Monet Exhibition: A Trip to Bountiful : Impressionist’s Retrospective Is Setting Records in Chicago

Crowds have long gathered around Claude Monet. His home and gardens at Giverny were already tourist attractions in the 1880s. By the turn of the century, the artist complained of being surrounded by curious Americans, whose “easels and sun umbrellas sprouted around the garden like mushrooms” until he seriously thought of packing his bags. Now Monet is surrounded again, as the Art Institute of Chicago anticipates as many as 700,000 visitors to “Claude Monet, 1840-1926,” the largest retrospective of his paintings ever assembled.

Attendance records were already broken on Monday, when 12,000 people came to the museum--and this during members’ preview week. This gorgeous display “shows Monet whole,” bringing together 159 Impressionist works by an artist who is arguably the most popular painter of all time.

“Claude Monet” also celebrates the centenary of his first museum exhibition, which took place in 1895 at the Art Institute. The museum’s current director, James Wood, who proposed the project five years ago, and Charles Stuckey, the museum’s Frances and Thomas Dittmer curator of 20th-Century painting and sculpture, acknowledge Monet’s universal appeal, but hope to provoke new responses to his work.

The museum’s early patrons made this effort possible. Wealthy Chicagoans such as Martin Ryerson and Bertha and Potter Palmer bought Monet in bulk in the 1890s, and as a result the Art Institute owns 33 of his paintings. According to Wood, it is because of its position as a major lender that the museum could borrow crucial works from the 1860s, never before shown outside Europe, and “the critical last works, large multi-part panels, essential to understanding the man’s ambition and success.”

Having scaled the heights of Impressionism, the exhibition grandly unfolds into this century to present Monet as an unacknowledged father of Modernism in expansive, unadorned white spaces. Stuckey finds Monet’s emphatically two-dimensional surfaces in Picasso’s Cubism and Piet Mondrian’s early Abstractions, and traces Monet’s influence in the gestural Expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Joan Mitchell and in the “all-over” compositions of Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol.

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All of these bold claims are made in the first pages of a sumptuous catalogue. Stuckey hammers down his case for Monet in a short, provocative essay and an unexpectedly engaging chronology of the artist’s life. The 70-page timeline details the years, months, and sometimes day-to-day facts of Monet’s existence; his travels, complex relationships with dealers, harsh critical responses, even the purchase of chocolate and prune juice are all recorded, as are the untimely deaths of two wives, the loss of a son, and finally the extended family that settled near the patriarch. This is the stuff of screenplays, a story of professional setbacks, artistic triumphs, and of the amazing construction of one of the natural, cultural monuments of the late 19th Century, the gardens of Giverny.

The gardens supported Monet’s vision--of irises, wisteria, and of course the lily ponds that mirror their surroundings and become pools for contemplation. With his landscape series, countless seascapes reflecting cliffs, ponds reflecting willows, and rivers reflecting the houses of Parliament, Monet seems a man obsessed. Even as his eyesight failed, he produced some of his most ambitious work, the mural-sized decorations. These environmental works exaggerate the close focus and magnify the planar surfaces of the green, pink, and blue Giverny ponds to cover the entire field of the painting. They make Stuckey’s Modernist point stunningly.

The exhibition’s success also depends on an evenhanded selection of works from each period or “campaign,” the military term the Impressionists used to suggest the deliberate character and hard-won victories of their painting excursions. Trains carried these artists from their Parisian ateliers to country houses and beach resorts, where they hauled easels, canvases, and newly invented portable metal paint tubes outside and were hindered by rain, snow, or, in the case of Monet, by the unexpected waves of the Normandy Coast in 1885.

But Monet’s innovations are of greater artistic significance than rapid transport and weather. He worked on five or six canvases at a time, recording variations of light and air, sky and water, and completing the paintings later in his studio. Contradicting his seeming ease of execution, the quick brush strokes and brilliant accidents of color, is the incredible strategic planning of a true master.

Monet alone could capture the fairylike atmosphere that occurs when light dissolves objects into particles of color, could transform a cliche of interior decoration, the water lily motif, into a new visual language. His themes were time and space, well represented here by the Gare Saint-Lazare pictures of 1877, the pivotal first series; the fantastic Etretat seascapes; lonely wheat stacks; 31 waterlilies, and the glowing sunsets animating the houses of Parliament in 1904.

But look again. The exhibition tells another story, of Monet’s challenges, his sustained attempts to find radical methods to describe the indescribable--atmosphere, sky and light itself. Physical as well as aesthetic risks were involved as he climbed steep rock cliffs to secure an unanticipated vantage point for the geologic formation that had become a tourist attraction at Etretat. He paid workers to pluck leaves from a tree, and the station master at the Gare Saint-Lazare to burn coal to produce smoke and steam--ephemeral, billowing clouds for Monet to transcribe on canvas.

Monet’s long career (he died at 86) straddled the Impressionist revolutions of the Paris salons and the violence of World War I. That the artist should be lionized at this moment in American history is noteworthy, and not only because this show will be an astonishing blockbuster.

At a time when many rally against government sponsorship of the arts, it is interesting to remember that Monet enjoyed the patronage of Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister who secured the great waterlily cycle for his nation. Monet’s “impressions,” the basic truths of visual experience, now offer pleasure and calm, and remind us that art rejected by one generation can appeal to multiple audiences over many, many decades.

* The exhibition continues through Nov. 26; to order tickets, call (800) 929-5800). Judith Russi Kirshner is a critic and director of the School of Art and Design, University of Illinois at Chicago.