Painting what he knew best Raleigh-bound Monet exhibit shines in Monet in Raleigh
SAN FRANCISCO - Claude Monet made his fortune in Paris and became famous the world over, but he spent most of his life in the province of Normandy in northern France. “Monet in Normandy,” a dazzling exhibition of 53 works by the impressionist master, makes a case for Monet as a regional artist who, over the course of his life, found inspiration in the places he knew as a child and young man.
Through Sept. 17 at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, the show presents some of the artist's most famous subjects – grain stacks, the Rouen Cathedral, the busy harbor of Le Havre – in a context that reminds us that “provincial” art is not necessarily a derogatory term. Like all great artists, Monet, while remembering his roots, transcended them with works that heralded modernism with their insistence on the primacy of color, composition and form.
Always rooted in the natural world, Monet recorded the season, time of day, weather and topography of Normandy and the other places he painted, but as he matured and increasingly moved toward abstraction, his paintings took on a mythic quality that makes them timeless and universal. The full range of his lifelong investigations into color and light is explored in the exhibition, which moves from the staid realism of an 1864 painting of a chapel near the fishing village of Honfleur to the vigorous gestural abstraction of a 1920s painting of water lilies floating in Monet's water gardens at Giverny.
Monet spent the last 40 years of his life in Giverny, in his time a rural farming village in a southern part of the province near Paris. It was there, at “the Gateway to Normandy,” that he painted the iconic grain stacks around his farm and the lush gardens of his own making that served as the model for his poetic evocations of the mutable and ultimately doomed pleasures of the visible world.
The first Monet show to focus exclusively on his Normandy scenes, the exhibition was jointly organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the N.C. Museum of Art with the Cleveland Museum of Art. Curators from the organizing museums and guest curator Richard Brettell of the University of Texas at Dallas assembled the show and wrote the liberally illustrated catalog that accompanies it.
Regional benefits
Brettell says it's appropriate that this show of Monet's “regional” works was organized by regional museums that have long been asked by larger museums to loan their Monets for blockbuster exhibitions. Brettell and the other curators were able to call in their chits and obtain loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musee D'Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery in London and other major museums.
The result is a well-focused, manageably sized show that brings together the Met's “Garden at Saint-Adresse,” the most important seascape of the first decade of Monet's career; North Carolina's “The Seine at Giverny, Morning Mists,” a subtle and absolutely stunning image of vaporous mists rising from a mirrorlike river; and Cleveland's “Low Tide at Pourville, Near Dieppe,” a serene scene of small figures on a beach under lapidary cliffs that rise up above them.
Brettell points out the irony that few of Monet's Normandy paintings, having long been sought after by wealthy institutions and collectors the world over, are to be found there. Only an early painting of a choppy sea on the coast and a sketchy treatment of the province's capital of Rouen come from museums in Normandy.
Lovely surprises
Many of the works on view are widely reproduced – among them the D'Orsay's “L'Hotel des Roches Noires (Trouville),” a charming work done on Monet's honeymoon in 1870 – but the show is full of surprises. “A Seascape, Shipping by Moonlight,” 1874, is a mysterious nocturne distinguished by broad brushstrokes of thick, tarry paint. The brilliantly painted “Church at Varangeville, Morning Effect” 1882, with its cliffs rising like flames, is as eccentric and powerful as an El Greco. And the blindingly white “Snow Effect at Giverny,” 1893, with a frigid blanket of snow giving way to subtle shades of blue and violet that limn the lines of nearly invisible trees and buildings, lingers in the mind long after seeing the show.
Even images that are more familiar – the fiery strokes of grain stalks piled up under a radiant sunset, the scabrous surfaces of the Rouen cathedral smashed up against the picture plane, the lush screen of vegetation under and behind the Japanese footbridge at Giverny – seem fresh, with the astonishing vitality that the classics of any art form possess.
As noted by Lynn Federle Orr, the San Francisco museums' curator of European art, people keep coming back to Monet because his works are like a favorite song you love to hear over and over. How true.