DATE: Thursday, July 31, 1997               TAG: 9707310045

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  126 lines

MONET COMES TO THE CHRYSLER THREE PAINTINGS ON LOAN FROM A BOSTON MUSEUM REFLECT THE MASTER IMPRESSIONIST'S WORK DURING THE 1889S

DURING THE 1880S, French Impressionist Claude Monet often went out on painting campaigns.

Campaign is the right word. Tromping through the meadows at Giverny, his home west of Paris, or climbing craggy bluffs along the Creuse River, Monet was willful and full of purpose. He must've been, because it sure wasn't easy.

He'd travel to sometimes distant and inconvenient locales, by train and then horse and buggy. And he'd lug loads of equipment so that he could carry out his personal aim - to capture the ``instantaneity'' in the out of doors.

Three examples of his success to that end go on view today at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk.

A trio of important landscape paintings from the collection of Boston's Museum of Fine Art have been installed in the skylit Impressionist gallery, alongside works by Monet cronies Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley. The show was underwritten by the museum's 155-member Masterpiece Society, a category of membership that requires a contribution of at least $2,500 a year.

The paintings span the 1880s and represent the major characteristics of Monet's work during that decade.

``Fisherman's Cottage on the Cliffs at Varengeville'' (1882), the earliest work, is ``one of the most

famous Monets in this country. I was astonished to discover it was available,'' said Chrysler chief curator Jefferson C. Harrison.

The cheery, sun-drenched painting depicts a seaside hut at a village in the Normandy region of northwestern France. The image has often been reproduced in date books and calendars.

``It's a joyful, almost Arcadian image,'' Harrison said. ``He loved the cliffs there, and he was particularly drawn to this little hut.''

The hut was built by Napoleon as a lookout post. By the mid-19th century it was abandoned and fishermen used it. Moving from one cliff to another, Monet made numerous paintings of the scene, with the hut as the principal motif. He first discovered it in the summer of 1882 and returned in the 1890s to paint it again, Harrison said.

France was becoming more industrialized, and a new train system made travel throughout the nation more widely available.

``A good deal of Monet's imagery is landscape,'' Harrison said. ``From the '80s and '90s, it is as much about the loss of the landscape through industrialization as it is about the beauty of the landscape.''

The fisherman's cottage picture, ``in my opinion, is about a nostalgic evocation of a pastoral paradise untouched by man. He felt a growing sense of nostalgia for unspoiled places.''

``Meadow at Giverny in Autumn,'' painted in the late-1880s, portrays the landscape surrounding Giverny, the rural village where Monet lived from 1883 to his death in 1926.

``He's painting the neighborhood,'' Harrison said, ``going out on painting campaigns to see what was around the house.''

Besides the nearby poplars and haystacks, subjects for two of his better-known series, Monet also was drawn to open fields. Of the three works, ``this painting is larger than the other two and more contemplative. Sort of misty, almost dreamlike,'' Harrison said.

Also on view is the 1889 ``Ravine of the Creuse in Sunlight,'' set in a desolate area in south central France.

``He was taken with the savagery of the spot. This rustic, unpopulated setting,'' Harrison said. ``This is where he began to paint his first series.''

Series painting - the notion of capturing a certain scene at different times of day, in sun, rain and mist - was uncommon when Monet embarked on the challenge.

``Certainly not to the extent that he did them,'' Harrison said. ``There were people drawn to certain sites, who painted them under certain atmospheric conditions. But not with the sense of purpose that Monet had.''

In the 1880s, Monet's style might be dubbed high Impressionism.

``By that, I mean absolute faithfulness to the basic founding tenets of Impressionism,'' Harrison said. ``The notion of the rainbow palette that reflects the prismatic optical experience of nature.''

The curator also was referring to ``a fidelity to the Impressionist technique - a fluidity and responsiveness.''

A decade earlier, Monet was struggling on many levels. In 1978, two major auctions of Impressionist paintings brought low prices, signaling a depressed market. The next year brought the death of his beloved first wife, Camille.

By the early 1880s, he began to pull away from the other Impressionists, taking a more solitary course, Harrison said. He was retooling his life, marrying Alice in 1881 and moving with their families in 1883 to Giverny.

It would be another decade, however, before he began creating the water garden that became the sole focus of his art for the last quarter century of his life. His famous waterlily paintings were introspective, almost mirrors of his soul.

Meanwhile, there were his painting campaigns.

If Monet's waterlilies looked inward, the 1880s landscapes were windows onto a rain-washed and sun-splashed outer world. The artist was in his 40s, hitting his stride and eager to travel.

The French Academy that had prevailed for decades preferred larger canvases painted in the studio. Monet opted for the opposite: smaller canvases that, in most cases, could be completed, start to finish, on site.

In his 1985 book, ``Monet: Nature Into Art,'' art historian John House devoted a chapter to the artist's en plein air - outdoors - painting.

Money would carry numerous canvases to the site, each destined to convey a given time of day or atmosphere. Conditions may have held for an hour, then he would set aside the canvas until conditions were again ideal - perhaps that day, or in a week. Maybe never.

A windy day at the shore might throw sand into his wet paint, forever embedded. Monet's friend Gustav Geffroy once wrote to Alice that her husband, painting on the coast in rough weather, would wear a fisherman's oilskins and tie his easel to the rocks, the gusts threatening to yank the palette from his hands.

Another friend, Octave Mirbeau, recorded one of the most thorough descriptions of Monet at work:

``Claude Monet realized that it was the time of day chosen which characterizes the landscape; this is instantaneity. He noticed that, on a settled day, an effect lasts for barely thirty minutes. Thus he had to record the history of these thirty minutes. He made it a strict rule to cover the canvas in that short space of a half hour.

``Every day at the same hour, for the same number of minutes, in the same light, sometimes through sixty sessions, he would come back to the same motif, if, during that short session, the light changed.''

His devotion was not without its dangers.

In November 1885, he was working by the sea at Etretat in the Normandy region. Focused on the image before him, he was nearly washed out to sea.

He was ``swept away by a freak wave when he thought the tide was already receding,'' House wrote in his book. ``He lost canvas and easel; his palette was plastered to his face, but he managed to crawl from the waves.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photos

[...photos of the Monet paintings]

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu