A Monet Show for Our ‘90s : The quintessential creator of dappled masterworks was also a grumpy, self-promoting pro

The century’s last decade has just begun. A nation long regarded as a world superpower seems at the apogee of greatness, flaunting its wealth and prestige like a bedizened courtesan.

A strata of self-doubt lurks just beneath its rhinestone encrusted surface. A humiliating defeat in a war with a third-rate power still rankles and everywhere there are fissures in the frosting--government is wracked with scandal, drug and alcohol use escalate alarmingly, conservative forces harden position while radicals plant bombs or drift into mysticism.

A country proud of its cultural modernity hoists one more glass of bubbly while glancing covertly at two threatening peoples--the Germans and the Japanese.

Familiar as it all sounds, the scenario is not about the United States in the 1990s. It is about France in the 1890s--the Franco-Prussian war, not Vietnam; the Dreyfus affair, not Iran-contra; La Belle Epoch, not “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” It is particularly about a historic exhibition opening to the public Wednesday at the Museum of Fine Arts.

“Monet in the ‘90s” is a singular art event reuniting the largest number of the artist’s renowned “series” paintings to be assembled since they were executed

and dispersed a century ago--90 of them, just so we don’t lose the theme. These nuanced variations on such landscape motifs as poplar trees, grain stacks and the facade of Rouen Cathedral have multiple happy properties. Postcard-popular with the general public, they are also awesome icons for cognoscenti who regard them as seedbeds of modern art and the source of contemporary serial painting, which involved everybody from Andy Warhol to Frank Stella.

In short, the museum has a blockbuster that even the fussiest connoisseur cannot disdain. It will surely pull big crowds until it closes here April 29. It then travels to Chicago’s Art Institute and London’s Royal Academy, which co-organized the event. No, it won’t go to Los Angeles, and more’s the pity.

C’est dommage , because it is not only a superb, revealing show but because the title is a significant pun. “Monet in the ‘90s” means what is says but it also means the way the 1990s look at Monet.

By now, alert readers may be asking themselves about the connection between Monet--the quintessential art-for-art’s-sake Impressionist--and social upheavals in France at the fin de siecle . Didn’t the artist known as just-an-eye-but-what-an-eye simply do his dappled thing while Paris wallowed in enticing decadence?

Well, not according to the compelling catalogue written by the show’s organizer, Paul Hayes Tucker of the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Tucker--a Monet specialist--thinks in a radical revisionist art historical manner much abroad in academia. The method goes beyond traditional questions of style, school and individual artistic psychology to link art and artists to larger social, political and economic issues. It tends to demythologize comfortable, romantic notions about the artistic character. Tucker paints a portrait of Monet as a shrewd, self-promoting entrepreneur with a sharp eye on the competition, the market and public taste.

The artist was pushing 50--and working in an Impressionist manner that even his contemporary, Pissarro, called “rancid”--when he did his first series paintings. According to Tucker, different suites intended to counter the competition of the radical young Seurat prove the old dog could still absorb the new tricks of decorative Symbolism, soothe the rattled nationalism of his audience with reassuring traditional rural themes and--finally--express utter disgust with the rapacious anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus case. After that, Monet retired to his garden at Giverny. There he painted the “Japanese Footbridge” series, presumably as an encouragement to emulate Oriental reverence for nature and private meditation.

Whew! To believe all that is to believe artists are capable of conducting their careers as a kind of three-dimensional chess game.

But Tucker’s text, although often highly circumstantial, frequently rings true. During this period, Monet made the final transition from scruffy bohemian to an artist of immense wealth and the stature of a national hero. Critical response to his exhibitions was so ecstatic that newspapers like Le Gaulois devoted whole supplements to his art. He must have been doing something right, even if much of this putative French nationalist art sold to Americans.

Besides, we know artists like this. In California alone, people like Robert Irwin or Robert Graham are almost as admired for their career tactics as for their work. With Monet, as with them, it remains an open question whether their amazing astuteness arises from intuition or calculation. Whichever, Monet is characterized very much in the mold of the artist going into 1990s--the canny pro rather than the visionary seer.

One thing is certain. When we come to actually look at the Monets, tactical and sociological questions give way to issues that are universal and poetic.

These are still the paintings that make us hear Debussy in the background.

Tucker has simply proven again that you can slice art many ways without wounding it.

The first suite on view is a group of eight canvases done in the Creuse Valley in 1889. Each depicts a mounded landscape cradling a section of river under changing light. “Sunlight Effect” approaches the rugged naturalism of Courbet, “Evening Effect” muffles tone and shape so closely as to point to abstraction.

Curious. We are so accustomed to associating Monet with the dappled delicacy of stereotypical Impressionism that it is a surprise to feel this work burly and somewhat inert under its surface texture.

The effect goes away in half a dozen graceful views of fields at Giverny but returns in 15 pictures from the famous “Grain Stack” suite, with its humble conical piles enduring the heat and snow of the seasons.

(The French like to complain, “En ete on crame, et on hiver on caille”--”In summer we boil and in winter we freeze.”)

If we want to have unaccustomed thoughts about Monet based on the pictures, it is their revelation of a quality not unlike Expressionist anguish. Fairly subtle most of the time, it is most obvious in mountain paintings he did on a visit to Norway. We suddenly find him predicting the neurotic tensions of an Edvard Munch.

There is something phantasmagoric about the grain stacks--they look scruffy and defensive, like dwarf Abominable Snowmen ready to mount a crazy attack on anybody who disturbs their elemental hibernation.

Monet worried and complained about his art so consistently that his wife once said that being disgruntled was part of his nature. When he was painting the now-revered Rouen Cathedral suite, he had nightmares about the building. “It fell on me,” he wrote, “and seemed to be pink or blue or yellow.”

So much for the serene patriarch of Giverny. This sounds more like the visionary disturbance of a Van Gogh.

The “Cathedrals” series--seen here in 10 versions--creates an odd, even upsetting tension between the stout solidity of the building and Monet’s liquefying light. His struggle with them shows. They exist somewhere between noble failure and narrow triumph.

One is left convinced that Monet made his art in a state of struggle against depression.

But only half the time.

The artist was grumpy and obsessive. He could turn the latter quality to good use in the real world, as when he mounted a successful subscription campaign to have Manet’s “Olympia” given to the nation, or fought tenaciously to build his Giverny water garden or save the poplar trees on his property line. He was bear-like and formidable.

But his favorite painting was Watteau’s exquisite “Embarcation for Cythera.” His favored colors were green and lavender--said to be the hues of the pure aesthete.

The suites of series paintings virtually alternate between moody downers like the grain stacks and lyric celebrations like the “Poplars.” The trees stand like serpentine rows of slender girls in pale green dresses, billowing hair united by mischievous winds.

If we want to fool around with fashionable theories about what makes artists tick, we could do worse than to explain Monet as a manic-depressive. Like most analysis, that’s too gross but it sets some useful parameters.

Monet was really a blender and rectifier--a very French seeker of harmonic compromise, a very individual pioneer of new frontiers carefully gained.

The most useful metaphor for Monet is the idea of the cinematic lap-dissolve. His work demands that the viewer make subtle distinctions. We find ourselves wishing they could all be projected on one spot to more clearly show his caressing light, lengthening shadows and changing seasons.

With Monet, everything dissolves into everything else. Illumination on a hillside changes furrowed earth into choppy water. The act of depicting the land dissolves into pure painting. His melancholy dissolves into his joy to produce the poignant “Mornings on the Seine.” Talk about harmony. No wonder he liked Whistler.

The final suite on view is the lovely “Japanese Footbridge” set. Poor installation does not diminish either its sense of fulfillment or its symbolic message. In most versions, the bridge leads out of the canvas to new experience.

One wanders backwards through the exhibition to be struck by the overriding common property of the paintings. Almost without exception, they want to be bigger. They strain uncomfortably at their frames like Samson in the Temple.

Monet died in 1926 at age 87. He still had more than a quarter-century to paint in his garden after the footbridge suite. The result was the magnificent, huge, waterlily paintings that burst his final limitation, size. Of course he grumped the whole time.

Monet’s work does send a message to the 1990s. When the world lets you down, cultivate the inner garden and let no man trample its fruits.