Prophet of Light

By R.H.

The Louvre, everyone knows, is the most famous museum in Paris. But which is the least famous? Until lately, a good candidate for the laurels of obscurity was the Musee Marmottan, a two-story mansion in the outer regions of the 16th Arrondissement near the Bois de Boulogne. From its opening in 1934, the place attracted about 30 visitors a month to admire a lugubrious clutter of porcelain, stained glass and Napoleonic furniture. Guidebooks ignored the Musee Marmottan. Even its hours were absurd: two afternoons a week, except during the tourist-laden summer, when the museum perversely stayed shut for two months.

That this drab and peripheral institute should come to rival the Louvre as a shrine of French Impressionism seems inconceivable. But five years ago, an octogenarian named Michel Monet, driving back from a visit to his wife's grave in Normandy, collided with a truck and died. He was the son and only offspring of Claude Monet. When Monet pere died in 1926, Michel inherited his collection and kept most of it in his secluded country house at Sorel-Moussel in Normandy. Nobody saw it for 40 years. Paintings were stuffed under beds, piled higgledy-piggledy in the cellar, gathered dust in cupboards. Michel preferred to adorn his walls with antelope horns and stuffed trophies of the African safaris that were his chief interest in life. Whenever he needed some cash to finance another safari, he would pull a Monet out from its storage place and sell it off.

Nobody knows exactly how much of the collection thus leaked away, but Michel Monet scrupulously respected his father's wishes in one area. He left the collection not to the French government (old Monet never forgave the Louvre for ignoring him) but to the Marmottan.

Driven Man. Last month the huge bequest of some 130 pictures went on public view for the first time in a new underground gallery excavated below the museum garden. There were paintings by Monet's masters, Delacroix and Boudin, and by his fellow Impressionists --including a magnificent portrait of Monet himself at age 32 by his friend Auguste Renoir. But the bulk of the gift is Monet's Monets--a unique and stunningly complete core sample of 65 oils and four pastels spanning his growth as an artist from 1870 to the series of lily ponds which, over the last 29 years of his life, Monet produced in his studio at Giverny. It is the world's largest Monet collection, worth--at one estimate--about $10 million.

Claude Monet was 86 when he died: a driven old man, almost blind with cataracts, preyed on by terrible fits of depression. "Age and chagrin have worn me out," he wrote to his friend Georges Clemenceau, former Premier of France. "My life has been nothing but a failure, and all that's left for me to do is to destroy my paintings before I disappear." Painters have often guessed wrong about their achievement; none guessed worse than Monet. He is, in fact, the only Impressionist other than Manet and Seurat whose work has consistently seemed relevant and useful to modern painters. One cannot imagine an artist "learning" from Renoir today. The difference is one of radical intent, of questions which Monet's work asked but did not always close, as most Renoirs are closed by their own unctuous completion.

Prophetic Figure. Seventy years ago, Monet posed all the queries that are central to informal, painterly abstraction while working on his haystacks, cathedral facades and lily ponds--and solved most of them. He is the Cezanne of Abstract Expressionism, like him a prophetic figure who was much greater than what he foretold. This fact was recognized by the "rediscovery" of Monet that took place in New York in the late '50s (a feast considerately laid on for the return of a Prodigal Father who had never actually been away).

How many thousand canvases produced in the last 20 years have echoed the muscular writhing of brush marks, the suffusing, arbitrary color and the dense, pasty, almost edible pigment that Monet, in 1918, incorporated into The Willow? In a study of African lilies growing beside his pond, the "modernity" of Monet's vision becomes even more pronounced. There is no horizon line; the fragment of reality he chose tips and squashes itself against the picture plane. A whole historical style is predicted in the vibration and flicker of yellow light on the water, the excited scribbles round the lily pads, and the deliberately blank areas of canvas that shine white against the effervescent paint.

There is an edge of smugness in the view of Monet that attributes his claim on our eyes to his modernity, we are prone to use the past as gratification, and think it good because it made us possible. But Monet did not labor for the sake of Philip Guston or Sam Francis. His actual greatness resides in the way in which he marked, and then transcended, his own cultural perimeter. He provoked Impressionism rather as Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon provoked Cubism; and the crucial encounter here was with an older painter, Eugene-Louis Boudin, whom he met somewhere around 1856.

Boudin introduced him to the idea of painting direct from the motif, en plein air. Painters like Constable and Turner had done this before but in watercolor; Courbet had done parts of his canvases on the scene and finished them in the studio. But the invention of ready-mixed oil paints in tubes made it possible for Boudin, and Monet after him, to carry through an entire painting in this way. Boudin's influence on his incomparably more gifted disciple was strong, and it can be seen as late as 1870 in the pearly sky, sand and sea of Camille Monet and Her Cousin on the Beach at Trouville. But the broad slap of Monet's brush and the vigorous striping of the girls' dresses have already gone beyond what Boudin had to teach.

From Memory. The word Impressionism was coined by a hostile critic from one of Monet's paintings of 1872, Impression: Sunrise, which by virtue of a chance bequest in 1948 was one of the few paintings the Marmottan already owned (and may be the only clue to why Monet fils chose the Marmottan). To the end of his life, Monet insisted that his one achievement was to have worked "directly from nature, striving to render my impressions in the face of the most fugitive effects."

This impulse lay behind his obsessive working in series, catching the alteration of light from hour to hour on the same haystack, the same fac,ade. But it does not explain the oddly abstract effect of such paintings. Nor does it account for the curious fact that Monet often painted from memory in a manner identical to his paintings from nature. The Houses of Parliament, London, with its diagonally surging, frayed green silhouette and glitter of thick silvery light, was produced at his house in France in 1905. For Monet's paintings become abstract to the extent that they accept light and color as absolutes.

"Energy is eternal Delight"--so wrote William Blake. This is the theme of the last 20 years of Monet's work. He apparently perceived in some intuitive way what science had just begun to formulate --that all matter, from Charing Cross Bridge to the lilies on his pond, was energy. And energy's clearest manifestation was the frothing matrix of light in which, hour by hour, the forms of nature were dissolved and reconstituted before Monet's failing, astonished eyes.

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