by Jon Lackman | 21 November 2008 | Modern, Museums
From Bloomberg News critic Jorg von Uthmann:
Why do people become painters? In two out of three cases, suspected the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, to overcompensate for a congenital sight defect. That’s hard to prove. Yet there is no doubt that Claude Monet had serious eye problems in the last two decades of his life. The Musee Marmottan in Paris, which has the world’s largest collection of his paintings, is raising the question: To what extent did those troubles shape his late work? … With the help of computer simulations, the show aims to demonstrate what the artist actually saw when he painted in his garden. You can also read the correspondence with his doctors and examine the yellow glasses he had to wear after the operation, the first of three … When London’s Royal Academy presented Monet’s late work in 1999, more than 800,000 visitors paid respects to the Grand Old Man of French painting who could do no wrong. The show at the Musee Marmottan has the courage to deflate the hype. Comparing its 1918-19 versions of the Japanese bridge at Giverny, an appalling brew of nightmarish colors, with their wonderful 1899 predecessor, a loan from the Musee d’Orsay, you don’t doubt for a second that what you see is a case for the ophthalmologist, not an artistic decision.
