Overdose of genius

The exhibition invites us to ‘discover the untold story’ of the impressionists, but can there be too much of a good thing?

Claude Monet’s Haystacks, midday [Meules, milieu du jour] (1890). National Gallery of Australia

Last year Nick Mitzevich, as head of the Art Gallery of South Australia, put on Colours of Impressionism, a very creditable loan exhibition from the Musee d’Orsay; this year, as head of the National Gallery of Australia, he has ventured, perhaps rashly, to mount yet another Monet show. How many do we need? It seems only a few years since the National Gallery of Victoria put on the lacklustre and uneven Monet’s Garden, borrowed from the Musee Marmottan in Paris (2013), and before that there was Terence Maloon’s much more substantial Monet and the Impressionists at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2008) from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. But gallery directors and their marketing people can’t go past the names that sell: Monet, Picasso, Warhol, Pollock; and apparently the public can’t get enough of them either, even when what is served up is not always of the highest quality.

Different brands, in the marketing world, are pitched at different demographics; Monet seems to be aimed at the middle-aged and elderly, who are notably represented in the gallery while I am there, not taking selfies, as girls tend to do in lightweight contemporary exhibitions, but standing in front of the paintings and ­fussily trying to photograph them instead of looking at them. Nor will anything stop the marketers dragging out the usual empty cliches about breaking with academic conventions, even to an audience with little idea what those conventions were supposed to be. The online trailer for the exhibition invites us to “discover the untold story” of the impressionist movement. Of course, the idea that, after countless publications and exhibitions, any story about the impressionists could still be left untold is utterly implausible. The idea that such a story might be about to be revealed in Canberra is even odder. But perhaps the point is to prepare us for the suggestion that we should see impressionism as arising partly out of British and continental plein-air landscape painting.

Monet’s Impression, sunrise [Impression, soleil levant] (1872). Musee Marmottan Monet, Paris/Christian Baraja

To support this not exactly novel argument, the first rooms are filled with a selection of pictures by Turner, Boudin, Jongkind and some others, and particularly three large Turners borrowed from the Tate and from Yale, with some smaller ones from the various Australian state galleries. The overall effect in these first rooms is rather dull, apart from a couple of memorable pictures. The first of these is Joseph Wright of Derby’s A view of Vesuvius from Posillipo (1788-90), which has nothing whatsoever to do with impressionism but is a meticulously finished studio painting based on plein-air sketches, in the neoclassical manner. What fascinates Wright is the contrast between the warmth of the red light from the volcanic eruption that dominates the right side of the painting and the coolness of the moonlight that bathes the left side. In the middle, perched on the hill, is a villa which he may have imagined as the former home of Virgil.

Detail from Monet’s Waterlilies [Nymphéas] (c.1914–17). National Gallery of Australia

The other striking picture is a little painting of a beach at Trouville, northwestern France, by Gustave Courbet, painted in 1865, and thus before the artist got himself into trouble by joining the Paris Commune after the city fell to the Germans in 1871. These were also the years in which the impressionist vision was beginning to be articulated, although the artists would not exhibit as a group until 1874, when they fortuitously acquired their name from the painting that has given its title to this exhibition.

Courbet’s work is a charming picture, evoking a sense of vastness on a small scale, aided by the tiny but economical figures of the walking man and his dog on the right. But it has nothing in common with the specific way of looking at the world that appears in the work of Monet; space, scale and perspective all matter for Courbet in a way that is more romantic than anything else.

There is a particular emphasis on the possible influence on Monet of another romantic, and that is why the exhibition includes so many pictures, of rather mixed quality, by Turner. We do know that Monet saw and admired some works by Turner while he was in London during the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune (the winter of 1870-71), but it is hard to know exactly what influence these works had on his art. As is clear from the exquisite Magpie of 1868-69, the star of the Adelaide exhibition last year, his approach to light was already fully formulated before his visit to London.

Whatever impression the works of Turner may have made on Monet at this stage, it cannot have been more than casual or adventitious, and it certainly did not reflect a convergence of aims, for Turner did not have the same interest in fleeting impressions of light and weather. He began as an emulator of Claude Lorrain and developed in a metaphysical, rather than optical, direction, gradually eliminating the element of earth from views that were increasingly reduced to a tumult of fire and water.

At the end of the century, after the heyday of the impressionist movement and when Monet was taking his style further and into new territory, he revisited London and looked more closely at Turner. Even then his approach to the art of painting was very different, but he was now in a position to ponder metaphysical and transcendent implications that were closer to his own aims. In the 1860s and 70s, however, Monet’s view of the world was fundamentally non-spiritual and non-metaphysical. He was simply concerned with finding an authentic vision, and that led him to pursue the immediacy of momentary sensation, the look and feeling of dawn light on a river bank for example, so momentary that it will have begun to change into something else by the time he puts up the easel.

Why is it that for Monet, and for a group of artists either influenced by him or coinciding in feeling, the authentic comes to reside in the ephemeral? It doesn’t have to: in Claude Lorrain’s work the authentic is found in the perennial. But this is precisely the kind of question that art history has to ponder, in the same way that literary history considers the different aperture of subjective experience in, say, Balzac and Proust. Perhaps the most plausible explanation is to see the emphasis on the personal, the immediate and the ephemeral as the last guarantee of the truth of personal experience in a mass society that reduces us to uniformity and regiments us into conformism. We can only be sure of the truth of what we witness personally at a specific moment.

And this is what we can see in the famous Impression, soleil levant, which is one of the three best Monets in the exhibition. Compared to other landscapes nearby, especially the large Boudin, this one is entirely unified and subordinated to the single focus of the subject. Neither space, nor depth nor the representation of any particular motif is a priority, although it is only because Monet has a completely confident grasp of all these phenomena that he can afford to treat them as he does.

Light, colour and tone are thus all perfectly harmonised, and perhaps temperature of colour above all, for the subject of the picture, as the sun just rises over the harbour, is the warmth of its light that begins to spread over and through a scene dominated by the cool bluish water and the shadows of night. This picture is among the high points of the show, but it is also when our heart sinks to realise that this is once again a selection drawn from the Musee Marmottan, which gave us the dreary 2013 exhibition in Melbourne. And what is the problem with the Marmottan? Basically that most of its Monet pictures come from the contents of his studio at his death, and everyone should realise that what is left in an artist’s studio when he dies is largely what he couldn’t sell, or perhaps just couldn’t finish satisfactorily.

The same is true of Hopper’s, Picasso’s or Turner’s studios, and while the trustees of these collections should treat the material care, they should think twice about exhibiting most of it, and ask themselves whether it really brings credit on the artist.

The Marmottan has two different sets of work related to Monet, which are here sensibly exhibited in distinct spaces. One was the collection of Georges de Bellio, which included Impression, soleil levant and was inherited by his daughter Victorine and eventually given to the museum in 1940. The other represents the works in Monet’s studio at his death in 1926, left to the Musee Marmottan by his son Michel in 1966.

Monet’s Train in the snow. Locomotive [La Train dans la neige. La Locomotive] (1875). Musee Marmottan Monet, Paris/Bridgeman Images.

The de Bellio collection contains several other good paintings, including a charming landscape by Sisley and an evocative winter scene by Monet from 1875, with a train passing through a snowy country landscape. There are a couple of other pictures that are good but not remarkable, and some, like the view of a railway station, or another snow scene, that are somewhat unresolved.

It is a different matter with the works from the Michel Monet donation. Some are weak, some unfinished, some seem to speak painfully of the ageing painter’s failing eyesight. It is all too obvious why they were never selected for sale by Monet’s dealer. And it is equally clear why no major institution was eager to accept the legacy of these works. A wall panel tries to imply that this was shortsighted and that their value is now recognised.

One of the better pieces from this set of work is a small lily-pond. Looked at strictly in isolation, it is far from a strong picture, but it looks quite respectable hanging next to and supported by the National Gallery’s own lily-pond painting, which sensibly dominates the vista into the last room. In the second-last space, the NGA’s Haystacks (1890) stands out luminously opposite a very bad picture of a boat flanked by two unfinished views.

We can be grateful that the NGA has a couple of good examples of Monet’s work so at least viewers are not left thinking that the Marmottan pictures are representative of the artist’s genius. But something is clearly not right when most of the best pictures in a loan exhibition — let alone a blockbuster — come from the host gallery’s own collection.

Monet: Impression, sunrise

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, until September 1