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May 19th, 2013 
Peter Nolan What’s up with all the Monet shows? http://www.examiner.com/article/loving-blue-chip-art-is-not-art-loving Fully sixteen different museums are hyping Monet exhibits here and abroad.
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In the U.S. Monet is showing or will show in Denver, Chicago, New Hampshire, Missouri, San Francisco, and New York.
Overseas, Monet is showing or will show in Denmark, France, Japan, Australia, Canada, Vienna, Spain and Sweden.
And that’s just current and upcoming. The list of Monet shows is long and the lines to see them are even longer.
Monet paintings are known to have created such a mob scene in London’s Royal Academy of Arts that on closing day, it had to keep its doors open all night to accommodate an 8,000-visitor spillover.
When Monet hit the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, it drew mobs that even attracted the recluse, J.D. Salinger.
A retrospective of Monet’s work in Paris has been called France’s most visited art exhibit in 40 years. A reported 913,064 visitors attended.
What’s so special about an artist fixed on his garden and water lilies?
Heidi Victoria, Australia’s Minister for the Arts said of the current Monet show at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne that it will “give audiences an insight into Monet’s works, his life and inspiration.”
What insights can possibly be left to glean at this point?
Maybe Monet mania comes down to the fact that he, like his fellow Impressionists, was an escape artist from a war-torn land. (The Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870 when Monet was 30) and we, a very war-weary people today, seek a similar escape the air of detachment that fills Monet’s canvases.
You know those wide Paris street scenes in Monet’s “Boulevard des Capucines”? Napoleon widened those boulevards so he could quickly dispatch troops into them if there were an uprising. Such was the tenor of the time. That’s when Monet ran to London for cover and painted parks.
Maybe we welcome his pictures of parks because, like him, feel glutted by images of death and destruction.
Then there’s the light. Monet only had eyes for the decomposing, running light that both buffed up and brushed off the life around him. Unwittingly acknowledging this narrow focus, he wrote this:
“One day, finding myself at the death-bed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face…”
Monet ignored the world he lived in and we identify with that. Given our calamitous world, it’s no wonder we seek out escape artists like Monet.
Source Article from http://www.examiner.com/article/do-doldrums-drive-monet-mania?cid=rss
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