An exhibition at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., focuses on Monet’s largely unknown graphic works.
By: Carolyn Foote Edelmann
An unprecedented exhibition of Monet’s unsuspected graphic works is rewriting Impressionist history at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. Everybody knows Monet always painted outdoors very fast with no preliminary lines, and certainly no sketches. Wrong! At the Clark, visitors will encounter nearly 100 unheralded Monet drawings, some lithography, and luminous pastels. They are joined by his very successful early caricatures, which financed Monet’s admittedly "vagabond life" in Normandy and first Paris studies.
These unrecognized works have been cloistered since they entered Monet’s vari-colored notebooks. Most have never been available to the public and will soon return to private hands. We have until Sept. 16, as Clark Director Michael Conforti asserts, to "reconsider these neglected works on paper, (offering) a totally new understanding of Monet’s life and work."
A significant factor in these revelations is a two-volume, unpublished 1906 manuscript. Clark curators came upon this "Rosetta stone" during final preparations for this startling exhibition. Le Grand Journal was compiled by Comte Théophile Beguin Billecocq, close friend of the prosperous Monets in Le Havre days. This saga of the Count’s excursions with the boy then known as "Oscar" was unknown even to scholars, such as Daniel Wildenstein and John Rewald, as they prepared their historic studies of the man who named Impressionism. The Count describes rich sylvan hours with young Oscar, always "scribbling" in his sketchbooks. Billecocq’s meticulous Journal, the Clark catalogue hints, may soon be published for all to study.
The seed of this exhibit is a 1939 purchase by the astute Sterling and Francine Clark of an "expressive black crayon drawing of Rouen." The interest of Clark curators, James A. Ganz and Richard Kendall, sparked that of Mary Anne Stevens of London’s Royal Academy of Arts. What ensued is a sleuthing accomplishment worthy of Holmes and Watson. The trail led to the museum now known as The Marmottan Monet, which owned both Le Grand Journal and eight pivotal Monet sketchbooks, utilized at random throughout his painterly life. The curators propose many startling theses, the most arresting of which may be that his sketchbook drawings generated Monet’s renowned and controversial series paintings. Like a cartoon that moves when a child flips its pages, Monet sketched successive evolutions of London bridges, poplars and agapanthus, of willow and wisteria, circuitous lily reflections, to say nothing of nacreous cathedrals. If the catalogue is to be believed, his series unfolded under Monet’s hand on paper, before ever meeting canvas.
Four Marmottan sketchbooks are presented, alongside "interactive computer kiosks, faithful to the Clark’s renowned tradition of marrying research to education." Their interactive image database of the sketchbooks’ complete contents is searchable by subject, date or keyword.
Catalogue authors/curators are Mr. Ganz, Marlton curator of prints, drawings and photographs; and Mr. Kendall, curator-at-large. The latter now resides in this country, having begun his art career in England. Apollo named Kendall’s "Degas, Beyond Impressionism," (1996-1997: National Gallery, London; Art Institute of Chicago), exhibition of the year. Its catalogue was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Art Writing. Such awards may well be in the wings for this catalogue. The Unknown Monet excels in thoroughness, scholarship, writing style and reproductions keyed to revelations. My notes include words such as "impeccable," "eloquent" and "vigorous." My conclusion reads, "Incisive for all its length."
What everyone always knows about this artist is an image he studiously created with reporters, photographers, critics evidently all but a few close friends and family members. In other words, that he always painted very fast outdoors without resorting to preliminary studies. The art world of the late 1800s and early 1900s neither knew of nor purchased Monet works on paper, although seven unnamed pastels accompanied six Monet paintings at the first Impressionist Exhibition in 1874.
The Clark’s exhibition tally reads like an artist’s shopping list: "Graphite and watercolor on scratchboard;" "Pencil and white chalk on gray paper;" "Black crayon;" "Watercolor and pencil with white gouache on beige paper." With all this proof, it still strains credibility to read the name Monet and the phrase "black crayon drawings" back-to-back.
Monet’s London pastels spare, abstract, living through color more than line could be cited as influences upon both Rothko and Diebenkorn, had either had access to them. The Clark curators call these evocations "complete as visual statements… neither painstaking nor hasty." They conclude that Monet (who turned to this medium in London because his baggage was lost very 21st century) discovered that "pastel could be remodeled to suit this energetic new art."
This Institute of Art, in its bucolic setting of 140 wooded acres, is unique on many fronts. Its mission weights scholarship right up there with the art, while testifying to the connoisseurship of Singer Sewing Machine heir Sterling Clark and his French wife, Francine (née Clary). Mr. and Mrs. Clark have endowed their Institute not only with significant funds, but also with the mandate continually to expand art knowledge, internationally.
This art institute may be the only one where visitors can set out upon a dawn hike, beginning at the museum parking lot. At the top of Stone Hill, the view stretches from the adjacent Berkshires, to the smoky Catskills and Vermont’s Green Mountains. Such a site would have generated Impressionism, if Monet and his confreres hadn’t already invented and named it. This may be the only museum that welcomes visitors in hiking boots.
John Rewald the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John of Impressionism takes until page 129 in The History of Impressionism to give us a Monet charcoal of "Les Roches Noires, Trouville." In Monet, A Retrospective, edited by Charles Stuckley, 135 pages are required before the mention of a Monet sketch.
You thought you knew all about Monet. His trials and triumphs. The courageous confreres. You know almost too well Monet’s willows and waterlilies. His haystacks and cathedrals. Sometimes you consider him too accessible. But then you remember the pierced rocks of Etretat; the morning mists captured from his studio boat upon the Epte and Rue. You honor him for following his inner vision, despite scorn, deaths, near starvation, and one patron’s bringing back a painting for refund because "My friends laughed." (Monet kept that work until death, refusing five-figure offers to the end.)
In the "lost" sketchbooks of Claude Oscar Monet, his ebullient responses to nature’s beauty erupt in chalk, crayon and pastel, on varicolored paper, in expressionistic swirls and fissures. And we never knew.
The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings is on view at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 225 South St., Williamstown, Mass., through Sept. 16. Hours: Tues.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. (open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. on Mon. through Aug.). Admission costs $12.50, free children/students. Reasons beyond Monet to visit the Clark right now: viewing the recent Turner/Constable/Gainsborough bequest of Sir Edward Manton, head of AIG Insurance; experiencing Dutch Dialogues: between self portraits by Van Gogh and Renoir and between two Franz Hals portraits separated for two centuries (part of a Berkshire-wide emphasis on the Netherlands); and sidewalk supervising of the Clark’s new addition by Pritzker Prize-architect Tadao Ando. (413) 458-2303; www.clarkart.edu