Monet show to reconcile French with snubbed master

PARIS (AP) - Beloved by Americans, Impressionist master Claude Monet has long been a victim of a sort of Gallic snobbishness in his native France.

A new exhibition at Paris’ Galleries Nationales attempts to right this historic wrong by bringing together nearly 200 pieces by the painter _ from blockbuster chefs d’oeuvre reproduced in books, magazines and postcards worldwide to little-known, privately held pieces you’d never guess were Monets.

Curator Guy Cogeval said “Claude Monet (1840-1926)” _ the most complete Monet exhibit in France since 1980, with paintings on loan from dozens of museums and collections from Cleveland, Ohio, to Canberra, Australia _ is a bid to “repatriate one of the great geniuses of French art.”

“We (the French) have always said, ‘Monet’s for an exhibit in Japan, an exhibit in the United States, but not for one in France.’ But why? He’s one of our greatest painters,” Cogeval told The Associated Press.

He chalked this reticence up to “snobbishness,” saying the French largely dismissed Impressionism as “something for tourists” and preferred other 19th century movements like Realism or Symbolism.

This Gallic apathy “has had disastrous consequences” on the French public’s appreciation of Monet, Cogeval said, adding that the lion’s share of recent scholarship on the painter was done by academics in the U.S. and Britain.

“I think the French public will be very surprised” by the show, said Cogeval _ who also heads Paris’ Musee d’Orsay, a museum dedicated largely to the Impressionists.

Organized thematically, the exhibition _ which opens Wednesday and runs through Jan. 24 _ showcases the subjects that obsessed Monet throughout his long life, from the rocky coastline of Normandy to the haystacks and poplars he revisited under every conceivable meteorological condition, to the Japanese bridge and water lily-filled pond at his home in Giverny.

It highlights his evolution from a gifted but slightly conventional landscape painter _ churning out in the mid-1860s seascapes so realistic they could almost be mistaken for photographs _ to a painter whose feathery brushstrokes that captured shifting light, atmosphere and movement helped launch the Impressionist movement.

Grays, slate blues and forest greens dominate the early work, but Monet’s palette slowly broadens out, first to include pastels like buttery yellows and salmon pinks and then to the bold mauves, teals and crimsons of his final years, when his eyesight was clouded by cataracts.

“Point de la Heve at Low Tide,” an 1865 depiction of a foreboding, rocky beach in the northwestern Normandy region where he grew up _ one of Monet’s early critical successes _ shows his lifelong preoccupation with weather and atmosphere: The skies churn with foreboding black clouds and the whitecap-dotted sea roils.

Even as a young man of 25, Monet had already begun his lifelong pattern of returning over and over to the same subjects. The first paintings in the show, both from 1865, are two different takes on the same subject, a clearing in the forest of Fontainebleau, outside of Paris.

That kind repetition runs through the show, as its five curators scoured private museums and collections in at least 14 countries to procure multiple reinterpretations of the same scenes.

A series of five paintings from 1890-91 looks at the same mammoth haystacks at different times of day and throughout the year, capturing the mushroom-shaped objects under the golden sun of a sweltering midsummer’s day or shrouded beneath a glinting covering of frost or snow.

The facade of the cathedral of Rouen appears as many times in the exhibit, its Gothic facade tinged canary yellow, mauve, apricot or dusty gray, depending on the changing light.

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