, Claude Monet, the quintessential impressionist painter, was born in 1840. That year Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, and in France both Ingres and Delacroix were at work. In 1926, when Monet died, Lenin was two years dead, and Picasso was already a middle-aged man of 45. Having lived such a span, Monet in old age looked like a relic of the 19th century -- hardly a modern artist at all. What could his painting offer a postcubist culture?
A great deal, as it turned out. Ripeness was all. Monet produced his best work after he turned 50, and it came to form the essential link between symbolism, with its cult of the nuance and its obsession with "getting behind" ordinary reality, and abstract painting. You can hardly imagine Jackson Pollock's all-over drip paintings, for instance, without the example of late Monet. But the real value of Monet's work lies not in what it predicted or how it was used by later artists but in itself: its intensity and breadth of vision, its lyrical beauty and the disciplined subtlety of its address to the world. One can hardly get enough of late Monet, which is why the exhibition currently on view at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, "Monet in the '90s: The Series Paintings," is so rewarding. It samples all his series in depth -- notably grainstacks, Rouen Cathedral, Japanese bridges, poplars -- except the Water Lilies, which come after 1900 anyhow.
With this show and its catalog essay, curator Paul Hayes Tucker, the leading U.S. expert on Monet, has set out to amend a number of received ideas about the artist. Chief among them is Cezanne's opinion: "Only an eye, but my God! What an eye!" In this view, Monet becomes a painter of mere sensation, exquisitely attuned to every sense impression but lacking social point and intellectual fiber.
Such a reaction against impressionism was strong among younger painters of the 1880s. They were led by Georges Seurat, whose Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-86, is a manifesto of anti-impressionist aims: a hieratic, pseudoscientific, heavily theorized paean to timelessness, edged with mordant social irony about the mechanization of bourgeois life. For some it made sensuous pleasure look like an insufficient message for art. Impressionism was gaining no new adherents and losing some of its original ones: Sisley had run out of steam by the '80s, and Pissarro had gone over to the younger side, doing pointillist dots.
Monet's reply to anti-impressionist prejudice, Tucker argues, was to broaden - the base and subject matter of his work. He wanted to show that the greatest landscape painting in France could still be produced by impressionist means. "Nature should not be submitted to harsh, premeditated analysis, as in the Grande Jatte," he writes of Monet's attitude. "It should be allowed to reign in the painting as it does in the world -- resplendent in all its nuances, variants, subtleties and surprises."