Art: REDISCOVERED MODERN

TWICE during his long (86 years) lifetime, Pioneer Impressionist Claude Monet had to face the jeers and catcalls of critics. The first time was when his painting, Impression: Sunrise, appeared at the first impressionist showing in Paris in 1874, and was ridiculed as a formless monstrosity. But as the public slowly came to appreciate the impressionists’ atmospheric, sun-drenched works. Monet grew rich, won enthusiastic plaudits from the critics as well as the public. His second rebuff came toward the end. when his studies of the water-lily pond, with its Japanese covered bridge, on his country estate at Giverny were considered so amorphous that one critic called him the “victim and gravedigger of impressionism.” Now once again Monet’s star has begun to glow almost as brightly as that of Cezanne, whose studies paved the way for Cubists Picasso, Braque and Gris. And it is on Monet’s once-despised latest work that enthusiasm is now centered.

“Sistine Chapel.” French Painter Andre Massno started the bandwagon five years ago by boldly calling Monet’s Water Lily panels in Paris’ Orangerie “the Sistine Chapel of impressionism.” Collector Walter Chrysler Jr. and Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art both climbed aboard, bought late-Monet paintings (TIME, Jan. 30, 1956). The Monet boom resounded even louder with a show of his late works last summer by Paris Art Dealer Katia Granoff, who bought from Monet’s son, Michel, the paintings that for decades had been stored at Monet’s Giverny studio (where several collected shrapnel holes during World War II). The fresh supply set off a scramble that one U.S. buyer called “a regular gold rush; the prices seemed to go up 1,000,000 francs a week.” By the end of 1956 Manhattan’s Knoedler Galleries had sold all but one of its 15 Monets, with top price reportedly as high as $55,000.

Hailing the new trend, half a dozen U.S. museums this year are featuring their newly acquired Monet paintings. Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts has hung a show of its whole collection of 33 Monet oils to honor its recently purchased, nonimpres-sionist La Japonaise (see overleaf), Monet’s genuine tribute to Japanese art, for which his first wife, Camille, posed. Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art is showing its third late-Monet purchase, Pond and Covered Bridge (opposite). In April the Art Institute of Chicago will celebrate its newly purchased Iris at the Side of the Pond by surrounding it with the museum’s collection of 29 other Monets. Next fall the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and St. Louis’ City Art Museum will jointly sponsor the biggest Monet show of all: 75 to 100 Monets from the U.S. and abroad.

“Abstract Impressionism.” The Monet revival is one case where painters led the critics. Young artists, moving from the geometric form toward nature, suddenly found an inspiring kind of abstraction in Monet’s late work. Museum of Modern Art Director Alfred Barr admits that he once thought Monet “just a bad example.” today has deep admiration for the vigor of his brushwork, his near-abstract paintings of nature, and his suggestive ambiguity of object and reflection.* Putting the final stamp of approval on Monet for the avant-garde is Manhattan Critic Clement Greenberg, who in praising Monet’s “free, calligraphic brush-work and loose, tonal delineation of form,” now confirms that much modern U.S. painting needs a new name: “abstract impressionism.”

*Monet once said that he wished he had been born blind and then suddenly gained sight so that he would begin to paint without knowing what the objects were.