The Mature Monet -- Portland Show Offers A Darker Look At The Master Impressionist

------------------------------- Visual arts review

"Monet: Late Paintings of Giverny from the Musee Marmottan," through Jan. 3, at the Portland Art Museum, 1219 S.W. Park Ave., Portland; 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily; tickets are $11 for adults, $6 for children, and are sold for specific dates and entry hours; 206-292-ARTS. -------------------------------

PORTLAND - Mounting a Claude Monet show is an art-world no-brainer. Exhibit a few of the impressionist master's beloved blue and green images of water lilies, and crowds will flock to see them.

The artist's shimmering, light-dappled landscapes and busy urban scenes were considered so radical in 1874 when they were first exhibited in mainstream Paris salons that critics scoffed that the paintings were mere "impressions," sketches rather than finished artworks. Today Monet's languid seascapes, countrysides, pond and flower scenes are universally admired and, some would say, too predictably palatable. If your aging aunt or mother is in town, a Monet show makes for an excellent afternoon out.

Thankfully, the new Monet show at the Portland Art Museum is neither predictable nor filled exclusively with smudgy water lilies. Called "Monet: Late Paintings of Giverny from the Musee Marmottan," the well-edited show of 22 paintings includes canvases that look like they could have been done by a mid-century abstract expressionist rather than the turn of the century's leading impressionist painter.

The paintings are vigorous and passionate, less limpid than his earlier work and filled with pent-up emotion. And there are canvases that are extraordinarily brooding and dark, a tangle of ochre and black brushstrokes punctuated by angry blasts of yellow.

Certainly the exhibition includes water lilies. The curatorial idea behind this jewel of an exhibition is to show the arc of Monet's oeuvre once he moved to Giverny, the small town 40 miles northwest of Paris where he spent the last four decades of his life. And it was at his home in Giverny where Monet, a life-long gardener, created the pond that would become the inspiration for so many of his most famous works.

But there is a poignant drama behind this show that makes it particularly intimate. In 1912, when Monet was 72, he was diagnosed with cataracts in both eyes. For several years he had experienced failing eyesight, a physical problem that manifested itself in distinct changes in his art, including broader, thicker brushstrokes and less subtle coloration. At one point he became so nearly blind that he could barely determine what colors he was applying to his canvases. Forms became so indistinct that the paintings looked abstract. Canvases got bigger, some as large as 6 feet by 5.5 feet, because the artist could not see well enough to paint smaller. By 1922 Monet had only 10 percent vision in one eye and virtually none in the other.

The situation left him frustrated and depressed, and the paintings show it. The brushstrokes become agitated, and a few, such as a dense, foaming swirl of black, brown and green called "Weeping Willow," 1921-1922, seem like pure abstract expressionism. It is not too far-fetched to compare them with some of the works Jackson Pollock made a couple of decades later.

During the same years, from 1899 to 1914, several members of Monet's immediate family died, including his second wife, his step-daughter and a son. On top of it all, he was much disillusioned by the horrors of World War I. In his writings of the period he remarked often on what he called "the appalling conflict" and worried over the fates of his son and stepson, both of whom had gone to the front to fight.

In 1923 Monet's cataracts were removed surgically, and he regained much of his vision. Though he was by now an 83-year-old widower in frail health, the war was over, and at least part of the fog that had clouded his vision and his personal life had been lifted. The paintings from the last three years of his life, as exhibited in this show, are once again serene. He returns to his earlier palette of calm blues and blue-greens, with gay splashes of rose and yellow. Forms become recognizable again, a clump of irises here, a trellis of wisteria there.

Monet died in 1926. And in the last painting in the exhibition, completed in 1926, he paints an arcing rose bush cascading through a brilliant sky blue background like a rivulet of flowers tumbling through the garden. The joy and pure beauty in this painting refers back to much earlier work, including the earliest water lily images in this show, dating from 1903.

There is much to admire in the Portland exhibition. In the museum's entry foyer PAM has hung a group of large color photographs of Monet's Giverny garden shot by the photographer Elizabeth Murray. It's great fun to see the rambling, two-story, pink-stucco country home that Monet first rented in 1883 and bought seven years later. The house came with a large kitchen garden full of fruit trees and vegetables, but Monet had the food crops plowed under.

He instead set about creating a living canvas, a constantly changing landscape of flowers and shrubs. The garden, which he planned entirely himself, eventually became so luxuriantly abundant with plants that he hired six gardeners to maintain it.

In the photos by Murray, we see pathways carpeted with nasturtiums and peonies, trellises heavy with climbing roses, and glades of towering hollyhocks. There are also photos of the famous pond, which Monet had dug on his property only after igniting a controversy with Giverny's populace, who didn't like the idea of an interloper from Paris siphoning water from the town's river into his ornamental pond. After he was initially denied the right to use the town's river water, Monet eventually won support from an influential newspaper publisher, who was able to pull political strings.

Constructed in 1893, Monet's pond was enlarged several times over the next two decades. The Japanese-style arched footbridge that would figure so prominently in many paintings of the period was built soon after the pond was constructed.

Also helpful to museum visitors are a couple of side shows that PAM has organized to give the Monet exhibition context. In "Essay on Impressionism," PAM has pulled from its permanent collection works by other painters of the period closely associated with impressionism, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissaro, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt and Toulouse-Lautrec. Though none of these works are masterpieces, taken together they give visitors an idea of what other like-minded painters of the period were up to. The collective desire for naturalism and spontaneity is easy to see.

In contrast, PAM has also organized a room of what in late 19th-century France was considered high art. Skillfully executed, the portraits and romantic scenes are nevertheless stiff and academic in comparison with works by the impressionists. And it's easy to see why Monet's lyrical compositions on light and form, paintings that often jettisoned conventional notions about foreground, background, depth and horizon, were deemed outlandish. In PAM's basement gallery, there is also a nice group show of prints by artists, including Henri Matisse and Raoul Dufy, who came after the impressionists but who were nevertheless much influenced by impressionism.

But the pleasure of the exhibition comes from the paintings lent by the Musee Marmottan, the Paris museum that is home to the world's most important collection of Monets. Organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the exhibition has also been shown in Baltimore and San Diego. The pure beauty of much of this show is impossible to resist. And the drama of Monet's last decades is fascinating to trace in his work.