Claude Monet's eastern promise

Japan may have provided the inspiration for one of France's best-loved impressionists, GREG ANSLEY finds.

The haystacks are unmistakably Claude Monet. The pink to yellow tonings of Haystacks at Giverny could be no one else's. Nor could the 6m Waterlilies, one of the series painted in Monet's garden at Giverny outside Paris.

But could these quintessentially French masterpieces owe much of their form and vibrancy to relatively unknown Japanese artists, whose work was beginning to reflect Western influences as Nippon emerged from two centuries of hermetically sealed isolation?

Professor Virginia Spate, Monet scholar and art historian at Sydney University, thought so. Armed with the conviction that Monet's perception of art had been shaped by the Japanese block prints that were flooding fashionable Paris in the late 19th century, Spate proposed an exhibition to explore the thesis.

She won an enthusiastic audience at Canberra's National Gallery of Australia and among the international custodians of some of Monet's greatest works, including New York's Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art, London's National Gallery and the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.

The result is Monet and Japan, a collection of 39 Monet paintings and 88 block prints by such Japanese artists of the time as Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige.

It juxtaposes well-loved canvases of Claude Monet with some crucial Japanese images that had inspired a vast period of his creative life.

Monet and Japan, which runs in Canberra until June 11 and from July 7 to September 16 at Perth's Art Gallery of Western Australia, has not convinced everyone of Spate's thesis, but it has produced a striking and well-argued case.

The exhibition explores the multiple relationships between the two art forms through the changing phases of Monet's art, from his paintings of modern life in the 1860s, to the cliffs, rocks and sea of his forces of nature works in the 1880s, and finally his life at Giverny through to the 1920s.

The thesis draws parallels between pairs of Japanese screens and Monet's vast waterlilies, represented in the exhibition by a work from the Museum of Modern Art.

The Japanese prints are ones Monet is known to have seen and are assembled to demonstrate the way the artist used a distinctly alien art to create his own vision.

Spate says Monet didn't imitate Japanese art, but drew on it to create a new kind of painting - the influence of the brilliantly coloured prints that flooded France, for example, in Monet's sudden change from relatively dark landscapes to such glowing works as Garden at Sainte-Adresse.

Spate cites Monet's comment that the Japanese "taught us to compose differently" and traces this in the strong affinities between Boulevard des Capucines, Monet's 1873 grey-toned elevated view of the Parisian throughway, and Utagawa Hiroshige's Evening View of Saruwaka Street, painted in 1856.

Another case is presented from the nine prints Monet owned of Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, depicting the mountain from different viewpoints and in different seasons, weather and time of day.

Spate says this undoubtedly influenced Monet's serial paintings of one or two haystacks in summer, autumn and winter, from early morning mists to sunset.

But she says the influence went both ways. Hiroshige's Evening View of Saruwaka Street, for example, shows that 19th-century Japanese artists were influenced by European linear perspective, which allowed them to depict deep space, adapted to Japanese idiom.

Gary Hickey, the National Gallery's curator of Asian Art, also points to Monet's seascapes. Although not as overt as other Impressionists, he says, Monet rendered waves and rocks in a Japanese calligraphic-like brushstroke rare in European painting - seen, as one illustration, in the 1881 work Waves Breaking, and Hokusai's The Hollow of the Deep-sea Waves off Kanagawa.