There’s a sense of déjà vu about the blockbuster French Impressionism exhibition that opened at the National Gallery of Victoria last week.
NGV curator Ted Gott is still swooning over Claude Monet and the sixteen paintings on loan from Boston. He’s made a few discoveries about the works that were shown here four years ago which he shared with AAR.
This is the exhibition that got cancelled after just three weeks because of covid and it’s finally been remade with a new angle and a couple of extras for the 60,000 who slipped in before the lockdown.
The 2021 exhibition had a “more square and white décor with LED screens” to evoke the excitement of Impressionism when it first hit the world, says Gott, while the latest honours the “evocation of eloquence” of Bostonians in recognising the value of the work and hanging it in their stately homes.
Early precursors to the movement also get more of a mention, such as Eugène Boudin, who taught Monet, and there is acknowledgment that Impressionism can be taken for granted, hence the Boston angle. Most of the works come from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
But viewers could be forgiven for rushing straight past the Forest of Fontainebleau to the more open landscapes and experiments in abstraction of Monet, grouped in a grey circular room built to emulate the L’Orangerie in Paris.
Composition was Monet’s great achievement. He could dramatise a tree on a flat paddock (Seacoast at Trouville, 1881) by emphasising the 2D surface and make a dull little patch of road a clash between planes (Road at La Cavée Pourville, 1882).
He achieved this effect in Trouville by blocking the expected vanishing point with an excessively bowed tree. The horizon is effaced in a haze. The composition, according to the curators, is similar to a Hiroshige print. Other works show the great design effect of the use of muted tones.
Gott’s own favourites are the water lilies. There are two in this exhibition. The paintings are radical and abstract, he says, “up there with Jackson Pollock. There’s no horizon line, no beginning and end to the composition. It’s beyond representation. The application of pigment is revolutionary.”
One major point that has been lost in today’s trade in close-up images on the internet was the subject of a recent discovery by Gott, an innovation that got Monet into trouble with the critics.
In 1883 Henri Havard wrote that he couldn’t see the point of Monet’s paintings because he had to step back ten feet to bring them into focus. “How can I hang them in my home,” he wrote.
It might surprise present-day critics that Monet cared about what was said in the press but “he was devastated,” Gott told AAR. “He was broke and had eight children. He needed to sell some paintings.”
That’s a story you won’t find on the wall at this exhibition, even though there are some other less dramatic anecdotes about the demands of the market on Monet’s practice. He painted quite a few works in Antibes to cater to “his dealer’s appetite for sun-drenches seascapes”.
Gott read about the critic’s response last year in French and he’s still emotional about the issue and the lesson to be learned by all of us about the power of stepping back to view a work.
French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
National Gallery of Victoria (NGV International), 180 St Kilda Road, Melbourne
Exhibition continues to 5 October 2025
Entry fees apply
For more information, visit: ngv.melbourne for details.
Image: Ted Gott with Claude Monet’s The water lily pond, 1900 – photo by Rhonda Dredge
Words: Rhonda Dredge