pictures are, of course, urban and thus return to one of Monet`s earlier themes but with the denser, richer atmosphere of his later pictures.
The colors often suggest a melancholy that goes beyond that of his darkish ”Creuse Valley” paintings, which Monet termed a ”lugubrious series.” This perhaps substantiates Tucker`s view of the artist regretfully turning away from his beloved France. But, as likely, it is Monet`s attempt to deepen the emotional atmosphere of England`s supreme 19th Century landscapist, Joseph Mallord William Turner.
Whichever, when Monet returned to France, he did not readdress French themes but occupied himself with the creation of his gardens at Giverny, a setting that would sustain his art for the rest of his life, more than 25 years. ”Everything I have earned has gone into these gardens,” he said. ”I do not deny that I am proud of (them).”
Monet created two complementary gardens, one Eastern in feeling, one Western. However, they were not mutually exclusive, for though their atmospheres were different-bold versus meditative-they each bore flowers from outside their broad geographical division.
Monet painted first the Eastern water garden, with its Japanese footbridge. Here, again, he evoked the world of Japanese prints and the French fascination with them. This time, however, his point seems to go deeper than with the Japanese reference in his ”Poplars.” Tucker suggests the artist attempted to teach his countrymen what he believed of the Japan he never visited, namely, that the people had a closer, more meaningful and, ultimately, regenerative relationship to nature.
The ”Japanese Bridge” pictures formed the first series Monet painted from his gardens. More than 500 other paintings would follow. Many are water- lily canvases that culminate in the panels for the Musee de l`Orangerie in Paris. But they are from the first quarter of the 20th Century, which lies outside the present exhibition.
In the last half of our century, we have become accustomed to thinking of Monet`s late water-lily pictures which seem so prescient of the ”drip”
paintings of Jackson Pollock, as the greatest of all his works because they are the most ”modern.” Yet Wassily Kandinsky first saw in Monet`s grainstacks the possibility of abstract painting, Emil Nolde and Christian Rohlfs thought his cathedrals prefigured Expressionism and Marcel Proust used both the cathedrals and Normandy coast pictures to flesh out a portrait of the prototypical French genius, a painter called Elstir.
Monet`s series paintings are, then, a congenial place to begin both an investigation of his modernity and his place in relation to the spirit of his time. They are beautiful pictures but also tough in the way they demand viewer scrutiny. We must go back and forth, seeing each picture in relation to the others in the series, to grasp their full mastery. And now, at last, we have the show in which to do it, assembling more of these wonderful paintings in a single place than ever before.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which has the greatest collection of Monets outside of Paris, organized the exhibition and displayed it handsomely in large, continuous spaces that only once indulged stagecraft by adding a group of unnecessary, crowd-hindering Gothic arches.
The Art Institute has less of a spatial advantage, using smaller galleries on the 2nd floor of the new Rice Building that do not have much variety in shape but admit plenty of natural light. It will be something of a squeeze for the paintings, so one hopes the few drawings from sketchbooks-shown in freestanding cases in Boston-will still be included.
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Sponsored by Digital Equipment Corp., ”Monet in the `90s: The Series Paintings” will continue in Galleries 262 to 265 and 271 to 273 of the Art Institute of Chicago, Michigan Avenue at Adams Street, through Aug. 12. Thereafter, it will be at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, from Sept. 7 through Dec. 9.
Advance tickets are available at all TicketMaster outlets or by using a major credit card and calling 312-559-0200. Tickets also will be available for pickup at the will-call window of the Columbus Drive booth on the day of ticket date.
Admission (plus a $1-per-ticket service charge; $1.30 for phone orders)
is $5 Monday through Thursday; $6 Friday through Sunday; children 5 years of age and under, free. After May 19, a limited number of same-day tickets will be available from booths at the museum`s Michigan Avenue and Columbus Drive entrances.
A 320-page catalog written by guest-curator Paul H. Tucker, associate professor of art at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, will be available in the Museum Store for $45 hardbound, $24.95 softcover.
Museum hours are 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday; 10:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday; noon to 5 p.m. Sunday and holidays.
