Visiting Monet at PAM

The Portland Art Museum is undergoing a massive renovation projection, creating a new “Rothko Pavilion” which spans an existing courtyard and connects the original museum building to an annex next door.Rothko’s connection to Portland seems a bit tenuous. His family relocated to Portland in 1913 from Latvia to join his father. He was already 10 years old. Rothko left for Yale in 1921 and made his way to New York City in 1923. Rothko was given a show at the Portland Art Museum in 1933. He returned to Portland for a short time in 1943, but immediately left for Berkeley, California (where he met Clyfford Still). It’s unclear to me if he ever returned to Portland or how much Portlandreally factored in his life and work. It seems like Portland was a place his father chose, and being a child, Rothko had no choice in the matter. At any rate, the museum expansion looks great and I’m excited for it to open. I hope that by naming it “Rothko Pavilion” it means we get at least one Rothko painting on permanent display here in Portland.

While the construction is ongoing, the museum’s exhibits are pretty sparse and sometimes the permanent collection is inaccessible. The museum seems to be looking inward during this time. The current long-running exhibit titled Monet’s Floating Worlds at Giverny: Portland’s Waterlilies Resurfaces and celebrates the restoration of Waterlilies (1914-1915) by Claude Monet. It’s a chance for the museum to show off a jewel in its permanent collection.

The exhibit opens with a small collection of impressionist paintings, some by Monet, some others, and compares them with Japanese wood-block prints from the Edo period.

The title “floating world” refers to Edo-period culture in Japan known as Ukiyo , referring to the fleeting bon vivant nature of urban life.Art from this period is known as Ukiyo-eand includes the woodblock prints that everyone thinks of as Japanese art. If you are thinking of The Great Wave off Kanagawaby Hokusai (1831) you are correct.

The restored painting is amazing. The restoration process removed varnish which was applied after the painting was purchased and brought to America. A video installation on the wall opposite the painting shows the painstaking process of scrubbing off varnish with gentle solvents to reveal the bright painting underneath. One striking visual in the video shows a horizontal band of varnished painting over a restored portion of the painting, Resembling a Rothko painting, the varnished section is dull and dark, the unvarnished is bright and lively.

Looking closely at the unvarnished paint, the colors are almost cartoonishly bright. The paint strokes blend optically and create a more unified surface. The varnish darkened the entire painting, but not uniformly. Some colors receded more than others, making the overall work appear more brushy than it actually is. I realized every impressionist painting I’ve seen has been a lie. They’ve all been varnished. Varnish does protect the paint surface. But many collectors had paintings varnished to make them look older. It was a deliberate choice. Can you imagine, walking into a gallery today, buying a painting, and then paying some jerk to slop some varnish on top?

The exhibition includes many Japanese prints (and also French imitations of Japanese wood block prints, which are interesting in a different way). The French impressionists were famously greatly influenced by this artwork from Japan. One thing that struck me, though, is how far apart in time these two things really are.

One piece in the exhibition is a huge lithograph poster advertising a French exhibit of Japanese prints, some 50 years after the newer of these prints were made. The impressionists were fascinating by an art form that was already 100 years old by the time the Impressionists were working. Hokusai’s Great Wave was printed 9 years before Monet was born. Of course, the world was much bigger then. Those Japanese prints had to be purchased, loaded on a boat, and sailed back around Africa to get to Europe.

Inadvertently, this exhibit got me thinking about time. I’m re-listening to the audio version of Blake Gopnik’s biography of Andy Warhol, and at the same time, making my way through a 2012 biography of Sol LeWitt by Lary Bloom. These are two of my favorites. As I was reading / listening it clicked for me that these two artists were born one month apart in 1928; Sol LeWitt on September 9, 1928 and Andy Warhol on August 6th, 1928. They both came to New York about the same time, and were both admirers of Jasper Johns (Warhol was an early collector of Johns). I have to imagine LeWitt and Warhol must have stood elbow to elbow in front of a Johns painting together at a gallery opening at some point. Their biographies barely mention one another. Like two drivers on the same freeway, driving at the same speed, vaguely aware of the other, going the same way, but completely separate.