The Old Man and the Pond

By ROBERT HUGHES

At Manhattan's Metropolitan, a superb Monet show

In painting, two great landscapists, Claude Monet and Paul Cezanne, are twin bridges between the 19th century and our own. As Cezanne's work provoked cubism, so Monet's looked forward to abstract expressionism. Today the role of landscape in art has shrunk. But the most ecstatic perceptions of experience and the most radical discoveries about the language of color and shape that these sublime artificers made were developed from their landscape motifs. Cezanne's was the Provenc,al countryside around Aix. Monet's was a garden at Giverny, about 40 miles outside Paris. It is one of the sacred sites of the modern movement.

Monet moved to Giverny at the mid-point of his life, in 1883; seven years later he was able to buy the house and start acquiring parcels of land along the junction of the Ru and the Epte, two tributaries of the nearby Seine. By 1926, when Monet--old, nearly blind, and as close to being a national hero as any French artist has ever been in his own lifetime--eventually died, the garden had become one of the most complete environmental expressions of a man's taste ever to be constructed. Monet created his own motif in order to paint it in tranquillity, and the paintings were art about art--self-reflexive, but imbued with an intense veneration for nature.

The garden became an exquisitely balanced artifact: rose arbors, willows, iris beds, raked paths, wisteria, a Japanese bridge and--most rewarding of all to the painter--ponds and water lilies. For the last 20 years of Monet's life, his "harem of nature," as Art Historian Kirk Varnedoe elegantly calls it, needed the services of six gardeners. After his death it began to decay. By 1966, when Monet's only surviving son--the reclusive Michel--died, the place had been closed to visitors, a shambles of rank growth and silted-up ponds. Recently, with a large grant from the U.S. collector Lila Acheson Wallace, the beds and ponds of Giverny were substantially restored; the work will take another two years to complete, but this fall the gardens will be opened to the public in something like their former exuberance.

To mark the event, Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art has put on a sumptuous show titled "Monet's Years at Giverny: Beyond Impressionism." It contains 81 paintings--a third of them lent by the Musee Marmottan in Paris, all of them images from the garden. We see, lined up, the different versions of each motif that Monet so obsessively worked at, in every possible variation of light, laboring to divide nuances into further nuances and stabilize their intervals with the devotion of a particle physicist: the poplars, the haystacks, the rose-twined tunnel of the arbor leading to his house, the water. To reproduce their subtleties is impossible; to recollect the differences of tone between one painting and another, apparently identical, defeats the most trained visual memory. But the show's organizers, Art Historians Charles Moffett of the Met and James N. Wood of the St. Louis Art Museum, have disclosed the minute differences in an exemplary way: the sight of the variations en serie, hung together, is one of the noblest spectacles of fine discrimination in the history of art.

At the core of Monet's achievement was his sense of time. He was fascinated by the discontinuous nature of reality: by the fact that, as a Greek sophist put it, you cannot step into the same river once, for it changes as the foot enters. Monet's Giverny paintings make up the most sustained and intelligent meditation on transience by a great artist since--what? Leonardo's water drawings? Probably, for although Monet's fellow impressionists also predicated their images on the moment, none of them was able to go so far in the direction of displaying reality as a collection of tiny, discrete stillnesses. Monet constructed a unified light, meaning and mood out of an accumulation of specific fragments, each the size of a brush mark. The unitary truth emerges from an infinity of facets.

Monet gave impressionism the dignity of classical art, though by the turn of the century he was no longer an impressionist in the sense of working outdoors, directly from the motif. Whether his canvases, he remarked, "are painted from life or not is nobody's business and of no importance whatsoever." They were in fact painted from memory--but the span of memory was as short as the walk from the pond to the studio. In his genius for rendering evanescence within a monumental structure, Monet became a master of le temps retrouve: the most Proustian of painters. His truer literary equivalent, though, was the symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme. The blank page, for Mallarme, trembled with possibility, as calm water or the tight-stretched canvas did for Monet. Its white flatness was not an absence: it was a poetic element, possessing the character of thought. "The intellectual armature of the poem," Mallarme once wrote, "conceals itself, is present--is active--in the space that surrounds the stanzas and in the white of the paper: a meaningful silence, no less wonderful to compose than the lines themselves." And again: "To conjure up . . . the negated object, with the help of allusive and indirect words, which constantly efface themselves in a complementary silence . . . comes close to the act of creation."

These are essential texts for Monet's lily-pond paintings, with their almost indistinguishable precisions of color, their deep tracts of the reflected sky (no horizon line, no orientation in space; the eye floats in an amniotic fluid of light), and their intricate play between air colors in the water and the solider rafts of lilies crossing them like clouds. Toward the end of his life, as his vision degenerated--first, after a series of primitive cataract operations, distorting his sight toward yellow, and at last toward blue--Monet rarely left his garden; but then, he did not need to. He had constructed a symbolist heaven on his front doorstep, and (since nature and culture fuse in the hortus conclusus--the enclosed garden--of paradise) the circle of his desires was complete. The result was the most consoling art of the 20th century: not simple in its pleasures, but oceanic in its peace, wave upon wave of light rippling through the immense canvases, a palpitation as vast as the encroaching spring.

-- Robert Hughes

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