Monet at the de Young
If there is anything that the San Franciscans love more than themselves it is art…and the French. This can be demonstrated in a number of ways, but it suffices to observe only that their world class fine arts museums are anchored by the Legion of Honor, a scaled replica of the legion d’honneur in Paris. The San Francisco version even has Legion of Honor spelled in French above the front door. And we may note further that the longest wing of paintings in the building is crowned at the end by a collection of canvases by Monet, the French painter par exellence. But despite this properly San Franciscan mélange of Francophilia and art appreciation, the primary site of this fetish has shifted over these past couple weeks from the Legion of Honor to the de Young, where a collection of Monet’s “late” paintings are on display in an exhibition casually titled, “Monet: The Late Years.” So naturally, when we found out that the San Franciscans were having an art exhibition of French paintings, we thought it would be good of us to go and visit them while they were flying their highest. And indeed they all were.
Something with which we may not be as well familiar in Oakland is the fact that art exhibitions are not like normal public entertainment, and for this reason, they are exceedingly difficult. There is a savant-ism that is necessary for their enjoyment. Little to no prior knowledge of the displayed objects is a most regrettable thing in situations such as these. How often do we go to the Grand Lake Theater and then afterwards attempt to explain our enjoyment in terms of pure form? Hardly ever, for that would be idiotic. We go and we see the movie, it does not require of us that we’ve done any homework, and it is perfectly alright to go in and come out without having a definite opinion on anything that we saw in between. And there is never any lack of certainty that we have enjoyed ourselves. This is not the same as the form of public entertainment one finds in the museums of San Francisco. The San Franciscans enjoy nothing more than the opportunity to intellectualize their experiences, to explain them, to display the prior knowledge they bring to a subject. Yes, the San Franciscan wishes for nothing more in life than the opportunity to gallantly step across barriers to entry in the sight of all one’s peers, as well as to see others struggle to maneuver likewise. This pleasure does not exist at the movies, or in Oakland.
When we were let in to the gallery, the crowd disbursed throughout the hall, eager to see the paintings. Many people, including ourselves, went to stand before a wall displaying large blocks of text that provided some background as to the contents of the exhibition. Such apparatuses are indispensable to us who visit from across the Bay, for they give us the security to feel that we bring to our experience of the paintings a precious modicum of expertise. Others, however, could be heard saying to their friends or partners, who had expressed an interest in reading the wall, that for themselves the information is “redundant” because they “already know all that stuff.” And so these walls of text are a boon not only to the amateurs, but also to the informed museum visitors as well, who greatly enjoy putting up their eyebrows at the U-shaped crowd standing around the wall of text, and passing them with an air, as if to say, “well what is everybody looking at? The paintings are over there!”
Among other whispers in the gallery one could hear just about every utterance ended with a rhetorical “wouldn’t you say?” or “wouldn’t you agree?” Such as, “the willow trees evoke a powerful sense of loss, wouldn’t you say?” or, “you can tell from the brushwork here that there’s still very much of the young Monet in this one, wouldn’t you agree?” As well, one could quite make a game of listening for who in attendance had most recently just come back from a trip to Paris: everywhere there murmured, “…well, yes, when my wife and I were visiting Paris last Fall…,” or “…it so reminds me of my semester abroad in Paris…,” or “…I was actually just in Paris last week for a lecture…”
But perhaps a word or two on the exhibition itself. The paintings were quite good. There was one of those famous pictures of the Japanese footbridge that one always sees as a jigsaw puzzle (Impressionists are responsible for some notoriously difficult jigsaw puzzles). Otherwise, the exhibition did great work to emphasize the locality of these paintings: the artist’s garden in Giverny. The gallery text portrayed the elderly Monet as completely given over to gardening and botany, ostensibly as a means to obtain ideal specimens of nature for his paintings. At one time, he employed as many as eight gardeners, which is more than some families in Piedmont probably have. Other techniques practiced in the way of supplementing his art included scraping algae off the surface of his lily pond to insure that reflections were sharper, and paving a nearby road in order to prevent the accumulation of dust on his models.
Likewise, the gallery text characterizes this as a time in the artist’s life “dedicated to the close observation of nature,” and the same wall quotes Monet as saying of his time, “I am exultant, reveling in nature.” But is any of this really natural? Given the extreme lengths to which the artist went to cultivate his garden, it all seems less like a keen observation of nature than it does an old man holding nature hostage in his backyard, torturing, twisting, manicuring it, saying, “conform to my ideal so that I can paint you!” For who has ever enhanced nature by paving a road? Could Monet have been mistaken about this? Of course we can’t expect so much from the San Franciscans, who are incapable of differentiating nature from its affectation. For them, there is only the latter.
The gallery text describes the garden as a “necessary extravagance” in the painter’s relentless study of nature (of course only a San Franciscan could come up with such a phrase), but when one looks at the paintings themselves, it seems that not a whole lot of care is taken to actually reproduce the details that were so painstakingly procured. The most errant streaks of pinkish-purple are taken for lily flowers. Of course this is just how Monet paints. All I am saying is that his practice of gardening does not seem to map onto his artistic practice as clearly as the walls say it does. But then again, perhaps it’s difficult for an Oaklander to appreciate how a few motes of dust, or some pond scum might affect the artistic gaze.
But of course, none of this really matters because at the end of the day, the San Franciscans had everything they could ever want all in one place: art, French culture, and themselves, which is more than can be said to have ever happened in Oakland.
