Monet and the Mediterranean

Saturday, 6 December 1997

Chris and I went to the Brooklyn Museum today, to see the "Monet and the Mediterranean" exhibit that's running till early January. The museum's about a block from our apartment, and one of the reasons we took an apartment in this area (the library was a more important one), but we don't go there nearly as often as we ought. This was only my third visit in four years, and Chris had just gone last July, when she was on vacation.

We got there around 4 PM, and got tickets for the 5:30 shift. We spent the time until then wandering around the museum. I was especially impressed by the recreations of rooms from actual Brooklyn houses of the past couple of centuries, and in one case, an entire 17th century house. (Chris tells me that they've got more houses that we didn't see.) The room recreations were all from upper-class domiciles; I can't imagine living in lush surroundings like that without having servants around to clean everything. They also tended to be very visually cluttered. A study from the 1930s was the first thing I saw that approximated my tastes, though even that was more lush than I think I could live with. (Chris points out that we seem perfectly capable of living in a cluttered space, but I reply that we've got physical clutter, not visual clutter.)

We also saw a display of work by current Brooklyn artists. Only a few of these pieces did anything for me, but it's nice to see that the Museum's keeping tabs on the thriving Brooklyn artistic community. There was also a great display of AIDS awareness posters from all over the world. The industrialized nations tended to have posters either telling people to use condoms, or addressing the more political aspects of the virus (like the famous "AIDS = Death" poster). In the more religous nations, posters tended to preach monogamy. A couple of posters aimed at American Indian communites portrayed AIDS as a threat to the culture. One from Mozambique warned of the dangers of catching AIDS from barbers who reuse razor blades without sterilizing them. As usual, I was amazed at how much better Europeans are than Americans at creating simple, bold images that make powerful statements directly and cleverly, and at how willing they are to grapple with sexual imagery. Americans seem to be scared of penises.

I was disappointed by the Monet exhibit. First, because I had expected a more comprehensive sample of his work; I hadn't realized that it was only Monet's work from the Mediterranean. Second, because a large portion of this part of his work wasn't, in my opinion, very good. His Italian Riviera stuff from 1883-84 just looks unfinished and washed-out, especially the Bordighera paintings. It's clear that he's struggling with the task of portraying the light that he sees, and he's just not getting it. The paintings have the flaws that I see in a lot of mediocre painters, that the bounadries between objects just haven't been dealt with well. The only ones that look like they have objects in them, as opposed to misty shapes, are the ones with strong light/dark contrasts, like Dolceacqua, and some of the more strongly colored ones, like Palm Tree in Bordighera. As far as I can tell, he didn't really start to succeed with what he was trying to do until his French Riviera paintings in 1884, and the exhibit only had six of those.

Monet's second visit to the Mediterranean, to Venice in 1908, is much better. By then, he was a much more mature artist. But there's 24 years of growth in there that the exhibit skips over.

After looking at the Monet, we wandered through the rest of the European and American art section. Most of the museum's large collection of Rodin scupltures was packed away to make room for the Monet. I noted that the late 17th-century The Finding of Moses, by Gabbiani, looked just like what you'd expect the finding of Moses in the bullrushes to have looked like if you thought that Egyptians had blonde hair and pale skin. Once again, I didn't go to the museum's scuplture garden, but I think that's something to put off for warmer weather.