There is no such thing as too much Monet

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/07/monet-art-snobs-modernist

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Poor Richard Shone. You can almost see the editor of the Burlington Magazine adjust his overtight cravat as he moans to the Times that “I think there is some fatigue with Monet”.

Yes, fatigue, rather like the fatigue one feels when one’s butler expects one to bring one’s own copy of the collected art criticism of Roger Fry from the library.

What exactly has brought the melancholic simpers of art snobs dribbling down on Claude Monet (1840–1926), the most popular of the French impressionists? Well, the answer is right there in the word “popular”. Connoisseurs love to think that no one appreciates art like they do – elitist egotism is at the very heart of a certain style of art appreciation – so just by being enjoyable by everyone, Monet is suspect, as is Caravaggio, who also “draws people in” as Shone drily comments.

Monet and Caravaggio “draw people in” because they are drop-dead geniuses whose art is infinitely rewarding. Not liking Monet is like resisting the Beatles. There have been more avant garde rock groups, to be sure, but none of them wrote Hey Jude.

Related: Monet and Matisse to feature in modern garden exhibition

Even that is unfair, to the Beatles who put out Revolution 9, and to Monet, whose late waterlily decorations are the true birthplace of the greatest abstract art. Monet may be accessible but he is also a modernist who invented utterly new ways of seeing the world.

The immediate reason for wheeling out the old cliches that Monet is an overexposed chocolate box artist is the Royal Academy’s forthcoming exhibition Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse. Is this a desperate attempt by the Royal Academy to cash in on Monet’s name, following on from many other exhibitions that featured him? Is it all adding up to too much Monet?

No. There is no such thing as too much Monet. The trouble with this exhibition, if it is anything like others I have seen that juxtapose him with other artists, is that they will be made to seem dull and overwrought compared with his freedom and light. From Tate Britain’s exhibition a few years ago that compared Monet with Turner and Whistler to the National Gallery’s recent impressionist show, it’s always Monet who steals the show.

To understand Monet it’s crucial to know that he was a child prodigy, a raw genius. He was already entertaining the people of Le Havre with caricatures shown in local shops as a schoolboy, when he met the landscape artist Eugène Boudin, who encouraged the teenaged wunderkind to paint in the open air on Normandy’s beaches. Monet went on to get a proper Paris art education but his freedom and fluency were already there from his early works. His innate genius is worn so lightly it is always intoxicating. Today he’d probably be a street artist.

There is nothing tame, conservative, staid, ordinary or cosy about Monet. Just look at his 1879 painting Camille on her Deathbed – a terrifyingly honest attempt to record the very last breaths of somebody’s life. This is a dark masterpiece of impressionism, the movement in which Monet, Renoir and their associates tried to paint not static, preconceived views of nature and society but rapidly brushed glimpses of the passing beauty of modern life. In Monet’s hands impressionism is as ethereal as railway smoke, as fluid as the modern world. The people in his painting Bathers at La Grenouillere (1869) are just blobs and dapples of pixellated colour as the sunlight breaks up reality into a dazzling fractured moment. So much of later modern art is anticipated by this revolutionary masterpiece.

“Only an eye, but what an eye!” So said Cezanne of Monet. This is a brilliant summary of his radical and challenging perspective. Like Andy Warhol much later or Gerhard Richter today, Monet made no distinction between the things he painted. He felt no need to make a scene more noble by adding a mythological story to it. He was at home in the modern world. He painted trains in stations, light on the Thames, poplar trees, everything he saw.

And of course, he painted his garden. Monet’s later art became ever more meditative and philosophical. His paintings of waterlilies floating on placid water are his most visionary works of all. Monet’s garden is one of the strangest places in modern art. His great and utterly disorienting array of curving, immersive, wide-angle Nympheas in the Orangerie in Paris is my favourite installation. Its two rooms turn everything upside down. Reflection and reality, shadow and form become indistinguishable as space is inverted and colours drug the mind. Monet’s waterlilies induce a reverie in which you contemplate the mysteries of time and being. Nothing is real.

Too much Monet?

You have got to be kidding.