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Exposition Musee Marmottan Monet

by John McGee

Claude Monet, Nympheas (Water-lilies), 1903, oil on canvas, 89x100cm 
(Images courtesy Musee Marmottan Monet, Paris)

For increasingly cash-strapped museums worldwide, Monet is too often pronounced "money." Tokyo institutions are no exception, and they regularly present variations on the Frenchman's popular but overexposed paintings. 

This show has two angles: the work comes from the Musee Marmottan Monet in Paris, home of the largest collection of Claude Monet (1840-1926) in the world, and half of the 80 pieces in the show are by Berthe Morisot (1841-95), the often overlooked first female member of the Impressionists. There are 19 pieces by Monet, including water lilies and late paintings of his garden at Giverny. Degas, Renoir and other contemporaries provide the remaining drawings, paintings and watercolors, sketching a brief history of the Impressionist movement, Marmottan-style. 

Located near the Bois de Boulogne, the Marmottan was originally the hunting lodge of a French duke. Subsequent owner Paul Marmottan left it and his collection of First Empire French art to the Beaux Arts Academy, and in 1934 it became a museum. The Marmottan earned its reputation as an Impressionist shrine following major donations by Georges de Bellio former doctor to Manet, Monet and other painters, and Monet's son Michel. 

The show starts with small works by Impressionist predecessors like Eugene Boudin (Monet's first painting teacher; he encouraged his young student to paint plein-air as he did) and Camille Corot (Morisot's teacher). The most interesting piece in this section is a watercolor sketch Eugene Delacroix made in 1838. It's not one of his usual big-screen historical melodramas, but a small, quick, loose seascape with cliffs dabbed in greens and the sky a sunset pink. 

Fifty years later, Monet was basing his practice on such light and landscape studies. Various small paintings indicate Monet's color and texture range. Impastoed bright reds on greens in Tulip Field (1886), for example, play against the soft, diffused pinks and grays of The Seine at Port-Villez, Evening Effect (1894). Alas, the Marmottan-owned masterpiece Impression: Sunrise stayed home. 

Berthe Morisot, At the Ball, 1875,
oil on canvas, 62x52cm 

Each of the five water-lily paintings (from 1903-19)—all in one cramped room—is a different study of the effects of light, reflection, atmosphere, optical color mixing, saturation and diffusion. One proto-Rothko image has three bands. A color field of pea-green water in the middle separates clusters of lavender lily pads at the top from frosted yellow and green ones at the bottom. 

Monet's failing eyesight was the likely cause of the artist's curious but unattractive late works (1918-24). Garish crimson and busy green squiggles resemble the carcasses of expressionist artist Chaim Soutine more than Giverny's willows, roses and Japanese bridges. 

Morisot, the granddaughter of Fragonard and wife of Manet's brother, focused more on people. There are straight landscapes here, but many paintings feature girls and young women. In On the Lakeside (1883), for example, a girl with a yellow bonnet faces away from us, looking to her arms-akimbo mother and the watery parkland beyond. This and other sunny, lazing images from the Marmottan's Rouart Collection—shown for the first time in Japan—transform the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum's dreary, ill-organized galleries into a drowsy summer day of blooming roses and ripe cherries. 

In the final stretch to the gift shop (and its sure-to-leave-an-impression ¥158,000 posters) are assorted works by contemporaries, including boats by Paul Signac, chrysanthemums by Gustave Caillebotte, and a monochrome figure study by Eugene Carriere.

This exhibition was held Jan-Mar 2004 at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in Ueno Park, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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