By ROBERTA SMITH
The New York Times
Published: May 4, 2007
Seeing a good-sized museum-quality show squeezed into a commercial gallery can sometimes feel like having dinner with a celebrity. A familiar distance falls away; the intimacy startles. So the show of around 60 paintings by Claude Monet at Wildenstein & Company may take getting used to, or it may simply take your breath away. It surveys Monet’s astounding 60-year trajectory in the span of three crowded galleries that would easily fit in one of the coat rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
Claude Monet: A Tribute to Daniel Wildenstein and Katia Granoff This show, at Wildenstein & Company, includes “On the Beach at Trouville” (1870), above.
This show offers a rare chance to encounter, up close and in detail, the evolving ways of seeing and painting that established the originality, historical importance and continuing irresistibility of Monet’s art. There are outstanding examples of his best-known motifs: two grain stacks, a burnished view of the cathedral at Rouen, several scumbled renderings of London’s bridges and three waterlily paintings. But there are also less familiar works, including a winter view of Vétheuil in which ice floes dot the Seine with the same levitation that would come to characterize his waterlilies images; a London street scene that is little more than swatches of mauve, green and gray broken by bursts of streetlamp yellow; and two still lifes from 1867-68. These show Monet painting piles of fruit with a restrained if loaded brush reminiscent of Manet and placing them in a space as airy and transparent as a still life by Zurbaran.
Monet of course exemplified Impressionism more completely and pushed it further than any other painter. The style’s radicalism lay in the determination to paint not just reality but the seeing of reality, the act of perception itself, by showing how light, especially bright light, tended to dissolve the colors and forms of the world. The key to this effect lay in spontaneous, broken, skipping brushwork — preferably registered in paint applied in front of the subject, en plein air.
The images produced are so familiar now that it’s possible to forget that Impressionism created a newly complex awareness for its original viewers. The experience of light was enhanced, but so was the physical assertiveness of the painted surface. Paint and reality co-existed in heightened tension.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
“Camille and Jean Monet in the Garden at Argenteuil,” by Monet, 1873.
In terms of sheer physical gifts Monet was superbly skilled at maintaining this tension. Cézanne’s famous summing up is still the best: Monet, he said, “is only an eye, but good God, what an eye.” The phrase, frequently quoted without the God part, has often been taken as a subtle put-down that implies a reflexive skill, dispassionate and even cold. Yet it is heat that comes across here, evident of course, in the light and the color but also in a palpable determination to see and portray, to penetrate reality by painting its surface in a new way.
The paintings are divided among the three galleries according to what might be called the three stages of Monet. In the first, where the relatively realistic Manet-like still lifes hang, we see how Impressionism began to emerge almost naturally in other works of the decade, especially when Monet followed the advice of his first teacher, Eugène Boudin, and concentrated on landscape. The sun-drenched “Seaside at Honfleur,” from 1864, for example, presents a rocky beach as a sparkling field of dabs of tan and gray paint, with the afternoon brightness heightened by sailboats rendered as dark silhouettes. A small figure approaches: it is apparently the artist carrying his easel, his blue smock echoing the sky, which fades into fluffy white clouds on the horizon.
In the second gallery, which concentrates on the 1870s and ’80s, Impressionism arrives and ripens. It is immanent in the paintings of the early ’70s, like the laundry-fresh “On the Beach at Trouville” and the imposing canvas of Camille and Jean Monet, the artist’s wife and young son, almost engulfed in the plant life of a garden in full bloom but still legible as individuals. Two summers later, in the open fields near Argenteuil, the figures are seen from a distance, and everything is a buzzy blur of pulverized color.
This room includes the great, steamy 1877 view of the immense open shed of the Saint-Lazare train station lent by the Art Institute of Chicago and two less familiar, mustardy views of the sea from the cliffs of Normandy. It concludes with two canvases painted in 1889 in the south of France. Monet eliminates the horizon in a close-up of the torrents of the Petite Creuse and then pulls back to depict the river in its gorge, its white foam highlighting the water the way red, pink and chartreuse highlight the dark slopes. The iridescence seems both highly artificial yet also true to the effects of raking afternoon light.
In the final gallery, devoted to works from 1890 on, color and paint do a slow and then a not-so-slow burn. Monet’s tendency to work in series is touched on in paintings of haystacks and of the Thames and an image — his first — of poplars reflected in the River Epte at Giverny, at the edge of the property he acquired in 1890 and where over the next several years he built his famous water garden.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The sun-drenched “Seaside at Honfleur,” 1864, depicts a rocky beach and sailboats as silhouettes.
Among the Giverny paintings, the standouts are four from 1918 or later of the Japanese footbridge, a structure that is all but subsumed in the skirmishes of radiant colors. The protagonists are mostly greens and whites in one canvas, greens and yellows in two others. In the fourth, the entire spectrum is more or less present, darkened, off-key, with a blistery blur of orange in the lower left corner. They remind us once more that Monet was as much an artist of the 20th century as the 19th.
This show also provides a reminder that commercial galleries are more than money machines. Organized by Joseph Baillio, senior vice president at Wildenstein, it is a tribute to the art dealers Daniel Wildenstein and Katia Granoff. Mr. Wildenstein (1917-2001) assembled the five-volume catalogue raisonné of Monet’s work between 1939 and 1991, and Ms. Granoff (1895-1989), the Russian-born, Paris-based dealer, was instrumental in the broader appreciation of Monet’s late work that developed in the 1950s. The show is accompanied by a museum-worthy catalog, one of whose illuminating essays traces the rise of Monet’s reputation in America. It is hard to imagine that there was ever a time when he wasn’t the most beloved artist in the Western Hemisphere.
“Claude Monet: A Tribute to Daniel Wildenstein and Katia Granoff” continues through June 15 at Wildenstein & Company, 19 East 64th Street, Manhattan, (212) 879-0500. Admission: $10; $5 for full-time students, military personnel and people 65+.
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