Reverent Grandfather

By his own admission, Manhattan's opinion-making Museum of Modern Art Director Alfred Barr once thought Impressionist Claude Monet was "just a bad example." But five years ago, he looked again, changed his mind, and pronounced him grandfather of abstract impressionism (a phrase for the softer side of abstract expressionism). To honor grandfather, the Modern last week opened a stunning, 119-landscape show that began with postcard-like seascapes in the manner of Boudin and ended with the wide, conflated color vistas Monet drew from the depths of his private water garden 50 miles from Paris in the last years before his death in 1926.

The Modern displayed Monet's light-filled canvases in series devoted to a single theme--a haystack, a line of poplars, a cliff jutting into the sea, a cathedral. Guy de Maupassant described him at work: "No longer a painter, in truth, but a hunter. He proceeded, followed by children who carried his canvases, five or six canvases representing the same subject at different times of day and with different effects. He took them up and put them aside in turn, following the changes in the sky ... I have seen him thus seize a glittering shower of light on the white cliff . On another occasion he took a downpour beating on the sea in his hands and dashed it on the canvas." Seen grouped as he painted them and as he wanted them to be seen, Monet's canvases revealed that his vision of reality was not single, but manifold. Nine paintings of haystacks derived strength in combination both from their sameness and their differences, made any one canvas, taken singly, seem incomplete.

The abstractness of his last pictures, which crowned 70 years of dedicated work, make Monet a supposedly transitional figure. He would have denied it. Though half-blinded by cataracts in both eyes toward the end of his career, he was concerned more than ever with the most evanescent effects in nature. The swift slashings of the abstract expressionists shut out what Monet so reverently embraced. Last week's exhibition made plain--as the Modern had perhaps not intended--that Monet has no heir.

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