The Impressionists and gardening − how perfectly the Royal Academy has triangulated British tastes for its beginning-of-the-year blockbuster. “Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse” is not though a cynical attempt to get the turnstiles churning but a considered and visually sumptuous attempt to examine the role gardens played in the wider artistic imagination at the beginning of the 20th century.The painted gardens on display, some 120 pictures from a broad sweep of artists such as Cézanne, Pissarro, Manet, Kandinsky, Van Gogh, Matisse, Sargent and Klimt, show how varied an outlet the motif of the garden could be. When Monet started to paint the waterlilies in his garden at Giverny, for example, the First World War had already started and he could hear the pounding of the guns at the front only 50 kilometers away. He painted the waterlilies and the weeping (mourning?) willows that fringed them to face down war by showing nature at its most serene and poignant. Three of his great waterlily canvases (the Agapanthus Triptych, 1916-19) have been brought together from their individual American homes for the first time since they were painted − they form an immersive altarpiece dedicated to France’s war effort: “to honor the victory and peace”, as the painter told his friend, the Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau.For other painters, however, flowers were a means of addressing painterly concerns rather than emotional ones. While Wassily Kandinsky’s “Murnau, The Garden II” (1910) is an exercise in dynamism and clashing hues, Emile Nolde’s “Flower Garden (O)” (1922) uses paint so thick that it almost ceases merely to represent petals but, in its three dimensionality, become them.The garden, for Nolde, was a space that offered “calm and beautiful hours” but perhaps the painting that best expresses this mood of horticultural luxe, calme et volupté is the Spaniard Joaquin Sorolla’s portrait of Louis Comfort Tiffany (who in turn transmuted flowers into glass) sitting painting amid a riot of blooms. The repose Tiffany finds in this blowsy world, so elegantly captured by Sorolla, is of sensory melding. Gustav Klimt, on the other hand, saw flowers as elements of pattern − tesserae in a patterned world and not living plants in their own right.At the heart of the show though remains Monet, not least because he recognized so clearly that painting and gardening were parts of the same impulse. When he moved to Giverny in 1883 he planted his garden expressly to give himself subjects to paint: it came to obsess him as much as his art. “Aside from painting and gardening,” he said, “I'm good for nothing.”Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse runs from January 30 through April 20, 2016, at the Royal Academy.
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