Date: 25-03-2007
Owning Institution: The Royal Academy
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2012      
Subject: 19th Century        

Oscar Claude Monet has certainly proved to be the most marketable of the Impressionists. Multiplied in reproduction, his work decorates posters, coffee-table books, plates, coasters, pincushions and paperweights. The range of Monet-inspired consumer durables is truly formidable, so much so that at the Musee Marmottan, Paris’s principal Monet museum, it is even possible to buy a special-edition cast-iron replica of the easel he left in his studio at Giverny on his death, just two centimetres high, complete with pastiche waterlily painting – a potent symbol, if one were needed, of how an artist can be diminished by his own huge commercial popularity.

Despite the crowds who flock to see his works, it might plausibly be argued that Monet has become a curiously neglected figure. He is one of the world’s most famous painters, but also one of the most persistently misunderstood. He is sold as the quintessentially nice artist, a man who painted ever-so-pretty pictures of ever-so-pretty things, like picnics and poppyfields. But that is  a view which almost completely obscures his true achievement.

Monet lived to the age of 86, and his lifetime spanned a period of great change. When he was born, in 1840, France was still a predominately agricultural nation, in which people travelled by horse and cart or by sailing boat, houses were lit by candlelight, and the Industrial Revolution was only just getting into its stride. By the time of his death, in 1926, people were travelling by aeroplane; they had central heating and electric light; they could see moving pictures and listen to jazz. Monet had lived through three attempted revolutions, a monarchy, an empire, and a world war in which France lost more than a million men. But he did not merely experience the dawn of the so-called modern era – he played his own part in the formation of modern attitudes and modern ways of seeing. He helped to dethrone a moribund and academic approach to art, tearing up old rules about how to represent optical reality and pioneering a fresh perception of nature. He confronted a new urban and industrial world and found beauty in things most of his contemporaries regarded as the ugly but necessary by-products of social progress: train stations, industrial suburbs, weekend daytrippers, coal-heavers on the Seine, factories on the edges of towns. He was also an artist who, in the twentieth century, paved the way for a transformed notion of improvisation, of emotional and pictorial freedom, as the heart and soul of painting.

“The Unknown Monet”, the title of the Royal Academy’s new exhibition, sounds full of promise, conjuring up the image of a boldly revisionist show that might attempt to restore the painter’s true eminence in the history of art and ideas. In reality, it turns out to have a rather narrow focus and a correspondingly limited ambition. Its subject is Monet’s relatively unexposed oeuvre as a draughtsman and pastellist. Its principal argument – sound enough, although hardly earth-shattering – is that his drawings and pastels played a more important part in his formation as an artist than has hitherto been recognised.

This distinctly modest exhibition works best at its start, when it charts the period that runs from Monet’s earliest beginnings as an artist up until the late 1860s and early 1870s – a time that corresponds with the dawn of Impressionism itself. Monet’s work as a draughtsman is certainly engaging and there is no doubt that it sheds significant light on his early career. He himself always emphasised the importance of drawing to his formation as an artist. As an old man, Monet claimed that “school always felt like a prison” and insisted that he had ignored his lessons, preferring to doodle instead. “I drew garlands in the margins .. and covered the blue paper of my exercise books with the most bizarre ornaments, which included highly irreverent drawings of my masters, full-face or profile, with maximum distortion.”

Such stories may have contained an element of self-mythologisation – Monet liked to project the image of the rebellious, self-taught genius – but they also contain more than a grain of truth. The Royal Academy’s exhibition opens with a group of extremely accomplished caricatures of the great and the good of Le Havre, where Monet grew up. Created for the most part in the late 1850s, these depictions of bulbous-nosed theatre-goers and big-headed bankers are accomplished in a style that owes something to Daumier but also much to the longstanding English traditions of satirical graphic art. The young Monet clearly had a mischievous and irreverent streak, although he did not exempt himself from the satirical scrutiny to which he subjected the well-heeled bourgeoisie of his native town. One of the most fluid of his early caricatures is a self-portrait, showing the artist in an absurd, high-pointed hat, wearing a ludicrous cape and carrying his watercolour box by his side. Long-haired and extravagantly moustachioed, he comes across as a quixotic figure – an eccentric young musketeer of painting.

Such works are likely to come as a surprise to those previously unaware of them. On the face of it, such “portraits charges” (“charged portraits”), as they were known, seem so thoroughly removed from the pictorial world of Monet’s Impressionism as to be more or less entirely irrelevant to it. But the truth is more complicated. In a purely literal sense, Monet’s precocious satirical juvenilia curtailed his development as a painter – when he applied for financial help with his art education from the town council of Le Havre, his reputation as a satirist preceded him, and he was refused a grant on the grounds that he was “insufficiently serious to deserve municipal liberality.” But in many other ways, the practice and habits of caricature can be seen to have played a crucial part both in Monet’s development and in the particular inflection that he gave to Impressionism.

Impressionism was, famously, an art of first “impressions” – an art that blurred the line between the sketch and the supposedly finished painting and that placed great emphasis on immediacy of response. To see Monet’s earliest drawings and sketches of the French landscape, side by side with his early caricatures, is to realise the extent to which he developed his particular language of Impressionist art using the tools of caricature. He took the rapid, shorthand vocabulary that he had developed as a satirical draughtsman -  quickly drawn lines, impetuous flurries of scribble, abbreviated contours and outlines that both simplify and encapsulate a particular shape or form in the visible world – and applied it to his experience of nature. Monet’s critics often accused his more daringly impressionistic pictures of amounting to no more than “caricatures” of landscape painting – a criticism that now might be seen, with hindsight, to have contained a certain truth. It is probably not mere  coincidence that both Edouard Manet, the painter, often referred to as “the father of Impressionism”, and the French poet Baudelaire, who did so much to formulate the aesthetics of “a painting of modern life” should also have taken caricature very seriously as an art form.

The Royal Academy’s exhibition comes most fully to life when Monet introduces colour to drawing by working in the medium of pastel. In his pastels of the 1860s and early 1870s, especially a radiant group of depictions of orchards in flower, and of dawns and sunsets over the Norman coast, nature seems to catch fire, sparkling and glittering in clouds and exhalations of colour. Monet’s attachment to pastel seems profoundly to have affected his practice as a painter. Just as his great English predecessor, Turner, had been so fascinated by watercolour that he diluted his oils to the point of etherous instability, so Monet seems to have been driven by a desire to catch, in oils, the luminous but also densely material effects of pastel. This is demonstrated most clearly in a group of pastels and paintings of the coast at Etretat, and implied, too, in the juxtaposition of several of his late pastels of London Bridge with a couple – by no means the best examples – of his late waterlily paintings. Monet uses his paint thick and dry, allowing it to catch and accumulate on the grain of the canvas. The effects are indeed very much like those of pastel – resembling the way it too catches on the grain of paper, forming drifts or veils of colour.

Although it contains a handful of outstanding works of art, and although it sporadically enlivens the conventional view of Monet, it must be said that this is, as a whole, a rather disappointing show. After a bright beginning, it limps to a close, having meandered rather inconclusively through sections devoted, respectively, to an interactive computerised display of his sketchbooks, and the transmission of Monet’s art to a broader public through the transfer lithographs of William Thornley French. Such displays are the museological equivalent of footnotes. The suspicion lurks that the true raison d’etre behind the show was simply to squeeze yet one more highly attended show from the magical name of Monet – and that far from correcting the popular misconception of his work, this is really just another attempt to take advantage of it.