NEW ACQUISITIONS: BONNARD & MONET

NO group show in history has become more famous than the one staged in 1874 in the vacated Paris studios of Photographer Nadar. One look at the shocking works by such unknowns as Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Degas and Cezanne, and the critics doubled up with laughter. In Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise, the critics found an epithet to pin on the upstarts: "impressionists."

But the raucous laughter echoed on to haunt the critics. Today these impressionist "palette scrapings," as they were derisively called, are among the most popular paintings of Western art. And their popularity commands a hefty price. The two new acquisitions of impressionist painting (opposite) by Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art and Minneapolis' Institute of Art are today valued by experts at upwards of $30,000 apiece.

The main point about the impressionists is not that they shared a name in common, but that their vitality and accomplishment rested on individual talent, stubbornly pursued by each artist in accordance with his own unique vision. Claude Monet's long lifetime of painting is a prime example. Long after impressionism ceased to be the vogue, he pushed on with his studies of light and texture. At the age of 76, troubled with approaching blindness, Monet ordered 50 huge (7 ft. by 18 ft.) canvases sent to his country studio at Giverny, began painting the water lilies in the pond beside his house in a last great effort to capture "something impossible in rippling waters with tall grass undulating in the sun." Looking at Monet's masterful brushwork, his lyrical blending of earth, water and sky into a single composition, French Painter Andre Masson called the completed set of canvases "The Sistine Chapel of impressionism." It is one of this superb series that now hangs in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art.

One of Monet's enthusiastic visitors during his final years was a painter a generation younger, Pierre Bonnard, who had a house across the Seine from Giverny. His Dining Room in the Country (opposite) is one of the best examples of what impressionism became under Bonnard's brush. In it, the transition from the blue tablecloth set in the cool interior of what is probably Bonnard's summer house, past the door and window, framing a dark-haired woman, to the shimmering outdoor vibrations, becomes a melodic, orchestrated movement from calm interior repose to the joyous peacefulness of a summer's day.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.