Monet: The Seine and the Sea
Royal Scottish Academy, until October 26

It’s not currently fashionable in intellectual circles to be a fan of Monet. “It’s not really my thing,” the cognoscenti mutter, as they toddle off for a bit of post-modernist conceptualism down at doggerfisher.
It’s time to re-open minds, as the National Galleries’ keenly awaited Monet exhibition delves deep into a lesser-known period in the Impressionist artist’s life.

Walking into the newly refurbished building, there is an immediate sense of excitement, of being at a show of international importance. The generous floor space and high ceilings, the state-of-the-art skylights and the atmospheric rumble of echoing voices all make you wonder how Edinburgh has managed to cope without the RSA.

Now that we have it back, it’s full to the brim with 80 Monets from the period 1878 to 1883, which was a difficult time for the artist. The 37-year old suffered enormous debts, watched his first wife die, and lived through one of France’s coldest ever winters, but despite – or perhaps because of – this, Monet produced an incredible 350 paintings, most of which are of the Seine near Vétheuil, or the sea at Normandy.

In fitting with this watery theme, the curators have chosen aquamarine for the majority of the walls, but it is just too strong for the paintings, whose intrinsic luminosity is tragically overwhelmed by the saturated green of their backdrop. Some radiant snowscenes rise to the challenge, but the other paintings might have fared better if the storm-cloud grey of the smaller rooms had been used throughout.

The curators (Michael Clarke of the National Gallery of Scotland and Professor Richard Thomson of Edinburgh University) have taken a distinctly academic approach to the exhibition, filling a recognised gap in Monet scholarship. They hope that visitors will not only look at each painting on its own merits, but will also compare and contrast, studying the artist’s development in the round. To this end they have hung the painter’s work in series wherever possible, inviting comparison between three views of the same subject, in different conditions or from different angles. The result is fascinating but also unmistakably didactic, creating a metaphorical text book on walls.

There are, for example, three paintings from 1882 of the church at Varengeville, in the light of morning, afternoon, and sunset. The former is a bold, vertiginous composition, two thirds of which is filled with the massive cliff face seen from below, anchored in reality only by the small church on top and the strip of sand along the bottom. The cliff is a boiling mass of gestural brushstrokes in every imaginable colour, reaching upwards to the church and to the sky beyond. The other two views of the same church are from the top of the cliff, and Monet creates entirely different impressions of the scene through his adventurous use of brushstrokes, which are dry and straight on the dusk-tinged land, smooth and inconspicuous in the misty afternoon sky, and stippled and rough in the sprawling bushes.

Many of the paintings are unglazed, and there is no barrier (except, perhaps, wary warders and throngs of determined art-lovers) to stop you getting really close to the brushwork. There is a handful of portraits and still-lives – most notably the effervescent portrait of Monet’s young wife, Camille, on her deathbed – and these perform an unexpected visual counterpoint to the gentle rhythm of sun, sea and sand.

The difficulty with the period 1878-1883 is that it is important because of what happened next. The show ends with three images painted 20 years later, which are everything we have come to expect of Monet: highly worked, shimmering and luminous like a vision through a heat haze. The visitor may leave feeling better educated about how Monet reached the pinnacle of his career, but slightly disappointed that the show stops there.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 10.08.03