Letting Nature Reign Resplendent

By ROBERT HUGHES

, Claude Monet, the quintessential impressionist painter, was born in 1840. That year Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, and in France both Ingres and Delacroix were at work. In 1926, when Monet died, Lenin was two years dead, and Picasso was already a middle-aged man of 45. Having lived such a span, Monet in old age looked like a relic of the 19th century -- hardly a modern artist at all. What could his painting offer a postcubist culture?

A great deal, as it turned out. Ripeness was all. Monet produced his best work after he turned 50, and it came to form the essential link between symbolism, with its cult of the nuance and its obsession with "getting behind" ordinary reality, and abstract painting. You can hardly imagine Jackson Pollock's all-over drip paintings, for instance, without the example of late Monet. But the real value of Monet's work lies not in what it predicted or how it was used by later artists but in itself: its intensity and breadth of vision, its lyrical beauty and the disciplined subtlety of its address to the world. One can hardly get enough of late Monet, which is why the exhibition currently on view at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, "Monet in the '90s: The Series Paintings," is so rewarding. It samples all his series in depth -- notably grainstacks, Rouen Cathedral, Japanese bridges, poplars -- except the Water Lilies, which come after 1900 anyhow.

With this show and its catalog essay, curator Paul Hayes Tucker, the leading U.S. expert on Monet, has set out to amend a number of received ideas about the artist. Chief among them is Cezanne's opinion: "Only an eye, but my God! What an eye!" In this view, Monet becomes a painter of mere sensation, exquisitely attuned to every sense impression but lacking social point and intellectual fiber.

Such a reaction against impressionism was strong among younger painters of the 1880s. They were led by Georges Seurat, whose Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-86, is a manifesto of anti-impressionist aims: a hieratic, pseudoscientific, heavily theorized paean to timelessness, edged with mordant social irony about the mechanization of bourgeois life. For some it made sensuous pleasure look like an insufficient message for art. Impressionism was gaining no new adherents and losing some of its original ones: Sisley had run out of steam by the '80s, and Pissarro had gone over to the younger side, doing pointillist dots.

Monet's reply to anti-impressionist prejudice, Tucker argues, was to broaden - the base and subject matter of his work. He wanted to show that the greatest landscape painting in France could still be produced by impressionist means. "Nature should not be submitted to harsh, premeditated analysis, as in the Grande Jatte," he writes of Monet's attitude. "It should be allowed to reign in the painting as it does in the world -- resplendent in all its nuances, variants, subtleties and surprises."

So from the late '80s on, Monet labored to take impressionism out of Paris and the immediate environs of the Seine. He painted all over the country. Tucker suggests that much of his work, seemingly without social content and often without people in it at all, is actually a long lyrical evocation of a timeless France, a rebuke to the political imbroglios and financial scandals that obsessed Paris. Monet wanted to fix impressionism (especially his impressionism) in people's minds as a healing, patriotic style.

At the same time, he took to painting in series: the same image over and over again. Why so many versions? The reasons are complex, as the motives of any great artist are, but one was his desire to prove the ordering power of impressionism, its ability to set forth infinite discriminations of experience. How many times can you see the same thing and find it different? Monet's serial paintings look for an answer.

The first great achievement among his series was the Grainstacks of 1890-91. Monet painted at least 25 of them, and they seem almost polemical because their subject looks so odd and raw. What are these things? Anonymous structures of oats and wheat, circular, with conical tops. They look like primitive lumps, soft rocks. Why paint a lump? Partly, no doubt, because the grainstacks implied abundance, the nurturing power of deep France. But mainly because, in their very simplicity, they were a superb matrix for the changing effects of light and color. Sometimes Monet's grainstacks glow like furnaces, their shadow lines breaking into excited flurries of crimson and blue; sometimes they are dirty brown, between the inert pewter sky of winter and the white crust of snow.

The grainstacks also correct the often heard notion that Monet did them from start to finish in the open air. In fact, nearly all his work from the '90s was elaborately "harmonized," finished in the studio. One has only to look to see why: the surface is so built up with grainy scumbling over creamy licks of the brush, with thin glazes on top, that the layers needed plenty of time to dry. He would line up the growing series of canvases in the studio and stress the differences between one image and the next by incessant retouching.

Slow reflection governed all his work. The pressure of the motif was sublimated in the demands of the painting. Monet also made quite conscious gestures to art history. His series of poplars near his house in Giverny -- their slender, stately trunks along the banks of the Epte reflected in the water and forming an almost abstract palisade, the S shape of their bushed-out tops strung along like a festive garland -- pays homage to French rococo, Fragonard in particular. Like his lyric images of a stretch of the Seine from 1896 to 1897, the paintings show how unrelentingly conscious Monet was of the abstract basis of design, even when painting the mistiest veils of color.

The climax of this show is, inevitably, the Cathedrals, Monet's repeated views of the west front of the Gothic Cathedral of Rouen: art about art. Between 1892 and 1895 he produced 30 of them; ten are lined up in Boston. Some critics have shied away from them as pictorial near absurdities, Gothic rendered as melting ice cream, architecture without a line anywhere. It would be hard to argue this for long in front of the paintings themselves. How could such an endlessly complicated form as this Gothic facade, with all its peaks, hollows, spires, bosses and moldings, be so fully rendered in terms of color and the space that color creates? Monet's control is astounding. With the sun behind it, the facade is a looming cliff of blue shadows; as the light moves onto its face, it becomes a stupendously intricate cellular structure, a vertical reef of stone, its grain and warmth evoked by the texture of the paint, flushed by radiance, in which every last touch of pigment seems operative.

Monet's power to evoke substance through paint was as strong as Rembrandt's. The next 100 years would be full of art about art, but one may doubt whether any of it quite equaled the level of intelligence and passion -- both seizing the motif and respectfully deferring to it -- that is figured forth in Monet's Cathedrals.