Nowadays, there's no more surefire crowd pleaser in the museum world than an exhibition of Impressionist paintings. Every museum director knows that if he wants to reverse a slump in attendance figures, or even remind the public that his institution actually exists, he has only to arrange a show of works by artists such as Monet, Renoir, or Degas. Cash registers will ring joyously, both at the admissions desk and in the gift shop, not to mention the cafeteria, the coat check room - and on and on.
But how long has it been since an Impressionist show was put together that really told us something, made a novel point, or enlarged our understanding of the movement, rather than simply recycling familiar faces, however beloved those faces might be? Quite a long time, I must say. In fact, the last really memorable Impressionist exhibition took place a little over a decade ago, when in 1978 the Metropolitan Museum in New York surveyed Monet's years at Giverny. It was a splendid exhibition, a feast for the eye, and one that managed to raise a few questions even as it answered others.
Happily, such an occasion is upon us once again, with the opening in Boston of Monet in the '90s: The Series Paintings. It has been organized by Paul Tucker of the University of Massachusetts, and covers the period in which Monet painted some of his most memorable images - poplar trees, grainstacks, and Rouen Cathedral - not singly, but in a succession of views observed at different times of the day.
Incredibly, there has never been such an exhibition, even though Monet has received intense scrutiny by scholars. In fact, there are paintings here that haven't been shown together since their first exhibition in a commercial galley soon after Monet painted them.
Given the way modern painting developed in the twentieth century, when serial or repeat imagery came to play an important role during the sixties, one would have expected an exhibition of this kind to have taken place long ago. Its organization now, therefore, makes it a landmark event.
But Monet in the '90s may be considered a landmark in another sense besides its allowing us to see a great number of magnificent pictures in away previously impossible. For the centerpiece - or rather foundation - of Tucker's reading of Monet is something called "contextual art history," in which a work of art is not strictly an aesthetic object - sometimes it isn't one at all -but rather a kind of a text useful for throwing light on the social and political attitudes of both the painter and the time in which he lives.
Contextual art history has been gathering momentum for sometime, and has become increasingly fashionable in college and graduate school study of art history. Its origins lie in an exhaustion with the distrust of the purely aesthetic or formalist approach to examining works of art; a belief that the social and political turmoil of the late nineteenth century and the political radicalism of many of its artists (Pissarro was an anarchist, for example) must somehow have made its way into the painting of the period; and, less respectably, a desire on the part of certain art historians to radicalize the profession itself by applying a Marxist perspective to its practices.
The study of Monet by the
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