In Boston, all 35 of the museum’s Monet paintings are on view for the celebration.
I haven’t written anything about the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston other than the news that its staff decided to unionize last fall. That doesn’t mean I don’t adore the MFA and think it’s one of America’s best museums. I do, on both counts. Its 150th anniversary season is nearing its end, and it’s got a striking and breathtaking show of its 35 paintings by Claude Monet (1840–1926). I spent a good afternoon there last week, seeing Monet in Boston: Lasting Impressions and visiting my favorite American things.
I think of the MFA in three ways. First, its collection is splendid. Boston isn’t a big place, but its wealth and discernment are historical facts. Bostonians bought well, early, and adventurously, and much of their art came to the MFA. Second, I think “fraught” and “MFA” go together. Its inner conflicts are unusual and many. As a curator and director of sister museums, I learned about many of these as they unfolded. The big donors I knew are either dead or non compos mentis, but their incessant, quirky complaints about the MFA shoot pellets of bile from the labels and plaques bearing their names, or they seem to.
Third, it’s in Boston, obviously, and I don’t like Boston. It’s a snooty and smug place. The Brahmin class is mostly gone, and good riddance. Their blood might have stayed blue, but it thinned, too, from entitlement, over-refinement, and intermarriage. Boston grandees had far too much power in national politics and, in the 1960s and ’70s, lost their nerve. It’s still thick with Harvard know-it-alls. Its prols are mean, too. New Yorkers, though brusque, are generous and kind. Boston drivers will run you over to make a light and then, for the fun of it, do a U-turn and not only add more skid marks to your corpse but stop and pick your pocket. Not nice.
Still, it’s the museum’s 150th birthday. I wanted to visit. I revere the MFA. It’s an aesthetic thrill, but it’s so rich in American art that, for me, it’s a patriotic experience. I hadn’t been to Boston in at least five years. The COVID hysteria has nearly emptied the city. And there was no traffic.
The museum just reopened after its second mandated lockdown. The reckless, useless lockdowns and strangulation of tourism have bludgeoned the MFA, Boston’s superb symphony, and its many theater companies. Very few people were in the museum. It was spooky to walk through empty galleries filled with Renoirs and Sargents, Old Masters, American colonial portraits, and icons like Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? and Turner’s Slave Ship.
The MFA does indeed own 35 paintings by Monet, acquired between 1906 and 1959 by bequest, gift, or purchase. It’s a comprehensive group starting from the early 1860s, with some good, telling juvenilia and evolving to end with diaphanous lily-pond scenes from around 1907. Monet, along with Pissarro, Sisley, and Renoir, were more-or-less the mainstays of French Impressionism from the first show of their cutting-edge work in 1874 through its many variations stretching to the 1920s, when Renoir and Monet died, still active, by that time famous, and still pushing the envelope.
The exhibition is divided in three chronological sections. The first is a Monet tutorial specifically and a good look at the elements of Impressionism. I thought the gallery was too big given the size of the paintings, which aren’t big and look punier than they should. Some big sofas would make the gallery feel less cavernous. No one will die. A second space features Camille Monet in Japanese Costume, from 1876. It’s a full-length portrait of Monet’s wife dressed in a kimono depicting a nightmare Japanese myth. It’s big and bizarre by any standard and a one-off for Monet. I think everyone had too much absinthe the weekend Monet did it. A third, big gallery is unadulterated splendor. Filled with big, late work, it’s got to be the most arresting space in Boston. It’s the MFA, its collection, and the edgy taste of Boston’s long-dead rich at their pinnacle.
An impression would have meant, to Monet, at least, a quickly applied passage of paint as notation of a motif, whether it’s a cloud, a ripple in water, or part of a figure. Distant elements like mountains or a receding sea are painted thinly and are both immaterial and inaccessible. Paint in the foreground is thicker and lusher but no less cursory. These are tactics aiming for what Monet called “instantaneity.” Our sight is transitory, as we look from spot to spot, and while we register an overall look and limited details, we see an impression. The impression’s made of tangible things like bricks and mortar, flowers, or haystacks but also intangible things such as color and light.
Rue de la Bavole, Honfleur, from about 1864, is a dense cityscape and really Monet before he was Monet. It’s not bad. It’s made of geometric wedges, and that’s modern, as is a street that starts wide in the foreground but narrows as it zooms a couple of hundred feet into the distance and then curves and disappears. Monet’s early zooms propose “instantaneity” as he understood and sought it as a very young man.
Ships in a Harbor, from about 1873, is Monet’s Impressionist moment and should be far more famous than it is. He painted it about the same time as Impression Sunrise, the gauzy, opalescent picture, also a Normandy harbor scene, that gave Impressionism its name when Monet showed it at the Salon des Refusés in 1874.
Impression Sunrise wins the prize for “first ever” because it was in the 1874 show and bears the name “Impression,” though Monet thought of the name only seconds before the catalogue went to press. He wanted mostly to establish that the picture was finished and was intended first and last as an impression and not a random or preparatory sketch. Impression Sunrise is in a French museum, and the French get fussy when the things that define them manage to land in America. Impression Sunrise is notorious, too, having been stolen from the Musée Marmottan in 1990.
Ships in a Harbor doesn’t have the perky palette of Impression Sunrise. It’s an overcast day, and the picture’s nearly a grisaille. It suggests scenes by Boudin and Jongkind, older artists who inspired Monet, so it doesn’t shout “revolution.” Still, its squiggles of unblended blue, gray, green, purple, and pink paint, fresh, “alla prima” look, and fetching though mundane subject make it an Impressionist picture.
Ships in a Harbor was given to the MFA by Denman Ross (1853–1935). Ross was a rich Boston collector and a good artist but also taught art theory at Harvard and was both an MFA trustee and an adjunct curator of the museum’s then nascent and now extraordinary collection of Japanese art. He gave the museum more than 10,000 works of art.
My biggest quibble about Monet in Boston is how it treats its donors. Is it the culture of the place? Alvan Fuller’s Water Lily Pond came to the MFA as a bequest in 1959 and is its 35th Monet. (The museum received its last Monet in 1978, as a gift, Boulevard Saint-Germain in Argenteuil.) Fuller made a fortune as Massachusetts’s first car dealer, selling thousands of Packards and Cadillacs. Yes, as governor in the 1920s, he sent Sacco and Vanzetti to the electric chair. Not good, I know, yet he’s a rarity: a politician with a deep interest in art. Alexander Cochrane, Juliana Cheney Edwards, and Henrietta Fitz owned some of the MFA’s Monets. They’re part of the story. We learn very little about them.
Interest in Monet in Boston didn’t come out of the blue, either. Jean-François Millet (1815–1875), an inspiration to Monet, sold work to Bostonians in depth and bulk starting in the 1840s. Millet’s paintings, pastels, watercolors, and drawings, owned in the hundreds by the MFA, established a local taste for French landscapes and scenes of rural life and opened the door to Monet.
So, too, did John Singer Sargent’s advocacy for Monet in Boston. He learned much about “plein air” painting from Monet in the 1880s and started working on Boston’s Public Library murals in the late 1890s. Dennis Miller Bunker, painting Impressionist things for Isabella Stewart Gardner, promoted Monet to his high-society Boston friends. Boston collectors such as Desmond Fitzgerald collected work by Monet starting in 1889. Fitzgerald owned nine and helped to organize the first Monet show in the city in 1892 — he also visited Monet in Giverny. Weeks after Monet’s death in 1926, the MFA mounted a big Monet memorial show, gathering 70 paintings and telling us, contrary to what registrars and curators will cry today, that a blockbuster can indeed happen in a pinch.
“It breaks my heart,” Monet wrote to his dealer, “to see all my paintings going to America.” By 1892, forty Monets were in Boston. “Why Monet in Boston” is an essential, fascinating story, and wouldn’t a museum want to salute its adventurous, rich donors on its 150th birthday?
The canny critic Philippe Burty said of Millet in 1875 that “the summary and solid expansiveness of his foregrounds marks the modern landscape with a recognizable stamp.” This is a good way to look at Monet also. His paintings aren’t heavy on sweeping views. We don’t think about patriotism, religion, or war. Road at La Cavée, from 1882, is weird and striking because it’s mostly foreground and one that’s not conventionally charming. It’s a path that’s nearly a ditch, and that makes it attractive in its plainness. The dabs of paint creating grass and yellow wildflowers sparkle, and that’s aesthetically pleasing as well as surprising. That it pretends to be about nothing makes it modern. It’s frankly geometric, too, with six blocks wedged together. For all his gauzy contours, for all his love of the ethereal, Monet is a painter of structure.
It’s best to say just a few things about Camille Monet in Japanese Costume, and I’d start with “ugly.” Her kimono shows the legendary samurai Taira Koremochi killing a female demon. He meets her in the forest, drinks sake with her, and does who-knows-what-else, but it’s not reading the Wall Street Journal — then he falls asleep and wakes as she’s about to devour him. Camille looks soused, and she’s wearing a blond wig. The MFA bought it in 1956.
I don’t know what the director, Perry Rathbone, was thinking. I know he was a piece o’ work and introduced contemporary art to the MFA, but the Monet was quite a venture. Rathbone left in 1972 after buying a portrait purported to be by Raphael. When the attribution collapsed and the painting was returned to the dealer, the stir in Boston was immense, though his advocacy of contemporary art was the irksome, decisive thorn for Boston’s art establishment.
I’ve always been puzzled by Boston’s aversion to living artists, since its collectors and the MFA were once so adventurous. I think that after the Second World War, the place sunk into provincialism. When I went to the opening of its big, nice American wing ten years ago, I saw, since I read credit lines, that most of the good art on the walls from, say, post-1970 was on loan. That’s another story, but the place of living artists at the MFA is still contested.
The last big gallery is so dreamy that I simply didn’t think about art history or, for that matter, dead donors. It’s filled with pure pleasure, with no tiny gems but sumptuous feasts. As much as I’m a pushover for Impressionist snow scenes, for me, Monet is a painter of sun and the things warmed and formed by it. Three paintings of Antibes from the late 1880s possess what Monet called a “gentle sweetness, some white, some pink, and some blue, and all this surrounded by fairylike air.” I know this winter has been a long one, and I’m from Vermont, but looking at them seemed to give me a tan. The scenery, Monet said, is “so beautiful, so bright, so luminous . . . one swims in blue air, and it’s frightening.”
Monet is a tough, rigorous painter, and he sometimes defines his quest for perfect light and color as a battle. Two of his paintings of Rouen Cathedral are in the show. Done in 1894, they are part of a series of 20 abstract paintings of the subject. He worked on as many as 15 simultaneously, forging through what he called “stubborn encrustations of paint” to convey light at a precise, fleeting moment. He’s painting something that’s intangible but there. He treats the paint like construction materials. The church is there, too, but it’s a canvas.
The paint’s gnarly and knotty and, though exquisite, was wrestled with, too.
These serial paintings — and there’s a haystack painting in the show, too — are Monet as far more of a radical than he was in the 1870s. They’re very beautiful, but they’re as intricate as high-tech circuitry, which looks like a dense, senseless maze of wires and plastic, but each bit has a purpose, leads somewhere, and contributes to an overall entirety.
The exhibition ends with a blast, which is what we want. So many shows sputter and fizzle. I think it’s sloppy curatorial thinking as well as fear of drama and showmanship, as if everyone’s too cautious to enchant and electrify. Two water-lily paintings, one from 1905, the other from 1907, are part of the concluding ensemble. There’s no zoom toward a point certain since each of the five or six paintings is big and strong.
Roger Marx, the French critic writing for the Gazette des Beaux Arts in 1909, looked at the 1905 painting and wrote, “The indecisive meets the precise, certainty becomes conjecture.” These two lily-pond paintings aren’t conventional. There’s no horizon line. “No more earth, no more sky, no limits now,” Marx said. The “no limits” phrase teaches us, again the obvious, that Monet is both a 19th-century painter starting from the Barbizon School but also an abstractionist different from Picasso and Matisse but daring and modern in his own way.
Monet’s not at the point that Pollock reached 40 years later — putting the canvas on the floor and pouring paint — but it’s a picture of the ethereal, with lily pads and water providing what substance there is, but mist and reflections are the star actors. Charing Cross Bridge, Overcast Day, from 1900, isn’t a cityscape. It’s a fog picture, and Monet admitted it when he said the only thing that made London beautiful was its fog.
Oh, and if all of this isn’t enough, Grand Canal, Venice, from 1908, is there. Venice, Monet said, was “too beautiful to paint,” and his three-month stay there was his last big painting trip. After that, he stayed in Giverny. At noon, Monet said, “The atmosphere applies itself and sumptuously gives body to the walls and water . . . as though they’ve passed through the rose of a stained-glass window.” He approached what’s “too beautiful to paint” as a spiritual subject, so the picture is divine in every respect.
Curator Katie Hanson’s short catalogue is very good. It’s a succinct, smart survey of Monet. The MFA has an active publications department, and its scholarship is always the highest, but its books are physical and for sale. I’d suggest putting the shorter books like this online for wide distribution. The MFA does lots of big, in-depth tomes, but I’ve always learned plenty from its smaller shows like these. Monet isn’t traveling, but the MFA’s exceptional holdings and its book deserve attention.
The museum’s newest building, dedicated to the art of the Americas, opened in 2010, so it was timely to see it after ten years. It looks good. So many new museum buildings, after ten years, don’t. It took a $500 million capital and endowment campaign to build it, and some of the MFA’s fundraising overlapped mine when I was director of the Addison Gallery at Phillips Academy in Andover and raising money for an addition and renovation.
The Addison and the MFA shared some donors — not many as my base was national and international given the school’s alumni — so I didn’t feel we were competitors . . . that much. Mine was paid for, though, in cash, while the MFA had some considerable debt as well as deals with donors that I thought were a form of alchemy.
Big parts of the museum were closed, which I thought was odd given that it’s a big anniversary year, but that’s the MFA. It’s a complicated place, though, and it, like Boston, seems Old World. Things like the needed overhaul of its antiquities and Dutch wings get done when the money comes in, regardless of milestones. That’s reasonable. The MFA isn’t rich. I can’t say whether the MFA treats its donors badly, though many will say it does, but I do know that the philanthropic class in Boston is crabbier and cheaper than most. The museum’s ancient art is fabulous and dazzling and will look the part when the refurbished galleries open later this year. I’m looking forward to seeing them. I’ll even brave traffic, the surly locals, and the ubiquitous Red Sox swag, a passion always and forever inscrutable to me.
