Save us from Monet mania
A genius, of course. But as yet ANOTHER Monet exhibition is unveiled, one art lover says: Oh, do try something more original
Claude Monet had a soft spot — and a sweet tooth —
for a galette des pommes. In the summer of 1882, the painter decamped to a hotel in the French resort Pourvillesur-Mer, where the house speciality was a galette of caramelised apples with an almond frangipane filling.
that summer, Monet, who had made his name with Impressionism — a movement which radically championed seemingly ‘unfinished’ works painted outdoors — sketched two of these tarts, side by side, on raffia placemats.
the slices of apple are golden, cooked in sugar and Calvados — the French apple brandy — and arranged in a Catherine wheel pattern. the pastry is softly flaky. a bottle of something amber-coloured waits beside the galettes, and a sharp knife is ready on the tablecloth. It is a delicious painting. Monet’s paintings are delicious, irresistible even. the dahlias painted in his garden at argenteuil, four miles from Paris, are blowsy and gorgeous. His meadows are a mille-fleurs dream, his snow is softest powder and his avenues of poplars stir in a painted breeze.
You believe that nymphs might comb their hair among his waterlilies, and you could sunbathe in the light that shimmers from his paintings of Rouen Cathedral. He even makes the thames of 1871 — the pestilential waterway of Charles dickens’s late novels — gleam like an alpine lake.
But has Monet become a little too irresistible? this week, a great brouhaha has blown up about whether galleries are overly reliant on stalwart, crowd-pleasing Monet. the Royal academy of arts (Ra) has announced its next blockbuster exhibition will be Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse. a third of the works will carry Monet’s name.
the news comes only a month after the national Gallery’s Inventing Impressionism exhibition closed.
Some art historians have publicly wondered if we haven’t perhaps had enough of Monsieur Monet. Might the gallery-going public not be suffering from ‘Monet fatigue’?
RICHaRd SHone, editor of the venerable art journal the Burlington Magazine, says: ‘It’s a name that exhibition organisers almost automatically put on to a title even if the artist is hardly represented.
‘It does seem a little late in the day... It’s coming at the end of many Monet shows. I think they’re a bit desperate for their historical shows. Getting these works costs a fortune, but it does put money in the coffers of the Ra, which has no government grant. But it’s going a little far.’
there’s no doubt that Monet means money. a Monet show will sell not only tickets by the tens of thousands, but tea towels, biscuit tins, chocolate truffle boxes, key rings, postcards and souvenir white-lace parasols. (they do a very brisk trade in parasols in the gift shop at Giverny, Monet’s country retreat.)
as long ago as 1999, there were concerns that our galleries were too dependent on Monet. Reporting from the Ra, where queues stretched the length of the courtyard and out on to Piccadilly, BBC correspondent Jane o’Brien described ‘Monet mania’ as 10,000 people traipsed through the doors for Monet In the 20th Century.
and it is a case of shuffling sardines. at Inventing Impressionism in the basement of the national Gallery this spring, visitors jostled and dodged through stuffy, crowded rooms to admire — oh, irony! — cool, shady paintings of river banks and springtime gardens.
there was one drowsy, pinkish Monet of a
woman falling asleep over her novel beneath a tree. It was accompanied by novelist and critic Emile Zola’s description of ‘a woman dressed in white, sitting in the shade of the foliage, her dress dotted with bright sequins like drops of water’. How we visitors wilted hotly in front of it.
Since 1990, there have been at least eight major Monet exhibitions in Britain, four of them at the RA. Monet has also made appearances at any number of smaller galleries, such as Compton Verney in Warwickshire, which, in 2012, showed Into The Light: French And British Painting From Impressionism To The Early 1920s.
It’s a good thing Monet was so prolific, otherwise there simply wouldn’t be enough of him to go round. There is a danger, though, that he becomes ubiquitous: the go-to artist for lilies, cornflowers, haystacks, Japanese bridges, pears and all things nice.
His prettiest paintings in pastel colours are undoubtedly charming, and have been shown time and time again to delight gallery visitors and part them happily from their money in the gift shop. But couldn’t our galleries and museums mount more of a challenge? Must they pander to a popular taste for loveliness and fondly remembered French holidays?
I’d like to see the gauntlet laid down with an exhibition of Monet’s contemporary Edgar Degas’s dark and dingy Paris paintings: crumpled absinthe drinkers, gas-lit bedrooms with bare floorboards, a sprawled jockey thrown from his horse during a race, the claustrophobic interior of a criminal court.
Instead, the RA gave us the Degas And The Ballet: Picturing Movement exhibition, with its tutus and satin slippers.
Or what about the neglected JeanFrancois Millet, a generation older than Monet, who painted austere scenes of rural peasants at a time when the Industrial Revolution was building filthy, coal railroads and factories over their fields and farms?
When Monet paints haystacks they are neat, golden beehives captured on a hazy, harvest afternoon; when Millet paints haystacks they are the backdrop to a portrait of stooping poverty as three women gather the last ‘gleanings’ left behind in the fields.
But we shouldn’t lay all the blame for unimaginative exhibitions at Monet’s door. I could quite happily take a decade’s break from the blasted Pre-Raphaelites John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt.
And have we not had enough J. M. W. Turner for now? There was Late Turner — Painting Set Free at Tate Britain this year; Turner And The Sea at the National Maritime Museum last year; Turner And Constable: Sketching From Nature at the Turner Contemporary in Margate the year before; and Turner Inspired: In The Light Of Claude at the National Gallery the year before that.
Yes, Turner is wonderful. But he is not the only great landscape artist Britain has ever produced. Let us rehabilitate Richard Wilson and William Daniell, let us put their lakes and caverns on magnets.
AND please let us have more William Hogarth, the great artist satirist, in all his bawdy, brawling glory. Rakes! Harlots! The Bedlam madhouse! Rigged elections and corrupt bawds! All the makings of a blockbuster exhibition.
It is understandable that galleries should keep one eye on their accounts — especially at a time of cuts — but it is regrettable when financial anxieties keep curators from taking a risk with an artist who might not be quite so bankable as Monet or Turner, but who a cohort of gallery visitors might discover and fall in love with.
‘There’s a crucial distinction to be made between “Monet fatigue” and “Monet exhibition fatigue”,’ explains Ian Dejardin, director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London.
‘I suffer from the latter, big time — but turning a corner in an art gallery and encountering a Monet or two is always a reminder of what a magician with paint he was.
‘I see very little sign of the general public getting tired of him. And a subset of “general public” is, unfortunately, sponsors — in particular, corporate sponsors — who know that where getting a “bang for their buck” is concerned, Monet will deliver. When you’ve sat in as many boardrooms as I have, trying to “sell” a great artist that “no one’s ever heard of” to a potential sponsor, the utter bankability of dear old Claude begins to seem pretty attractive.’
Still, the odd brave punt does pay off. It has been heartening to follow the storming success of the current Eric Ravilious watercolour exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London. With six weeks still to run, it is on course to be the most-visited exhibition in the gallery’s history.
Ravilious has been deeply unfashionable for decades — thought slightly twee, muted, unshowy, oldfashioned. Yet something about him has enchanted gallery-goers.
Perhaps we are all exhausted by brash, noisy, show-off modern Britain with its bleeping mobile phones, Twitter storms, delayed trains and Tube strikes — and find ourselves keening for tea on the lawn, cricket on the village green and Pullman railway carriages.
It was brave to bet on Ravilious’s unassuming watercolours, rather than Monet’s poplars or Turner’s beaches. Yet Dulwich is busily adding late openings to find room for everyone who wants to visit.
And not a waterlily to be seen.