"Monet In the 20th Century"

September 24 - October 1, 1998

[Art Reviews]

Thoroughly modern Monet

The MFA brings Claude into the 20th century

by Jeffrey Gantz
"MONET IN THE 20TH CENTURY." At the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, September 20 through December 27.

The artist at work

Monet, as we know full well in the wake of the Museum of Fine Arts' 1990 "Monet In the '90s" blockbuster (half a million attendees), means money. Few painters have achieved such financial success -- by 1900, at age 60, Claude could easily have retired. And few have been as popular in Boston: nowhere outside of France will you find as many Monets (36 canvases at the MFA alone). But what the MFA's new blockbuster, "Monet In the 20th Century" (which will have just two venues, Boston and then London), tells us is that Monet also means . . . meaning. That this artist, who could have spent his last 26 years resting on his Impressionist laurels, instead journeyed deeper into the heart of reality, probing the relationship between time and light (he was the art world's answer to Einstein), reproducing creation atom by atom, confronting the Deity (if any) to ask about the riddle of life.
It's a journey Boston hasn't taken before, at least not with this painter. Just five of the MFA's 36 canvases belong to the 20th century; the latest, a view of Santa Maria della Salute in Venice, is dated 1908. But between 1900 and 1926 Monet painted some 450 canvases (not counting the many he destroyed), 92 of which have been collected for this show (86 at the MFA stop). That means "Monet In the 20th Century" will be taking most of us into uncharted territory. It's the most-comprehensive late-Monet show ever (which tells you something about the neglect of late Monet); it occupies the largest space the MFA has ever accorded one exhibit; and it's attracted the largest sponsorship gift the museum has ever received, $1.2 million from the Fleet Financial Group. And yes, it's a Mega Commercial Event. But it's also a Mega Artistic Event. Even a Mega Life Event.
Like any Mega Undertaking, it creaks here and there. Owing to its size, the show has to begin in the Charles C. Cunningham Gallery before wending its way to the Gund Gallery. You won't enjoy that sense of integral space the MFA provided for "Monet In the '90s"; you may even feel you're getting lost -- but then, this is a journey into the unknown. One could also wish the MFA had come up with a thematic concept instead of the show's straight-line chronology. Yet the truth, in London as well as Boston, is that we're all on our Getting Acquainted Tour of late Monet. The subtleties will have to wait.

THERE ARE EIGHT ROOMS to "Monet In the 20th Century," of which the second takes us to London (Charing Cross Bridge, Waterloo Bridge, Parliament) and the fourth marks the artist's 1908 "working vacation" in Venice (the Salute, the Doge's Palace, various palazzi). The rest record his life at Giverny: the garden, the pond, the Japanese footbridge, the weeping willows, and, above all, the water lilies. An entire room is devoted to water-lily paintings done between 1903 and 1909, 24 of them, and you could spend an entire afternoon just meditating on the nuances of these nymphéas (the French word for water lily, from nymphe, "nymph," a connection that wouldn't have been lost on Monet). You could as easily spend a half-hour contemplating the different colors the water reflects in the two views of the Grand Canal before the Doge's Palace (still rooted in pictorial reality next to, say, Turner's The Doge's Procession to the Sea). Monet is here bringing to art what Debussy, among others, was bringing to music: the idea that life is existence as well as essence, that color (or timbre) and harmony (or harmonics) are as important as structure. As in his series paintings of the '90s (Rouen Cathedral, or the grainstacks), he's really painting light, the way the transcendent intersects with the immanent. Only through time, T.S. Eliot reminds us, is time conquered.
Time, unfortunately, is what you don't have at this show -- you can stay as long as you like, but you can't break for, say, lunch, and in any event it's too big for a single viewing. Where you want to focus your attention is on the last four rooms. In 1911, Monet's second wife, Alice, died; his eldest son, Jean, followed her in 1914, when World War I broke out. Monet actually stopped painting for a time; when the show resumes, after the Venice group, it's with a room full of huge, strident studies, canvases measuring two meters square that he never meant to exhibit, that don't even look finished. Having survived the shock of his wife's death, and his son's, and the war, Monet puts reality under a microscope. He painted and repainted his canvases -- the irony of his art is that what purports to capture the fleeting truths of time is achieved through a time-consuming process. But here we see his work in candid snapshots. The principals of the Asahi Breweries' Water Lilies (catalogue #63) huddle together like pilgrims stranded in the sea of faith. The Marmottan's Water Lilies, Reflections of Weeping Willows (catalogue #68) wears its myriad magentas and violets like a purple heart. Everywhere there are marble-like outlines that the sculptor's chisel hasn't quite refined.
The last three rooms remind us that great artists in their final years (think Euripides, Shakespeare, Titian, Bruckner, Balanchine) often go beyond ordinary reality. Monet limited himself to painting what he had himself fashioned at Giverny, a god still trying to fathom what he'd created. The horizon line, seldom far from the top of his later works, disappears altogether; we're left to ponder nature without appeal to any higher authority. The paint surface begins to take on the nature of the object (check out the trunks of the weeping willows). The two-meter-square format gives way, in the Grandes Décorations that he intended for the Orangerie (in the Tuileries), to panels that run two by six meters, a horizontal reality that's all time and yet no movement -- his version of what Eliot calls "the still point of the turning world." There is movement here, but it's not the kind that withers and decays; instead, like the universe, it vibrates, an oscillating field of color harmony, the music of the spheres.

I'M IN THE LAST ROOM, standing in front of the Museum of Modern Art's Water-Lily Pond (catalogue #92), which forsakes ordinary reality altogether. A pond implies a horizon, but no horizon is evident. A pond has depth, but this painting is all surface, as if depth were just another phenomenological illusion. The water lilies themselves are barely discernible, and it's impossible to tell what's "real" from what's reflected, upside down (the way the retina transmits the image to the brain), in the water. The "colors" run from saffron to chartreuse, but they all run together, as if there were only one color. Monet's unified-field theory? Looking at this Water-Lily Pond is like opening the final door. Monet atomizes the universe, allowing us to decide whether the result is Logos or chaos, whether we're seeing the Light of the World or just plain light. He's content with making the transitory eternal. In art, at least.

More for your Monet

For this show, which it's obviously hoping will be the blockbuster of all blockbusters, the MFA has hooked up with Amtrak and area hotels to offer special packages. There will be a free shuttle service from the Boston Common parking garage and the Boston Public Library; and in addition to the Monet menus at the museum's restaurant and café, there'll be a tent in the Calderwood Courtyard where you can dine al fresco on the "Monet Boxed Lunch." I can vouch for the vegetarian selection.
There'll be the usual lecture series and related exhibitions, and, of course, the Monet exhibition shop, with its assortment of books, prints, posters, notecards, jewelry, neckties, T-shirts, totebags, umbrellas, dinnerware, salt and pepper shakers, mousepads, screen savers, kaleidoscopes, and who knows what else. But save room for the exhibition catalogue, which like its "Monet In the '90s" predecessor has informative essays (by such luminaries as John House and Paul Hayes Tucker) and reasonable color (late Monet is a terror to reproduce) at a very reasonable $25 for the paperback.
You must purchase tickets for the show in advance: call (617) 542-4MFA (automated) or (617) 423-6000 (operator). The MFA Web address is www.mfa.org; there's also an interactive site at www.fleet.com/monet.