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| Claude Monet, The Japanese Bridge, c1923-5 |
(The following review is published in Landscape Issues, Vol.15, Nos.1 & 2, May 2016)
Claude
Monet is undoubtedly the star of this huge show – supported by a cast of some
40 other painters. Although the exhibition title signals a historical span
bookended by Monet and Matisse, it is notable that the later giant of Modern
art is represented by a paltry two paintings to Monet’s 35 or so.
It is,
nevertheless, quite fitting that this should be so: given the premise of the
exhibition, that many pioneers of modern painting were enthusiastic gardeners,
and engaged in a productive dialogue between the possibilities of horticulture
and painting, Monet is in a league of his own. Not only did his garden at
Giverny become the exclusive subject of his painting, but the garden itself was
a work of art. Monet was no mere Sunday-gardener, he was nothing less than a
landscape architect. Over a period of 40 years, from 1890, he developed and
extended a country garden into a 6-acre composition of foliage and flowers;
eventually he was able to employ 6 gardeners and divert a local river to create
the famous water garden with its iconic Japanese bridge. Monet declared that
his garden was his studio.
The
period spanned by the exhibition – roughly 1864 to 1928 – was, art
historically, one of extraordinary invention and experiment. Modernism was
forged in wave after wave of avant-gardism: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism,
Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism. Broadly, this is a story of
escalating ‘difficulty’ in painting – difficulty for the viewer, that is, as
what was seen in paintings became increasingly disconnected from what could be
seen in the natural world and increasingly engaged with psychology, abstraction
and provocation, to say nothing of revolutionary politics.
Understandably,
there is little of that revolutionary ilk here – the section rather cornily
labelled ‘avant-gardeners’ does present some of the major figures of that extraordinary
period – Van Gogh, Klimt, Klee, Kandinsky, Nolde, Matisse – but, Nolde and
Klimt, aside this fairly tame section feels like a distraction from the main
business of supplying visual pleasure and, in particular, the pleasure of
flowers.
The
overriding aesthetic ethos of this exhibition is Impressionism. It is hard, now,
to believe that Impressionism was ever shocking. Impressionism may have
initially, and briefly, provoked a negative response – to a public and to critics
weaned on polished, academic pictures, the brushy smudges of pure colour seemed
unfinished and hard to ‘read’ – but, eventually, once the idea of a spontaneous
response to the play of light on the natural world was grasped, the movement
became, and remains, immensely popular. While more radical avant-gardism was
intent on épater les bourgeois the Impressionists forged an art that was
bourgeois to its core, intent principally on visual pleasure. Impressionism
combined here with gardening is a cast-iron crowd pleaser.
The
exhibition is, indeed, rich in visual pleasure for both the connoisseurs of
painting and of horticulture – though, perhaps, less reliably so for the
latter. The joy of Impressionism is that the painters played fast and loose
with the visual sensations offered by the sunlit scenes before them so that flowers
become sensuous smears of red, orange, white and blue rather than botanically
accurate representations.
Overall,
I think there is more to be learned here about the development of modern
painting than about the ‘modern garden’ of the title. Highlights include
marvellously ethereal paintings by Berthe Morisot (Woman and Child in a Meadow,
1882) and Edouard Manet (Young Woman among Flowers, 1879); Max Liebermann’s Flowering
Bushes by the Garden Shed, 1928, rendered in thick, dense, glossy smears of
paint; Joaquin Mir y Trinxet’s intense veils of colour in Garden of Mogoda, 1915-19;
Emil Nolde’s slabs of deep blue, bright red, yellow and green forming a solid wall
of blooms in Flower Garden (O), 1922; and Gustav Klimt’s cascade of flowers in Cottage
Garden, 1905-07. Perhaps one of the oddest, yet most interesting, paintings is
Henri Matisse’s The Rose Marble Table, 1917: the salmony-pink, octagonal table,
stands against a predominantly brown ground relieved only by some dark green
foliage; on the table’s perspectivally tilted surface is a small basket and
three small green spheres of what might be fruit. The uncharacteristic gloom of
this picture, by a typically joyful painter, is ascribed to then ongoing
horrors of the Great War.
Finally,
however, the show belongs to Monet. Three rooms are devoted to his paintings.
In the first, situated in the middle of the exhibition, are paintings executed
from around 1895 to 1905: some of his much reproduced paintings of the Japanese
footbridge across the pond in his garden are so familiar that they seem like
clichés; however, the paintings of water lilies and swathes of blossom are seductively
subtle essays in colour and form. The other two rooms form the climax to the
exhibition and are simply stunning. In the first of these The Japanese Bridge
c1923-25 is a dense shimmer of deep, rich reds and greens dissolving the form
of the bridge so that it is only just perceptible.
The final
room is spectacular. On one side is the huge Water Lilies (after 1918) - a 4
metre-wide haze of pale yellow-greens within which occasional highlights of
orange-red flowers glow. And opposite is the truly immense triptych, Water
Lilies (Agapanthus), c1915-26, altogether some 12 metres wide: this stands not
just as the apotheosis of Monet’s career as a painter but is pregnant with the
then future possibilities of painting and abstraction. Magnificent.
Richard Salkeld.
(Click on images to enlarge.)
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| Edouard Manet, Young Woman Among Flowers, 1879 |
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| Gustav Klimt, Cottage Garden, 1905-07 |
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| Emil Nolde, Large Poppies, 1908 |
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| Emil Nolde, Flower Garden (O), 1922 |
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Santiago Rusiñol, Glorieta VII, Aranjuez, 1919
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| Joaquin Mir y Trinxet, The Artist's Garden, c1922 |
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| Claude Monet, Water Lilies, after 1918 |
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| Claude Monet, Water Lilies (Agapanthus), c1915-26 (detail) |
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| Claude Monet, Water Lilies (Agapanthus), c1915-26 (installation view) |
