Last July, Chris Smith, Britain's Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, announced that the Royal Academy in London would host a major Monet exhibition in January this year. If the news prompted a sense of deja vu, there was good reason, for the RA had already done Monet, in style, in 1990. In fact, the massive Monet show of that year, Monet in the Nineties, drew something approaching 700,000 visitors and is generally held to have consolidated the arrival of a new phenomenon, the "blockbuster" exhibition, on this side of the Atlantic. To repeat the exercise within the same decade seemed to imply a certain level of cynicism. Weren't there other artists deserving of attention?
There is an undeniable element of cynicism to the choice, and certainly there are other artists deserving of attention, but for Monet read Money. Monet is one of a select group of bankable names, guaranteed to bring in the crowds - even at a substantial £9 a head. Given that much of his late work took as its subject the garden he created at Giverny, itself a major tourist attraction, it also has the advantage of appealing to the English love of gardens.
As Patrick Murphy, director of the RHA Gallagher Gallery in Dublin puts it: "Blockbuster is virtually a synonym for Impressionist, and Monet is the definitive Impressionist." That is broadly true. Picasso and Matisse are among the few non-Impressionist or Post-Impressionist artists who have comparable drawing power, but by and large exhibition organisers have learned that in the popular imagination there is a unique magic to that one moment in art history.
The love affair between the public and Impressionism is one of the wonders of the century, and it shows no signs of cooling off. It's a lesson that has not been lost on arts administrators in Ireland. As early as 1984 the National Gallery of Ireland mounted a phenomenally successful exhibition under the title The Irish Impressionists. The show was curated by art historian Julian Campbell, and had its genesis in his PhD thesis, `Irish Artists in France and Belgium, 1850-1914'. He was at pains to point out that the Irish artists who made the pilgrimage to France to study and work there were not, and never became, Impressionists. Nevertheless, there was enough sunlight and greenery, water and parasols in evidence in their work to justify, at least in a figurative sense, the Impressionist tag.
There is no great mystery as to why the Impressionists, and artists identified with them or following in their footsteps, should be particularly popular. It is rare in the history of art to find such sustained concentration on ocular pleasure, conveyed so accessibly. For the Impressionists painted attractive subjects - gardens, landscapes, picnics - in an overtly attractive way.
An audience attuned to the cruel, hard-edged ironies characteristic of the contemporary British art promoted by Charles Saatchi may find Monet's densely worked evocations of water and lush vegetation lacking in bite. But the record advance ticket sales demonstrate that there is an audience for the show, one that can't be attributed entirely to hype. After all, in the recent past crowds flocked to see Howard Hodgkin's lush colour compositions despite the sniffy reservations of art world sophisticates. As Monet said towards the end of his life: "Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love."
More contentiously, nowadays the exercise isn't just about attracting people in to look at the pictures. The "trading arm" of the Academy, RA Enterprises Ltd, has the task of coming up with a range of merchandise to accompany the exhibition and augment its earnings (profits do not swell private bank balances, but are ploughed back into the activities of the Academy). Purists may cavil, but there's nothing unusual about this. It's a fact of the mass marketplace. The revenue from spin-off merchandise can surpass that from the Hollywood films that inspire it.
The logic is that, having endowed your product with an image of desirability through advertising and promotion, you devise ways of further capitalising on the public appetite you've very expensively created. So the shelves and display stands of the RA shops are piled high, not only with catalogues, postcards and posters, but also with Monet mugs and umbrellas, Tshirts and scarves, pencils and notebooks, water lily watches, and even Monet seed kits with instructions on growing your own Giverny in pots. There are hand-blown glass vases inspired by the pictures and a CD of soothing music by composers who have absolutely no connection with Monet other than the fact that they were contemporaries.
The danger here is not really vulgarisation, but that the sheer hype will eclipse the art. It seems unlikely. Not least because Monet's stolid presence doesn't lend itself to the romantic mythologising of Van Gogh or Picasso. The rationale, and it is a convincing one, for staging another Monet show is encapsulated in the title, Monet in the 20th Century. He is thought of as an Impressionist, and hence an essentially 19th-century artist, but much of his most important work was done after his 60th birthday in 1900, after the advent of Cubism, the rise of Picasso and Matisse.
The 1990 exhibition concentrated on the series of haystacks, of Rouen Cathedral, and of aspects of the French landscape that in many respects laid the groundwork for what we see in the current show. At the turn of the century, Monet was in an exceptional position in the French art world. Over the previous 20 years he had progressed from being a rebellious outsider, subject to the scorn of the press and the public, to being recognised as the foremost Impressionist and a major artist. After years of poverty, his work was in demand and fetched very high prices. But not everything in the garden was rosy.
In his long biographical essay in the exhibition catalogue, Paul Hayes Tucker argues that Monet's patriotic identification with France was irrevocably shaken by the Dreyfus scandal. Like his friend Clemenceau, he honourably sided with Emile Zola in his heroic, and personally costly defence of the victimised Dreyfus. But the affair left a legacy of bitterness that has never really been satisfactorily resolved.
The RA show features several groups of work including what Monet called "the Londons", views of bridges on the Thames, paintings of Venice, about which he harboured distinctly mixed feelings, and, predominantly, pictures based on his garden and its lily-pond at Giverny. A couple of myths attach to these late works. One is that the Giverny paintings represent a solipsistic retreat from the world into the cosy privacy of his own garden. Another is that his virtual blindness meant that he was unable to see what he was painting. Both are partially true.
After one eye operation, for example, although his sight improved he suffered from partial colour blindness, and at times he was simply unable to paint at all for long period of time. But it is certainly not the case that he was increasingly confined to his own garden by the debilities of age and failing sight, nor that his eye problems account for the blurring of edges in his paintings. The fact is that Giverny was a long time in the making, and that he designed it in meticulous detail as a subject to paint. He was more interested in seed catalogues than aesthetics, as one friend remarked.
Furthermore, far from declining into semi-retirement there, he not only did a prodigious amount of work, but made paintings of unprecedented scale and ambition. Financial necessity played absolutely no part in this. He actually spent a lot of money - more than he had paid for Giverny itself - in building a studio big enough to accommodate the paintings he had in mind. By 1900 he was positively well off. Not only did his pictures fetch substantial prices, he also played the stock market with notable success. By about 1912 he need never have worked again.
There were also a number of less positive factors that might have prompted him towards retirement. His wife Alice died in 1911. The following year he lost his sight in one eye and was diagnosed as having worsening cataracts in both. In the meantime, his eldest son suffered a stroke and entered a slow decline until he eventually died in 1914, while his step-son was dispatched to the front when war broke out.
In addition, since the turn of the century, and to the exasperation of his dealer, Monet was extremely cautious about what he let out of the studio. He was acutely conscious of carrying the Impressionist banner into a new century, and of the fact that the once revolutionary movement had become conventional. He was never arrogant about his work, and agonised over whether he should have released the Venetian paintings, despite the enthusiastic reception accorded them.
Periodically, as he worked on the water lilies, he was plagued with self-doubt, and reportedly destroyed many canvases. The heart of the RA show is unquestionably to be found in the garden and water-lily works. Their superiority to the more conventionally picturesque - but still engrossing - views of the Thames and Venice confirms the soundness of Monet's own artistic instincts. The heavy gilt frames that look reasonably appropriate on, say, a view of the Grand Canal in Venice, make absolutely no sense on the water-lily studies.
From around 1890, Monet painted more and more in series, producing sets of virtually identical views of one scene recorded at different times of the day, minutely attentive to varying atmospheric conditions, prompting Cezanne's celebrated remark that he was: "Only an eye, but my God, what an eye!" The dissolution of form in favour of atmospheric mists of subtle colour in his pictures still attracts disapproval, but it is striking that he remained a resolutely naturalistic painter.
So that, while it is absolutely true to say that his huge water-lily panels anticipated aspects of Abstract Expressionist and subsequent painting, there is no direct causal relationship: Jackson Pollock didn't look at the water lilies and decide to have a go himself, but in terms of painting there is a definite conceptual overlap between the mature Pollock and late Monet.
While most of the work at the RA is extremely beautiful, Monet never opts for easy, superficially attractive effects. To follow the closely argued sequences of the sets of water lilies is thoroughly enjoyable (and it is wonderful to have so many of them displayed in one place) but, if you pay attention, it is also demanding, and gives you an idea of the gruelling nature of the painter's thought processes, never mind the sheer physical work involved. We're never in any doubt that these are hard-won images, and they inspire great respect. For despite his fame, and the official support he enjoyed, here he was, an elderly, ailing man, grappling in relative isolation with intractable pictorial problems. Contentiously, the show includes unfinished works, as well as finished works that the artist may well have preferred not to exhibit.
There have been disparaging comments about some of the hotter, more intense studies of the Japanese bridge and the flower garden, but even here, while you may recoil from the sheer lushness of the results, you can see what Monet is trying to do, and there is nothing on view that could dent his reputation. The climax of the exhibition takes the form of the four enormous Grandes Decorations displayed in Gallery 9, made when he was working on the panels destined for the Orangerie in Paris. In these, the horizon has disappeared. We are looking onto the surface of the water with its floating lily pads and the reflected vegetation.
They are big paintings, unashamedly dependent on luscious colour harmonies, but in contrast to the heightened drama of romantic landscape, they are almost shockingly intimate and understated. Our eyes are free to explore the myriad of tiny optical incidents that make up their seamless, interwoven surfaces. And the humble lily pond becomes a universe in itself - not a retreat from, but a means of approaching the world. That final room in itself merits a visit to Burlington House.
Monet in the 20th Century is at the Royal Academy, Burlington House, in London until April 18th. The ticket office at the RA is open Sunday to Thursday 8.30 a.m.-5.30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 8.30 a.m. to 9.30 p.m. The exhibition is open Sunday to Thursday, 9 a.m.-6 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 9 a.m.-10 p.m. Expect queues. Advance tickets are available from Ticketmaster: London 0044 171 413 1717. Booking fees apply.
The fully illustrated catalogue, published by Yale University Press, costs £30 in the UK (hardback) and £19.95 in the UK (paperback).