Modern master
Monet at the National Gallery makes the heart sing
At first sight, Claude Monet’s first major London exhibition in 20 years has a slight air of barrel-scraping. The great impressionist is one of art’s guaranteed crowd-pleasers – and ticket sellers – and every aspect of his preoccupation with landscape has already been raked over in blockbuster after blockbuster: water-lilies, gardens, the Normandy coast – there’s even been an entire show of his paintings of haystacks.
This exhibition proudly claims to be the first to focus on Monet’s “interest in architecture” – which feels odd. Buildings undoubtedly feature in his work – from Rouen Cathedral to the Houses of Parliament – but his revolutionary approach to them is surely more about breaking form down into pulsating fragments of light and colour than trying to understand architectural structure.
A collection of dour and ordinary little paintings open the show, chosen to demonstrate that, for all his interest in the railway stations and beer gardens of the modern world, the young Monet was still attached to romantic notions of the picturesque. If this is just about borne out in works such as the Lieutenance at Honfleur, 1864, with its cluster of dark medieval buildings, and Street in Sainte-adresse, 1867, with its villagers wandering down a muddy lane, I suspect that to a contemporary viewer they would have appeared remarkable for their uncompromising mundanity – Monet’s lane really does look cold and muddy – rather than for their nods towards a romantic, literary past.
The second room gives us a selection of glorious cliff-top views in Monet’s native Normandy, from the positively giddy The Church at Varengeville, with its tiny steepled chapel bathed in opalescent evening light, and the Japanese-flavoured From the top of the Cliffs, Dieppe, both 1882, with its cluster of modern villas perched by a plunging cliff-edge.
While the wall texts make much of Monet’s focus on these man-made structures, they seem to be the aspect of these scenes that least interest him. The show’s idea that buildings provide Monet with his point of interest is particularly difficult to sustain in a picture such as The Cliff at Varengeville, 1882, where there is no building, until you notice a modest roof in the middle distance, and the glistening, but sketchy presence of a town on the far side of the bay – elements that hardly change our perception of a jolly good land and seascape.
The show’s premise that Monet used architecture to “structure and enliven his art” becomes more tenable as it drifts towards the urban. Where many, if not most, artists of his time would have found the encroachment of bright brick villas and Parisian tourists along the glorious Normandy shore an appalling intrusion, Monet seems to simply accept it in works such as The Beach at Trouville and On the Boardwalk at Trouville, both 1870. Yet if the brilliant, fresh morning light gives these paintings a wonderfully optimistic feel, it’s the capturing of that light in the patterns of clouds and bright boardwalk that preoccupies Monet, rather than the hazily rendered buildings.
His interest is primarily optical, and his tone impassive, though merely by focusing on something he’s conferring a kind of approval. As the show arrives in Paris, at that time the modern metropolis par excellence, he’s clearly excited by the accelerated development taking place all around him.
In The Coal Heavers, 1875, with its lines of silhouetted men carrying baskets of coal along perilous planks from barges to shore, it’s the visual pattern these figures create, with its clear echoes of Japanese masters such as Hokusai, that dominates. In the magnificent The Boulevard des Capucines, 1873, with its view down onto one of Haussmann’s spanking new boulevards, it isn’t the looming apartment blocks he focuses on, but the way the sunlight hits the bare trees blocking these buildings from view.
Meanwhile the National Gallery’s The Gare Saint-lazare, 1877, with its blue locomotive smoke rising into a cavernous engine-shed, is one of 12 scenes in and around the Paris station that capture the energy and dynamism of the then still relatively new railways. Again, however, Monet’s emphasis – rightly – is on the trains, the steam and the sense of movement, rather than the building itself.
Make no mistake, though – the mere fact of being able to see such works is a joy in itself. There is much here to make the heart sing and, in the penultimate room your jaw to drop in awe. Five of Monet’s great series of views of Rouen Cathedral, with the gothic façade dissolving into pure light and colour, face three of his iconic paintings of the Palace of Westminster, with the immense Victoria Tower looming through veils of toxic fog. Around them hang five magisterial scenes of bridges over the Thames. Monet was intensely aware of the numinous power of these buildings: the cathedral with its sense of spiritual encrustation through time; the Houses of Parliament, a vast cliff-like monument to British imperial power. But unlike many lesser painters who’ve been seduced by such buildings, he makes sure it’s his fundamentally radical vision that’s the dominant element. And standing amid these paintings, you feel that to quite spine-tingling effect.
Monet was the first great artist both to embrace the modern world in all its forms, and to look with a generous inclusiveness at everything in the visual world around him. One can quibble over the use of the word architecture and the show overstates its arguments, particularly in its early stages, but it has brought together a magnificent, life-enhancing collection of paintings to make its case.