Arts |

This Monet exhibition is a big get for Denver Art Museum. Here’s a sneak peek.

“Claude Monet: The Truth of Nature” serves up a healthy portion of fine-art comfort food, and just as winter is approaching. No wonder Denver is eating it up.

The exhibit delivers mightily on its basic promise: It’s full of historically important paintings that everyone ought to view in person at least once in their lifetime. Enough said right there about whether or not you should pay the $27 it costs to see this blockbuster in the making.

Those huge crowds about to step into the Denver Art Museum will be overloaded with fine and familiar material — those ponds and poplars, those bridges, boats and, of course, water lilies that Monet is known for, and all reflected in studied light and shadow. If this exhibit is, indeed, supper for the soul, then it is drawn from the Sunday dinners your mother used to make, and it will nourish just as you expected.

“The Truth of Nature” will also remind you of the untruth of the digital age, where images of art are plentiful, but flattened by necessity into pixels on screens. You need to experience these works with your own eyes, 2 feet from your nose, to perceive the depth on their surface, to feel the push and pull of the painter’s brush as he struggled so relentlessly to produce them, to understand their humanity.

But otherwise, “Truth of Nature,” positions itself as a history lesson, rather than a contemporary art experience. It is timeless in ways that are good and bad. That is to say, it is an authentic, scholarly and well-organized trip into the late 19th and early 20th century world of Monet.

But it chooses not to connect, beyond ways that are implicit, to the realities of nature or art in the troubled era we live in now. This exhibit does rely on current research, but it wouldn’t have been much different if it were presented 20 or 30 years ago, or even in Monet’s lifetime.

That said, it is an accomplishment for the Denver Art Museum and curator Angelica Daneo, DAM’s in-house expert on European art before 1900. Under director Christoph Heinrich, the museum has honed its skills as an organizer of high-quality shows and as a respected institution that can wrangle loans of precious objects from other museums.

That decade-long effort pays off handsomely for this show with a roster, more than 100 works long, that starts with the Denver Art Museum’s own handful of Monet pieces, and is enriched with offerings from 80 lenders located in 15 different countries. Top museums contributed: Paris’ Musée d’Orsay, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and others.

The exhibit is also possible because DAM chose an interesting partner when creating it, the Museum Barberini, in Potsdam, Germany.  The Museum Barberini opened just two years ago with backing from the German art collector and software entrepreneur Hasso Plattner, who Forbes magazine lists as the 94th richest person in the world, with a family fortune estimated at  $15.3 billion.

Those are significant resources, and Daneo took advantage. “The Truth of Nature” is able to take a very broad look at Monet and his creative development, starting with “View from Rouelles,” painted in 1858 when the artist was just 18 years old, and continuing right through a number works, created at his house and garden in Giverny, France, where he lived from 1883 until his death in 1926.

The exhibition is powered, in part, by individual oils, like “Boulevard des Capucines,” Monet’s well-known 1873 streetscape that captures Paris on the verge of modernity.

Or “The Port of Le Havre, Night Effect,” a rare night scene that Monet painted in 1873 and which is held in a private collection and has never been shown before in a U.S. museum.

But its strength comes in the way it is organized. Of course, it climaxes with a roomful of lily paintings, which serve as a reward, or maybe a dessert, for folks who followed the biographical path of the exhibit.

But along the way, there’s a stop in a gallery that focuses on Monet’s work created in Argenteuil, France, when the Impressionism movement, and Monet’s own career as its ambassador, were succeeding. Paintings like 1873’s “The Artist’s House at Argenteuil” are full of light and joy (and blossoming trees and children playing).

Conversely, another gallery centers on work completed in the village of Vétheuil, where he processed the death of his wife, Camille, with paintings like 1881’s “Wheatfield,” depicting a lonely stretch of agricultural land, full of color, though void of humans.

Two other galleries stand out, both for showing Monet’s skill with color even when using a limited palette. One centers on winter scenes and is built around 1893’s “Floating Ice in Bennecourt,” which depicts an ice flow and sneaks shades of pink, blue and yellow in a mostly white environment. The other centers on Monet’s obsession with fog, which he painted during a visit to London. Again, oranges, greens and pinks give shape to a scene that otherwise feels stuck in the mist of gray clouds.

There is plenty of jubilance to balance out the exhibit’s darker moments. Those lovely and detailed garden paintings, the lilies and more. And there’s a chance to get into Monet’s obsession with light and his willingness to do whatever it took to get things right. One particular wall holds three side-by-side, very similarly composed views of a haystack. You can picture the artist standing there at his easel just waiting for the light to change.

The arguments are clear and convincing about Monet’s brilliance and his place in art history. Taken together, his work can easily be seen as the warm-up act for the great painters of the 20th century, who saw the doors of freedom opened by the Impressionists and rushed through them to create the own magic.

Monet’s importance beyond the world of painting — his social relevance today — is another matter, and it is largely left alone in “The Truth of Nature.”  The painter lived in a time of rapid modernization, of development, of human encroachment on the nature that he revered so much. He lived through emotional and psychological stress. He suffered through the ups and downs of economies, the whims of popular taste.

What other kind of tour through his life and work might connect those experiences to the world we live in today? What arrangement of nature paintings might help us understand or appreciate the precarious place of nature during a time of human-caused global warming, or what emphasis on his own mental state would serve as fodder for a discussion on personal freedom or mental health during a moment when so many people are feeling uneasy, even oppressed?

Museums tread into dangerous waters when they dip their feet into the world of current events or contemporary issues, into the environment, the economy, race or power. Some customers get upset; they want only escape from their art and, to be fair, that’s what a lot of them are paying for. It’s easy for museums to play it safe, to stick to what they do well — and what they do well is art history.

And, honestly, I’m not sure how a museum does that gracefully. Though I think it begins by starting the whole exhibition process with this question: Why this artist and why now? And skipping the whole thing if there’s no good answer.

Otherwise, it’s a missed opportunity for museum work at a crucial time in our own history. More than that, it’s a disservice to the artist on display. Does the artist speak to our times? If not, the work is terrific, but useless, fading, inconsequential. Monet gave the world a good bit of beauty; what else did he give us?

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