Monet: Impression Sunrise National Gallery of Australia, Canberra until September 1, 2019
It’s hard to Imagine finding something new to say about yet another blockbusting impressionist exhibition. And yet, Monet: Impression Sunrise gives a surprisingly fresh take on the emblematic painter of the movement. Instead of presenting him having sprung, like Athena, fully armed from Zeus’s brow, this exhibition places him as a first among equals, surrounded by and inspired by European painters who were pushing similar boundaries.
Art history orthodoxy makes a turning point of the rebellious exhibition in which Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, depicting the port of Le Havre enveloped in morning mist, first appeared in public. It was in the first independent show he and his friends – Cézanne, Pissarro, Degas, Morisot, Renoir and others – organised, in Paris in 1874, and its title gave rise to the name of their movement. Conservative critics and other supporters of the Royal Academy, which held its own illustrious exhibition of “real” art annually, were scathing about the sketchiness of the works. They could not yet understand that light and colour were replacing form as the primary aspect of artistic perception. One coined the term “impressionism” contemptuously, apropos of Monet’s painting, and the name stuck. Between them, they seemed unsure whether the artists were lazy, seeking notoriety or just having a lend.
Most of the Monets in this exhibition come from the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, which has the largest holdings of the artist’s work, including the estate of his son, Michel Monet. The Canberra exhibition was organised by the museum’s head curator, the erudite and imaginative Marianne Mathieu.
That the NGA has been lent the emblematic hero painting is an honour. But more interesting, perhaps, is the lineage Mathieu presents. Some of Monet’s influences seem obvious, such as the master of light, the English painter of the sublime, J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851). The Canberra exhibition contains three of his paintings. Closer to home, Eugène Boudin (1824–98) and Gustave Courbet (1819–77) were influences on the younger painter and the show contains examples of both.
The Dutch painter Johan Jongkind (1819–91), famous in his day for his seascapes, may be less well known. When Monet saw his work, he was struck by the Dutchman’s use of colour composition. “From this moment on,” Monet said, “he was my true master, and it is to him that I owe the final education of my eye.” Six of Jongkind’s paintings are in Canberra.
There is also a fascinating forensic examination of the location of Impression, Sunrise. Le Havre was destroyed in World War Two and it has been a pet project of Mathieu’s to discover exactly where Monet was looking when he made the painting and whether it was indeed at sunrise or, maybe, at sunset. M