In the Shadow of Greenberg

The Water Lilies: American Abstract Painting
and the Last Monet
Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris
13.04.18 – 20.08.18

Translated by Bridget Noetzel

Texts are not footnotes for images, and images are not illustrations for texts.
– Roland Barthes

Claude Monet’s late works were not appreciated to the point of becoming world-famous, but they touched off a major aesthetic adventure. In 1955, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought Water Lilies from Monet’s descendants, and this formally launched a voyage of discovery. The roles played by art critics, the art market and national institutions – Abstract Expressionism was exploited by the Americans during the Cold War – were as important as the genius and technique of the painters themselves.

Clement Greenberg built a bridge between French modern painting and American abstract art. Supported by the opposition between surface and depth, Greenberg gave a standard version of the history of modernist painting: with Kant’s discovery of self-criticism in the philosophical realm, painting could not be left behind. As in avant-garde literature, painting highlighted its own self-critical nature: ‘Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness.’ Within this trend, the masterpieces of Manet, Cézanne and Pissarro were often seen as outcomes, in different ways, of the struggle with this newly discovered ‘flatness’. Is the concept of flatness really as clear a Kantian idea as Greenberg hoped? The French philosopher Jacques Rancière somewhat angrily found this logic restrictive; it definitely provides art history with a node that connects modern painters, regardless of their specific approaches. Painters are regarded as modernists, as long as their work vaguely interacts with this flatness. Thus, the breadth of Greenberg’s version of modernism seems to explain why Pissarro and Monet, two artists with decidedly different techniques, were both modernist masters, conscious of flatness. Thus, it is not at all strange that people see American abstract art as part of this larger modernist family. Greenberg also quickly found American abstract painters their predecessors: Picasso and Matisse. When Greenberg visited the Musée de l’Orangerie in 1954, he was astonished by Monet’s large Water Lilies, and he promptly announced that Monet’s late modernist ideas were perpetuated by the American abstract painters. Greenberg’s unassailable position in American art-historical circles helped to place this idea within the canon of art history.

In order to represent this immensely influential meeting between Water Lilies and American abstract art and to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of an important state commission, the Musée de l’Orangerie, in Paris, mounted The Water Lilies: American Abstract Painting and the Last Monet. Regrettably, this lavish exhibition transformed works of art into footnotes of an art-historical narrative.

Strolling into the costly exhibition space under the greenhouse-style building, viewers were not welcomed by a parallel and open relationship between Monet and American abstract artists; instead, text nervously pressed on image in every instance. Visitors were, at all times, confined by hints from art history. Nearly every caption was accompanied by a comment from Greenberg. Viewers could feel Greenberg’s presence everywhere; the exhibition began with a notable passage from Greenberg’s essay, ‘The Crisis of the Easel Picture’ ( 1948 ): ‘Monet’s later practice threatened the easel-picture convention, and now, twenty years after Monet’s death, his practice has become the point of departure for a new tendency in painting.’

The history of art laid out on the wall formed a notable contrast with Blue Water Lilies, which hung in the exhibition entrance; the text printed on the wall occupied the entire left side of the first room. The Monet borrowed from the Musée d’Orsay measures only 204 × 200 cm, so it appeared rather isolated in the first room. Viewers outside the space could see it through the entrance, but once they entered and looked around they found only one other work: Barnett Newman’s 1946 painting, The Beginning. In the first room, the first ‘exhibited work’ that people encountered was the wall full of text. This passage was projected onto viewers’ bodies, accompanying them throughout their entire visit. It is worth noting that almost no video relating to this exhibition presented the full extent of the first room ( Newman’s painting was never shown ). We can surmise that it is precisely because of the awkwardness of the presentation of this room that the camera did not linger on this unusually imbalanced ratio of text to image.

This bloated passage was like an art history lesson. First, it defined the relationship between two types of abstract art for us. The displeasure we might feel is not at the incorrectness of this definition per se ( it could not be correct, because any definition is only ‘one’ voice in art history ) but because it stifles the wonder that might be produced at encountering two kinds of abstract art. Like American abstract artists ‘rediscovering’ Monet after encountering his late work, could we not ‘rediscover’ something new since our first encounter in the 1970s? Of course, the words printed on the wall do not amount to an encounter, or a dialogue; they masquerade as ‘the history of art’, burying in arbitrary, assertive voices a newness that should have been left to the viewer to discover and invent. Putting together a string of famous names was enough to lend an air of unquestionable authority to the elitist discourse, in which one classic followed another, to generate new classics in turn. As if that were not enough, we then stumbled on a stifling commentary from Greenberg bang in the middle of the exhibition:

But only a few years later, several Americans who were to become the most advanced of advanced painters were enthusiastically rediscovering him. They had not even seen, outside reproductions, those huge close-ups which are the last Water Lilies […] Monet’s broad, slapped-on daubs of paint and his scribbles were telling them, further, that paint on canvas had to be able to breathe; and that when it did breathe, it exhaled color first and foremost – color in fields and areas, rather than in shapes; and that this color had to be solicited from the surface as well as applied to it. It was under the tutelage of Monet’s later art that these same young Americans began to reject sculptural drawing […] and turn instead to ‘area’ drawing, ‘antidrawing’ drawing.

We might be curious about the content that was omitted from the first paragraph after ‘those huge close-ups which are the last Water Lilies’. Greenberg wrote, ‘but they were already learning from Monet, as well as from Matisse, that a lot of sheerly physical space was needed for the development of a strong pictorial idea that did not involve an illusion of more than shallow depth’. Here, Greenberg reminds us that, from an art-historical perspective, Monet and Matisse were similarly important for American abstract artists. Art history defaults to the authority of authoritativeness; the close relationships between great painters is one kind of greatness, and this pairing is just a kind of name-dropping. Here, the disappearance of Matisse’s motivation is obvious; it allows the relationship between Monet and American abstract artists to be singular and absolute, thereby maximising the great continuity and purity in this art history of greatness. It is not difficult to imagine this passage from Greenberg being re-edited and used in an exhibition about Matisse and American abstract art.

What guides the exhibition? The work of art? Or the history of art? Has a fresh dialogue begun – in relation to a new history with a preference for thematic or alternative content? Or is this simply repeating the single voice of the history of art? In other words, what is the position of text in art exhibitions? How can text appear next to the works of art without analysing them? To paraphrase Roland Barthes: how can we prevent images from becoming illustrations for texts? We must admit that art history is not a translation of art, and vice versa. This exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie is a negative example: the art-historical dogma that often appears in auction house descriptions of works of art has unthinkingly become the discourse in a state museum – a scandal for avant-garde art.