Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist. - book reviews

The four volumes under review offer in microcosm a revealing insight into the state of Impressionist studies: two very different catalogues of major exhibitions, one lavish monograph published to coincide with one of these exhibitions, and a modestly produced monograph that is the fruit of a quarter century of research and methodological inquiry. Impressionism's high public profile is inseparable from the blockbuster exhibition business; but are these exhibitions the occasion for the most searching publications?

The first three all belong to the astonishingly productive Monet industry. In terms of visibility, pride of place must go to the catalogue of "Claude Monet, 1840-1926," presented in 1995 at the Art Institute of Chicago, and "the largest Monet retrospective ever assembled" (p. 6). Yet, beyond the expected array of color plates, this is surprisingly unambitious in what it offers either the exhibition viewer or the scholar and student; by current standards this is a minimalist catalogue. There are no individual catalogue entries; Charles F. Stuckey's brief introduction is largely devoted to signposting aspects of Monet that he feels have not been adequately studied; and the bulk of the text is a detailed tabular chronology of Monet's life, whose main aim is to make available in English the data in Daniel Wildenstein's catalogue raisonne and other recent publications.

Of course, the choices involved here are value-laden. Both introduction and chronology emphasize documentation - "hard" evidence, as opposed to the broader interpretative and contextual studies that are now fashionable. And the data listed in the chronology - like the areas for research that the essay proposes - are tightly restricted, to the activities of members of the Impressionist group and their immediate circle. The chronology offers a highly informative and almost wholly reliable guide to Monet's activities, but gives little sense of what made those activities significant.

Stuckey's essay shows an almost quixotic determination to disregard recent Monet studies. Indeed, two of the areas that he isolates for future research have not been neglected. A number of studies in the past decade have focused on Monet's working methods and their historical contexts, most recently the volume published by the National Gallery, London, in 1990. Likewise his comments titled "Decoration" do not cite the articles by Steven Z. Levine and Robert L. Herbert on this issue.(1) Moreover, Stuckey's discussion here is blurred by his failure to distinguish between the explicit use of paintings as decorations and the broader uses of the term "decorative" in the period.

Little is offered by way of interpretation of Monet's art. The tenor of the introductory comments is firmly in line with the "high modernist" reading so eloquently expressed by William C. Seitz in the 1950s and 1960s. Stuckey offers a long list of 20th-century artists, from Matisse to Smithson, as "Monet's direct heirs, too often unacknowledged" (p. 10), and takes at face value Monet's claim that his primary concern was to depict the "envelope" of colored atmosphere: "Like so many twentieth-century artists who have stressed 'nothing' as the ultimate theme, Monet conceived his primary subject as empty space" (p. 9). Stuckey pays lip service to historical investigation, but finally urges us "to put aside the historical perspectives that can blind us to what he [Monet] really tried to do - to make us see in a way unknown before" (p. 18).

By contrast, Paul Tucker's handsome Claude Monet: Life and Art, opportunely published to coincide with the Chicago exhibition, argues that Monet's sites and subjects were "laden with meaning for himself and his audience," and aims to restore "the significance of contemporary history and Monet's engagement with his times to the evident subtleties of his art and lift" (p. 4). His account offers an engaging and readable introduction to Monet's work, though marred by a number of minor errors; it broadens the range of Tucker's previous publications on the artist, but without significantly extending or developing their arguments.(2)

Throughout, there is a surprising gap between the visual analysis of pictures and the discussion of their meanings and contexts - between analysis of form and content. Visual descriptions are couched largely in formalist terms, while the broader historical interpretations treat the pictures as if they were transparent, mere reflections of some other reality that lay behind or beyond them.

Moreover, it is unclear what sort of "realities" Tucker sees as central to a painting's meanings. In his Monet at Argenteuil (1982), and again in the discussion of Argenteuil here, the material realities of the sites themselves are treated as primary. By contrast, in Monet in the '90s (1989), and in the discussions of the series here, a broader reality of social and political values is harnessed to Monet's chosen subjects, rather than the particulars of the Giverny topography; and at times, primarily in the discussion of Monet's figure paintings, the point of reference is Monet's personal emotions (though Tucker's new book is rightly more cautious about such readings than he was in Monet at Argenteuil).