Monday 31^st January 2011

I’m going to be art historical. If you want moisturiser, shopping, outfit crises or superbly fractured lives, come back another day.

As you know, I’ve been much criticised for going to Paris, with my architect Bruce MacBain and top blue-chip accountant, Prince Dmitri Hersov, to see the Monet Exhibition. ‘Terrible Sunday dauber,’ Robert Nevil wasped. Lord Arrowby absolutely wouldn’t come, appeared never to have heard of Monet and has now struck back with a new home art installation: an actual stuffed vole besieged by tiny ballerinas made of bird-bones.

I do hope Lord Arrowby isn’t cracking up.

Of course the main reason for wanting to see the Monet Exhibition was the near impossibility of getting in. Dimly, at the back of my mind, it flickered: Is Monet a bit common? Too much sunshine, the one-dimensional holiday mood shown in sick-making shades of salmon and azure?

Now, willed vulgarity is all right. Absolutely Poor Little Rich Gay. But how defiant and badly-behaved was Monet? Or did he think that masses of bright blue and orange was nice?

Poor Little Rich Gays require greatness in art. Good isn’t good enough.  I refer to gallery art.  Home art is another matter.  Or Art can be massively minor, freakish, obscure  and neglected.  We like that. Greatness means a complete vision of how the world is, offered without compromise, astonishing yet recognisable, patently true, not without darkness yet resounding and affirming.  K.Clark (of  Civilisation) said that Monet was ungreat on account of lack of form. Colour and light aren’t enough.  He said that when Monet painted Rouen Cathedral he made it look like melted ice-cream. He said it was telling that Monet’s idea of an interesting structure was a haystack.

K. was right about form. Form gives thunder and importance and is a massive bulwark against nothingness. He was right that ‘Bathers at Asnières’ by Seurat is the greatest painting of the early modern era. But he was wrong about Monet. Monet does have form. Those haystacks are dynamic in a quiet way. K. couldn’t see it.  There is design or so little design that is the point. One of my favourites is the one of the poppy field.  People might think it’s a pretty picture,  but the perspective is unsettling, leading up to the blind house and allowing the feeling that the poppies are a kind of wave that might overwhelm. The figures in the picture are ghostly; the two at the side, in fact, I’d never noticed before. This is how Monet saw things throughout. We little humans in this lovely world yet overwhelmed by it, blasted by sunshine, assaulted by colour, gripped by wind.

Poor Little Rich Gays like this. We live under the glorious panoply of our own importance, bearing the knowledge of our nothingness –  unlike the Earls Court Gays.

The garishness is inevitable.  How could Monet avoid it? He didn’t mean to be pretty. Those brilliant colours are terrible. At times the glare is appalling, the colour scheme offered by the world likely to wipe out anyone going near it, both in and out of the picture. He had to face it.

But he might have avoided the awful gardening. I was hoping and hoping the picture of the abandoned lunch-table at Giverny would be there, adored by me at the Jeu de Paume 30 years ago and not seen since. It was – but a standard fuchsia in a Versailles tub!

Monet: Awful Gardening

The Poppy Field: Sinister Overtones

Monet: Appalling Wind

Monet: Colour Almost Unbearable

Monet: Another Colour Assault