Review of the micro-exhibition of Claude Monet at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts

The main Moscow art museum displaying Western art has opened the exhibition “Rouen Cathedrals”. Study of paintings by Claude Monet from the collection of the Pushkin Museum. A. S. Pushkin.” He talks about the exhibition of two paintings Kira Dolinina.

The long and detailed title of the new Pushkin Museum exhibition should immediately cool the ardor of naive dreamers who might have thought that at least a few of Monet’s “Rouen Cathedrals” out of the 35 available in the world were brought to Russia. No, they didn’t bring it, now it’s completely impossible – museum exchanges have practically stopped. As a consolation, I can say that no one has ever seen all the “Cathedrals” together, and after Monet’s death, the largest number of them – 16 paintings from the series – were exhibited in one space in 1994 in Rouen itself. The Musee d’Orsay has the most “Cathedrals” – five; in Russia there were two paintings from this series, both from the collection of Sergei Shchukin, and both in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

“Rouen Cathedrals” (1892–1894) is one of Claude Monet’s “calling cards”: recognizable at first sight, always different, but not so much as to confuse them with something else, ready to answer not only for themselves, but also for all impressionism as a method in general. The fact that they are late for classical impressionism (the painting “Impression. The Rising Sun” that gave its name to the movement is dated 1872, and the term “impressionists” coined by the feuilletonist Louis Leroy is 1874) does not matter for such popularity. Much more important is the principle of animation, seriality, which emphasizes the constant desire of impressionist artists to capture natural light, whose variability dooms them to more and more new attempts.

Monet painted all of his Cathedrals in two years. But by this time he already had the series in the factory: the “Gare Saint-Lazare” series is dated 1877; in 1891, “Haystacks” appeared in the gallery of Monet’s chief marchand, Paul Durand-Ruel, in Paris; in 1892, also with Durand-Ruel, the artist presented his first exhibition, dedicated exclusively to one series of “Poplars on the Epte.” Immediately after “Cathedrals,” Monet painted a series of snow scenes made in Norway, followed by “Views of the Thames” and, of course, hundreds of “Water Lilies.” “Cathedrals” are a landscape, but a landscape with such a predominance of architecture that it is permissible to imitate the Dutch of the Golden Age and call this type of image a “portrait of a building.” The main character of each painting in this series is the Rouen Cathedral, and it is the smallest changes in its “face” that Monet tries to capture. The artist himself used the word “kaleidoscope” when he wrote about the series he had begun: “It seemed to him that he was looking into a huge kaleidoscope, where pattern follows pattern, following in continuous succession and with inexhaustible variety.” He starts and stops several times, leaves Rouen and returns, rents premises for a workshop with one or the other – a little more shifted to the right or left – view of the cathedral. He either boasts in letters to his wife or Marchand, then completely wilts: “It’s so hard… I’m broken, I can’t do it anymore… I had a night full of nightmares: the cathedral… seemed blue, then pink, then yellow.” He works on many canvases simultaneously (in this case, he kept up to 14 canvases at hand next to the easel), changing them depending on the movement of the sun. Some paintings go easier, the number of layers of paint in others reaches twenty – as, for example, on “Rouen Cathedral at Noon (Portal and Tower of d’Alban)” exhibited at the Pushkin Museum.

Monet himself saw this exercise as a great challenge. He wrote a lot about his “Cathedrals” while no one had seen them yet, promised a sensation, and set a very high price in advance (for one painting – 15 thousand francs). On May 10, 1895, a large solo exhibition of Monet was opened at the Durand-Ruel Gallery, where twenty “Cathedrals” were presented for the first time, which were given a separate room; The hanging diagram was created by the artist himself. At first, Monet wanted all the paintings in the series to be purchased by one collector. But it quickly became clear that this was hardly possible. Then the artist pitted his two Marchands against each other, the faithful Durand-Ruel and Rene Valadon, who was stepping on his heels, and began selling “Cathedrals” himself, bypassing the Marchands. This is exactly how his first “Cathedral”, “Rouen Cathedral in the Evening,” was sold to Shchukin in 1901 for 18 thousand francs. The Russian collector will buy his second “Cathedral” in 1903 from Durand-Ruel, for 22 thousand francs.

The Pushkin Museum exhibition doesn’t really tell the whole story. Its theme is comprehensive technical and technological research carried out in 2023, which included a detailed study of the paint layer and the chemical composition of pigments, as well as the canvases on which the works were painted. I cannot promise that the viewer will receive, as the museum advertisement says, “unique information about Monet’s creative method and the materials that the artist used in his work.” Given the number of “Cathedrals” that exist in the world, similar studies have already been carried out, and a lot has been written about purchased standard canvases, the features of the primer, underpainting and paints. What is definitely important in this project is that the work was restored and possible weak points were mothballed. That is, everything is in order now with “our” “Cathedrals”. This is what the museum reports on.