Arts & Culture
The unanswerable lightness of being
Published 22 January 1999
Overfamiliar? Yes. Overblown? No.Andrew Motion follows Monet's rapt gaze from the Thames and the Grand Canal to that lake and those water lilies
Fame is a spur, but it's a barrier, too. The Royal Academy reckons at least half a million people will spin through its turnstiles to see Monet in the 20th Century over the next three months, and lots of them will be buying more than a ticket (£9). There's everything from the catalogue (excellent) to a cuddly frog (water lilies, see) - all of it confirming the impression of the great impressionist as an ideal artist for our times. He's lofty but accessible, innovative but familiar, new but old. The show's title prompts us to think as much about how our century has learnt to package and present art as it does about Monet himself.
And where does that leave the paintings? More highly visible than ever, in the sense that they've been brought to Piccadilly from the four corners of the world, some to be seen in public for the first time. In other ways, it makes them feel cut off - because their fame acts like a pane of glass. It distances their achievement, dulls their original imperatives, and slips our own reflections between ourselves and their subjects.
It's those froggy lilies that pose the biggest problem. They're obviously gorgeous, drowning us in huge pools of colour. Or should that be: they're obviously overblown - sentimental and ready-made for the lids of a million boxes of bubble bath? Knowing what they do about Monet already, many people will visit the show thinking this is the crunch question. By the time they've reached the end - the sixth lily room - they'll be adding others. Is the gradual increase in the canvas size a sign of heroic ambition or a grand loss of subtlety? Is the mere fact of self-reinvention an admirable thing?
The early rooms immediately suggest some answers. In the first, we're shown comparatively wide views of Monet's garden at Giverny: the house glimmering beyond lush flower beds; the flower beds themselves, bulging with irises; the bridge over the lake, floating in the stillness with the delicacy of a Japanese water colour. Most of these images were produced in the very early years of the century, when impressionism was far from scaldingly new, but their inventions still seem marvellous.
"My only virtue," Monet said towards the end of his life, "is to have painted directly in front of nature, while trying to render the impressions made on me by the most fleeting objects." As he entered old age (Monet was 60 in 1900), this longing to "fix sensations" still led him at every turn to create minute ingenuities of colour and texture - things in themselves and also agents for strong feeling.
The second section of the show, which concentrates on the London paintings (Monet produced 95 views of the Thames between 1899 and 1904) is even more impressive. Although still fascinated by their own techniques and effects, and busily quoting Turner and Whistler, they engage with the modern world in surprising and complex ways.
Generally, of course, the modern world doesn't show up much on Monet's 20th-century radar - or not in objective, specific ways. (In the whole show, there isn't a single clear human figure, let alone one in a recognisably contemporary setting.) But here, in his presentations of Waterloo and Charing Cross bridges, in his accounts of the Houses of Parliament, and in his panoramas of the smoking chimneys and towers of the south bank, we get a vision of the city which is at once awe-struck and apocalyptic.
Corroded bars of sunlight smash down through cloud and smog to shatter on the surface of the river. Charles Barry's Gothic encrustations loom and glower like the last outpost of an exhausted civilisation. The blurry pollutions of industry suffocate all living things. All living things, that is, except nature itself, which bravely and benevolently continues to perform its light-magic.
Compared to the delicate bridge at Giverny, the stern horizontals of the London series - congested with the thick but indeterminate traffic of souls - are grimly earth-bound. They are a necessary means of crossing troubled water, not an ethereal delight; their emblematic significance confirms everything else the paintings have to say about doomed empires, endings and corruptions.
These same thoughts return when we reach the Venice paintings (1908-1912), which describe the collision between people and the elements much less sombrely but nevertheless point to the same conclusion: to an unpeopled expanse, where organic forms have reasserted themselves after the human world has failed and faded.
By the time we see these Venetian pictures, we've already been shown the first lily paintings, which Monet worked on between 1903 and 1909. He had lived in Giverny since 1883, and for many years had been planning the gardens there to suit his ambitions as an artist. Building the Japanese bridge in 1893 was one crucial decision; another, made in 1901, was to enlarge the lake. Before this, he had tended to treat its surface area as just another motif among many. By 1905, he had become fixated, eliminating the horizon, losing himself among reflections.
For the next 20-odd years (he died in 1926) Monet kept his eyes down. Occasionally (in the mid-1910s, especially), he would return to solid ground, and gaze instead at a few carefully chosen objects: the bridge, a weeping willow, the path under his rose arches. But these images have the same obsessive, almost claustrophobic intensity as his watery ones. His earthly paradise is a place of bowers and tunnels, a swirl of reds and yellows and greens, where congestion is a sign of rampant good health, and also of age and impending confusion. It might be terra firma in fact, but Monet's "sensations" tell him - and us - something else.
Maybe that was partly why he went back to the lake, and why his treatment of it - through the final rooms of the show - becomes gradually larger until it climaxes in the celebrated Grandes Decorations. However clotted with lily-clumps the water might appear, however agitated his handling of paint (due partly to the cataracts which troubled his sight, partly to his amazing self-regeneration), the lake as a subject allowed him both the shelter and the space he craved. The shelter comes with the rapt downward gaze, and the exclusion. The space exists in the reflect- ed sky, the almost-vacancy between solid flower-forms.
If anything can refute the charges of sentimentality, and at the same time crack the frame-glass which covers the paintings, this is it. The lake scenes have been turned into archetypal images of tranquillity; actually they are deeply troubled, asking unanswerable questions about time, colour and matter. They're also therefore deeply troubling, making us wonder: what are we, and where, in relation to what we see? Not comfortably in the shop on our way home, buying one of Kermit's relations, that's for sure.
"Monet in the 20th Century" runs at the Royal Academy (0171-300 8000) until 18 April. Andrew Motion's "Selected Poems 1976-1997" is published by Faber, £9.99
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