COLUMNISTS  |
| ‘The Bank at Petit Gennevilliers’ (1875) |
Most beautiful exhibition in London this winter? Monet, at Helly Nahmad’s gallery in Cork Street, consisting almost entirely of canvases owned by his family or from other little-known private collections, has no competition. Shows of such calibre in an uncrowded private gallery, bringing you up close and personal to great, historically significant works, are both rare and unnerving in their splendour. Many paintings here have been in private hands for a century, never shown in London. Spanning the years 1872-1908, they form a condensed mini-retrospective, recapitulating the stages by which Monet came to depict reality as a rapturous series of light effects dissolving colours and forms.
From impressionism’s heroic decade at Argenteuil in the 1870s, “The Bank at Petit-Gennevilliers”, depicting sailing boats on the Seine melting into purple-white flecks beneath a wooded path, is a masterpiece of fragmented brushstrokes capturing the play of luminous reflections and vibrations. From Monet’s painting campaign in Normandy in 1883-4, “The Needle at Etretat, Low Tide”, credited “collection unknown” in recent literature, thrillingly reappears: hollowed out like a sculpture and bathed in warm afternoon sun, its creamy yellow crags rise above a stretch of tidal rocks darkened by seaweed and shaded by a giant cliff – a work of subtle nuances but tremendous emotional impact.
There is a great haystack painting, “Les Demoiselles de Giverny”, whose arresting, near-abstract forms make one understand why this series changed Kandinsky’s life. The lush “Roman road, Bordighera” is a passionate, fraught early response to the challenge of the Mediterranean, with shorthand dabs of hot rose, lemon and orange tints in the foreground and blended strokes of lavender-blue for the distant mountains.
Monet told Rodin he was “fencing, wrestling with the sun” in this picture; to his dealer Durand-Ruel he wrote “Shall we ever be able to feel contented before nature, above all in this place? When surrounded with such dazzling light, one finds one’s palette rather poor. Here art would need tones of gold and diamonds.”
Although they do not change our view of impressionism, such outstanding canvases vitally refresh it, for their unfamiliarity delivers something of the shock of the new which visitors to Durand-Ruel’s gallery would have experienced in the 1870-80s. Shattering pictorial expectations by transforming motif after motif into compositions that were literally about sensation – the act of perception, the excitement at conquering the representation of light – Monet changed forever how we look, broadening our range of vision in a way that was both optimistic and democratic.
In Argenteuil he was starving and, until Manet stepped in to pay his rent, often evicted, yet the river’s long, placid ripples and pink and grey reflections beneath a light-streaked sky in “Sailing boat, Argenteuil” (pictured right) – a work not publicly exhibited since 1873 – and the mirror-like gleam of cool, cobalt-blue surfaces in “Regatta, Argenteuil” give no hint of turbulence.
Instead, supreme confidence in nature and the artist’s mastery of it, delight in the visible world laid out for all to enjoy through radical innovations of fractured brushwork and broken flickering effects, made poverty-stricken Monet impressionism’s undisputed leader. Renoir, Sisley, even Manet flocked to Argenteuil to paint alongside him in the floating studio, a boat fitted out like a hut, set at different vantage points on the Seine to catch shifting weather and light conditions.
Of all the impressionists, Monet was least burdened by tradition: Degas and Manet met while copying Velázquez at the Louvre, but Monet, dragged there by Renoir, found nothing of interest. Rather, as unravelled here, he was in ceaseless search of new, heightened subjects with which to maintain the intensity of his sensations – from the sparkle on the river at Argenteuil to Etretat’s coastal brightness to Bordighera’s saturated hues. Eventually, pushing these effects to their inevitable conclusion – that the sensation of light was his only subject – he anticipated 20th-century pure abstraction in his own silent, unpeopled world of light on water at Giverny.
By excluding these late canvases, this show keeps Monet a fundamentally 19th-century artist. It does, however, feature celebrated paintings from the 1900s London and Venice series. Monet painted the watery motifs of both cities from a distance, through fog or sun: the arches of “Waterloo Bridge” barely discernible behind a sulphurous shroud; the melancholic “Palazzo Contarini” enveloped in a luminous veil, its curved windows and balustrades elongated in rhythm with the undulations of the lapping water that, wrote Monet’s friend Gustave Geffroy, “ebbs and flows, passing back and forth around the palazzi, as if to dissolve these vestiges of history”.
Monet was 68 when he made his only trip to Venice, the final campaign before he retreated to Giverny. “What a dreadful shame that I did not come here when I was young and would dare anything!” he wrote to Geffroy. “Anyway, I have spent some delightful moments here and nearly forgot that I am the old man that I am.”
‘Monet’, Helly Nahmad Gallery, London W1, to February 26. Tel: +44 (0)20 7494 3200, www.hellynahmad.com
