Fields of Energy

"One might ask," the catalogue begins with unwonted nervousness, "why look at Monet again?" Indeed, no artists have been more exposed than the impressionists; but the day when Claude Monet, their leader, could become a bore is (happily) not yet. Apart from the delectability of his work, it becomes increasingly clear that Monet, whose painting life began in the 1860s and spanned almost 70 years, was as fundamental to 20th century art as Cezanne. Bonnard, Pollock and Rothko, not to mention every color-field painter who came out of an art school, lie cradled in Monet's woven strands of pure color. Consequently the Art Institute of Chicago's Monet retrospective of more than 120 paintings, which opened last week, is an event of real importance: the man has never been better represented in the U.S.

Monet wanted people to believe --and how successfully he made them believe it!--that he painted everything in the open air, in the flush and excitement of confronting his subjects. He would even speak of his two years' military service with the Algerian cavalry in 1860-61 as though they were nothing but art training: "You can't imagine how much I learned in this way, how well it trained my eye." In fact, as Art Historian Grace Seiberling points out in her excellent catalogue essay, Monet both cultivated and violated the myth of impressionism. From the garden scenes at Argenteuil in the 1870s, through the cliffs and seascapes of Etretat and BelleIsle in the 1880s to the blue watery cathedrals he made from his lily pond at Giverny, Monet constantly reworked his paintings in the studio. "Whether my cathedrals, my Londons and other paintings were made from nature or not is nobody's business and is not important," he wrote to his dealer.

In his youth, the effort to reconcile the truth of outdoor painting with his ambition to make "important pictures" on a Salon scale bore odd results, one of which is Women in the Garden. He set up this vast canvas (over 8 ft. high) in his garden and even had a trench dug to rest it in so that he could paint the top without having to teeter on a stool. Its tonal contrasts between the green gloom of the trees and the crisp white of the girls' dresses in the bleaching sun are a manifesto of early impressionism.

Yet each of the women is really his wife Camille in a different pose. Hence the picture's odd disunity: it is a composite, not a "scene." Besides, there are historical quotes: so intent was Monet on this modern fete champetre that he turned the Camille in the beige dress with vertical buttons into a parody, conscious or not, of Watteau's clown Gilles.

Open Air. What closed this gap and enabled Monet to be the artist he became was his discovery of a kind of notation that transcended the "normal" processes of seeing. Decades of practice in the open air, fixing on the tiniest and most fugitive effects of light and color, gave his eye an immense confidence. As a young caricaturist in Le Havre, he met the seascape painter Eugene Boudin; he was 17, Boudin 34. "Three brush strokes from nature," the lesson went, "are worth more than two days' work at the easel." One can see the grasp growing in works like The Artist's Garden at Argenteuil, where the flecked commotion Df pink flowers, the blue flowerpots and the green foliage are rescued from incoherence by one bold device: a broad field of lavender-gray shadow thrown across the terrace. We recognize the Argenteuil paintings as substance: they belong to a realist tradition.

But within 15 years this had changed. The high pink-blue landscapes he made in 1884 at Bordighera on the Mediterranean are not about realist vision; no stretch of the imagination can turn these twisting, mistral-filled brush strokes into an optical fact. For by now, Monet had found the theme of his next 40 years: not how to depict things, but how to manifest them as part of a field of energy. In late Monet, as the surrealist painter Andre Masson observed, there are no solids and voids. Everything is full. A branch moves and pushes at the air with its mop of leaves; the air, a dense fluid of light, responds elastically; eddies form in this continuum of brightness, and the movement of Monet's brush reveals their presence the way an oar, dipped in a pond, reveals the water. "A landscape, for me, does not exist at all as such," he said of his Haystack series, "because the aspect changes at every moment, but it lives through its surroundings by the light and air which vary continually." If nature was not eloquent enough, she could be cajoled: Monet planted blue flowers under the trees in his tangled garden at Giverney, to make the shadows bluer.

Perfect Crust. The final result was the series of more than 200 paintings known as the Waterlilies. They resolve a problem that, before Monet, must have seemed self-contradictory: How can monumental art be made out of impermanence? It is surface about surface: horizontal sheets of water fixed in vast crusts of paint, then hung vertically on a wall. Apart from the lily pads themselves, there are no objects. Nor is there depth: we know how long a courtyard in a Renaissance painting is, but nobody could guess how far Monet's pool extends or how many feet of water lie in it. What happens on that surface is either ghostly (the reflected passage of a cloud) or abstract, the twining and piling of brush strokes. The Waterlilies are among the most challenging and aesthetically perfect paintings of the 20th century. Though they were almost ignored when the two rooms dedicated to them opened at the Orangerie in 1925, they have since become to modern art almost what the Sistine Chapel was to 16th century painting: an inexhaustible fount of style, a touchstone of pictorial Seriousness. -Robert Hughes

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