A world of reflections in NGV's Monet exhibition

THE strength of the National Gallery of Victoria's Monet exhibition is in the artist's later garden pictures.

THE Musee Marmottan in Paris was not originally a museum of impressionism but was transformed by the bequest in 1966 of a large number of works by Claude Monet's son Michel.

The collection included the picture that ended up giving the movement its name after a journalist made a disparaging remark about it - Impression, Sunrise (1872) - a reminder of how contingent such appellations are. The futurists and surrealists, for example, trumpeted their movements in manifestos, while mannerism and the baroque were named retrospectively and gothic was originally an expression of scorn.

Impressionism, as it turned out, was the first of many modern movements to pass through a life cycle of initial opposition followed by increasing acceptance and eventual canonisation, a cycle that after many iterations has now been shortened dramatically so the phase of opposition has reduced to a rhetorical trope of publicists - work is routinely described as controversial - followed by the immediate embrace of an eager market.

It seems odd now to think impressionism could ever have been controversial: it is in many ways the most accessible and even indulgent of styles, requiring much less active engagement, prior knowledge or even visual sensitivity than the art of the 17th century, for example. There perhaps has never been a style that seems to offer itself so readily as the object of undemanding pleasure, which accounts for its popularity even today, while it is often justified within a progressivist view of the history of modernism as the precursor to abstraction. Both the ease of enjoyment and the spurious vindication, in the end, can get in the way of appreciating the true qualities of the best impressionist pictures.

To understand the initial opposition to impressionism, one has to realise two things. One is that the French for centuries have taken their national culture very seriously, from the Academie Francaise established under Cardinal Richelieu for the improvement of the French language to the post-war cultural initiatives of Andre Malraux as Charles de Gaulle's minister of culture. The other is French history in the 19th century. Indeed just as the artistic movements of the 20th century evolve around the historical armature, as it were, of the two wars, the Depression and post-war tensions, 19th-century art unfolds during the period from the fall of Napoleon in 1815 to the beginning of World War I in 1914, punctuated by the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the unification of Italy in 1860 and the event most relevant to impressionism, the Franco-Prussian War and its consequences in 1870-71.

This was a conflict in which France became collateral damage in the unification of Germany - or the takeover by Prussia of the other German states, apart from Austria - as a result of which Napoleon III was forced to abdicate, while Paris was occupied briefly by the revolutionary Commune before its bloody suppression by the army of the new republic. France, for centuries the great power of the continent, was mortally humiliated by this defeat, which is why it was so ready to take up arms again in 1914. And when, only a few years after the Franco-Prussian War, the impressionists held their first exhibition in 1874, the apparent facility and indulgence of the new style were shocking because they seemed evidence of a general deliquescence of the national spirit.

It didn't take long for the public and the market to adjust to the new style, and impressionist pictures became ever more popular and sought-after by rich collectors, including an impressive number of Americans, towards the end of the century and the beginning of the new one.

The market has continued to rise since, and the Musee Marmottan was the object of a dramatic raid by armed bandits in 1985, when several works including the eponymous Impression, Sunrise itself was stolen. Eventually the criminals were uncovered and the pictures were recovered at a villa in Corsica in 1990.

A selection of works from the Marmottan constitutes the greater part of this year's Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition under the title Monet's Garden. The Marmottan is one museum in Paris that I have never visited, so it is hard to judge the collection by what has been sent to Melbourne, but one senses the same sort of problem that there is with the Musee Picasso, whose exhibition was in Sydney last year. The trouble with collections based on the contents of an artist's studio, or the works they left at their death, is that they tend to be a mixed bag. The positive spin is they are the pieces the artist kept; the negative reality is often that they are the ones that didn't sell or that weren't finished, or simply studies never intended for exhibition.

There were a lot of weak pieces in the Picasso exhibition and, for that matter, a lot of weak Turners in the Art Gallery of South Australia's Turner show, also based on a contents-of-the-studio collection. I've commented before on our obsession with the size of blockbusters. It does no service, either to a museum or an artist, to pad out shows with inferior works simply in order to reach a level of blockbuster overkill.

As the title of the Melbourne show implies, its strength lies in the later garden pictures, while its coverage of the earlier phases of the artist's career is perfunctory. Nothing makes this point more clearly than the fact that the best picture in the first room is the National Gallery of Victoria's own beautiful view of Vetheuil, hung beside a distinctly lesser rendition of the same subject from the Marmottan. Rather perversely, the same thing happens in the second room where, although there are some good works from Paris, the NGV's fine painting of the crashing waves at Etretat (1883) is juxtaposed with an indifferent coastal view.

There are two things that make this exhibition worth visiting, nonetheless. The first is the paintings of the garden and in particular of the lily pond - though even here the selection of largely sketches and studies is supplemented with a finished view of the Japanese bridge (from the Chicago Art Institute) - and the second is the deeply moving spectacle of the elderly artist struggling against compromised and diminishing eyesight in his effort to carry on working.

After early poverty, Monet eventually grew very prosperous and was able to afford a large house and, especially, the beautiful garden at Giverny, carefully designed and laid out and tended by a staff of gardeners. It is equally interesting, though, that a painter so devoted to painting en plein air - though we see that in the case of the London or Rouen paintings plein-air could mean a hotel room conveniently situated opposite the motif - should end up creating his own artificial ensemble of natural motifs, like an artist's equivalent of a film set in which landscapes could be painted under controlled conditions and without the hazards and interruptions of work in the field.

But the garden represents more than another solution to the problems of working directly from nature. It also recalls the garden of Epicurus, where the philosopher withdrew from the bustle of urban life and the distractions of contemporary politics to find peace of mind in the midst of nature. Monet was far from an intellectual or a philosopher, but his garden became a place of introspection and communion and of moments of almost mystical experience that could be articulated only in the form of paintings.

The most poetic of these are the lily pond pictures in which the artist looks down into the water and there is no horizon or sky to relativise this world of reflections and consign it to a secondary status of reality. Monet would almost certainly have been unaware of the reference, but Leon Battista Alberti centuries before had proposed the conceit that Narcissus, symbolically speaking, was the inventor of painting, the art of grasping the image on the surface of the pool.

In Monet's reflected world, we rediscover the sky, trees and clouds above, but inverted, distorted and reduced from the solidity of substantial reality to the flux of uncertain appearance. It is a striking image of the dissolution of the external world in the fluid medium of subjective experience, analogous to the alchemy by which Marcel Proust too dissolves the world into thought, imagination and memory, and no doubt why the latter based Elstir, the painter of his novel, on the figure of Monet. At the same time, just as Proust, through the elaborate play of language, constantly draws our attention to the surface of the text in which this metamorphosis takes place, Monet makes us sense the invisible skin of the reflecting water, marked by the floating lily pads.

But even an epicurean garden is not immune from the vicissitudes of the outside world, of war and age, illness and death. One of a sequence of three pond views is unusually violently coloured in blood-red sunset hues. Monet was, naturally, profoundly depressed by the loss of his second wife, Alice, in 1911 and his elder son, Jean, in 1913, and for a time almost stopped painting, until he was encouraged to go on by his friend Georges Clemenceau, prime minister of France in 1906-09 and during the crucial years from 1917 to 1920; from being a threat to the national spirit, Monet's painting had by World War I turned into an expression of its resilience.

What is particularly striking about the later pictures is not only the pursuit of the vision in the water on a grander scale, now with the ambition of making a kind of public monument, but the artist's own struggle with age and failing sight. Operations on his cataracts restored some lost vision but for a time left his perception of colour deeply perturbed. There are works that are tentative or confused, and some that Monet certainly never would have wanted to put on public display.

Most moving are the last pictures, in which the same motifs recur: the bridge, the alley of roses; the sense of introversion is acute, as is the feeling that he is painting things he knows are there even if they are imperfectly seen. There are moments of grace and transcendence, like a great bough covered in red roses, reminiscent of van Gogh's late almond blossoms; and there are two views of the house in hues of fiery sunset red, so different from his usual cool palette, evoking mortality and the desperate will to continue to see the world that was his inspiration and, in the end, the medium for his thinking as a painter.

Monet's Garden: The Musee Marmottan Monet, Paris
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, until September 8