Monet -- water lilies and all -- returns to San Francisco

PUBLISHED: March 3, 2019 at 8:30 a.m. | UPDATED: March 4, 2019 at 4:24 a.m.

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Two years ago, a San Francisco museum exhibit revealed the stunning early career of French artist Claude Monet. The storyline ended about the time his painting “Impression—Summer” went on display in Paris in 1872, labeling forever the new style of Impressionism.

An expansive new exhibit at San Francisco’s de Young Museum, “Monet: The Late Years,” picks up his career some 40 years later.

Monet was still devoted to his Impressionistic style after 1900, but was also reinventing himself as an artist. The deaths of his second wife and his eldest son, and Monet’s declining vision — he would eventually undergo surgery for cataracts — were personal tragedies. But in his 70s and 80s he plunged ahead as a painter with amazing vigor.

Fortunately, he still had his beloved garden, especially the water garden he created at his home in Giverny, about 40 miles from Paris. The water-lily pond, which he studied and painted endlessly, in every conceivable light and atmosphere, provided the images that have become synonymous with his name.

Those water lilies will enchant many visitors to the de Young, where “Monet: The Late Years” runs through May 27. They are featured in at least 29 of the 52 paintings on display, along with wisteria, roses, iris and daylilies. One big gallery surrounds visitors with these works, suggesting the 360-degree panorama of Monet’s most famous installation at the Musee de l’Orangerie in Paris.

The curator of “Monet: The Early Years,” George Shackelford of Houston’s Kimbell Art Museum, offered plenty of surprises in that exhibit two years ago. In “The Late Years,” again presented with San Francisco’s Fine Arts Museums, he offers more. Monet’s rarely seen works from the last years of his life — blazing with color, abstract to the point of obscurity — are also featured.

Shackelford draws a timeline from Monet’s late Impressionist works to American artists of the mid-20th century whom they inspired. The “action painters” who flourished after World War II are also linked. Shackelford quotes Alfred Barr, then director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, who said that among the era’s Abstract Expressionists there were also “Abstract Impressionists.”

“But all of these backwards reflections on what Monet’s work might signify for posterity meant nothing to Monet, in the end,” Shackelford concludes in the exhibit catalog.

That may be the best way for visitors to experience the exhibit, developing their own narrative. Captions for individual paintings are minimal, wall text panels are brief. Getting lost in Monet’s garden can be its own reward.

Paintings of the water-lily pond may seem repetitious, but they offer subtle variations of mood, lighting, time of day, and the reflections of sky and clouds. Some appear almost three-dimensional, including the water’s depth. (The painter Edgar Degas told Monet that he could only look at his works briefly: “Your paintings gave me vertigo.”)

“Monet: The Late Years” stretches through the de Young’s big galleries for temporary exhibits chronologically, with one startling exception. At the entry, there’s a wall-size projection of a 1915 film showing Monet painting at his pond in Giverny. It’s from a film that included silent footage of France’s greatest living artists at the time, among them Degas, Renoir and Rodin.

The paintings in the exhibit include the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums’ own “Water Lilies” (circa 1914-1917), as well as works from such wide-ranging sources as the Musee Marmottan Monet in Paris, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo.

It may be difficult selecting highlights from an exhibit that feels so comprehensive, but is actually well focused. As Shackelford does in the catalog, it is possible to spend a great deal of time comparing brushstrokes, individual lines of color and the sense of reflection in three big paintings, side by side, all titled “Water Lilies.”

The exhibit’s earlier “Morning on the Seine” (1896) gives a wider atmospheric view. “The Japanese Footbridge” (1899), across the lily pond, is a starting point for many variations to come. “The Artist’s House at Giverny” (1913) offers a lush perspective of the garden as well.

The de Young’s “panorama” gallery is awe-inspiring, suggested by the “Grand Ambitions” of Monet’s large-scale paintings. The largest here, at 14 feet wide, “Water Lilies (Agapanthus),” is merely the central panel of an even wider work. There are also two sweeping panels of wisteria, dizzying in their abstract style.

For dedicated Monet fans, this exhibit offers a chance to lose oneself in a dreamy version of nature, and escape for a day to a garden, especially a water garden, in France.

Monet himself did not leave nature to chance. Each day, a gardener skimmed the surface of the pond and dunked the lilies to remove dust. Monet even funded the paving of surrounding roads to prevent dust from settling on the pond. Then what he called his “landscapes of water and reflections” were ready for their portrait.