Art: The real painter of light

By F. Andrew Taylor

Surely nobody expects me to trash Monet here. Get real. We're talking about one of the premier and most influential painters of the 20th century. No, strike that time qualifier. Monet's bigger than that. He's in that rare handful of artists whose work is almost universally recognizable: Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Warhol, Picasso, Charles Schulz and Monet. Everyone else is the province of art history majors and book publishers looking for copyright-free book jacket art.

For the sake of argument, Monet is simply the preeminent impressionist. By and large the subject matter is less important than the way it is painted and captures the effects of light and atmosphere. To that end, he created several series in which the subject matter remained more or less constant, but the lighting is different in each painting. This is represented in this exhibit by two paintings of the Rouen Cathedral, each painted from the same vantage point yet sharing few of the same colors. These two paintings alone are worth the price of admission.

The exhibit covers work spanning his professional career up to and including his water lilies. After a lifetime of traveling to exotic locales to paint, in his later years Money bought a house, diverted a river to create some major water features and had it filled with rare and exotic plants. Essentially, he created a landscape that was in itself a work of art and then spent his final years capturing the effect of light on it.

What this exhibit doesn't have are any of the large works that fill a huge room and are so utterly overwhelming in person. This is just as well, given the space restraints of the gallery. The works are all drawn from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. There, they are displayed in spacious rooms with a good deal of light and, more often than not, relatively little daily patronage. It's often possible to back up 30 feet and ponder the way the dabs of individual color blend in the eye to create an astounding illusion of luminosity and life. Unfortunately, the smaller spaces of the Bellagio's exhibit force the viewer too close to the work, with pools of light playing on the individual works in an otherwise dimly lighted room. The very popularity of the show detracts as well, as patrons jockey to see the paintings; but it's that very popularity that bodes well for our city's cultural enrichment.