Impressionism abounds in North Texas. Just after wishing Berthe Morisot goodbye from Dallas and sending her to Paris, Claude Monet arrives in Fort Worth.

This is not a coincidence. Instead, it stems from the fact that two important scholars of 19th century French painting — Nicole Myers at the Dallas Museum of Art and George T. M. Shackelford at the Kimbell Art Museum — are in Dallas-Fort Worth, using their connections, charm and institutional ambition to create Impressionist exhibitions especially for North Texas audiences.

Shackelford, curator and deputy director, is bringing us "Monet: The Late Work," the final in a two-part series of exhibitions for the Kimbell and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and devoted to the canonical Impressionist. The exhibition, with more than 50 paintings, is on view through Sept. 15.

Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926) "Weeping Willow and Water Lily Pond" 1916-19 Oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 70 3/4 in. (200 x 180 cm) (Private collection / Kimbell Art Museum)

The first Fort Worth appearance, as we well remember, was in 2016, and it was a splendid look at the first decade of Monet's work. Shackelford elected to fast forward through the middle four decades of Monet's career and turn his sights on the years of despair and triumph from 1910 until the artist's death in 1926 (there are several earlier works to set the stage).

These were far from the "easy" years so often associated with Monet and his vaunted pleasure garden in Giverny, now a global tourist site. The opposite is true; Monet's garden in Giverny was his refuge in times of war, personal tragedies and poor health, a place where he often flailed away alone in the garden and his large studio, sometimes despairing about the quality and meaning of his work.

Claude Monet in front of his house in Giverny 1921 Autochrome (Kimbell Art Museum)

Life at Giverny

Today, when we visit the gardens with droves of admirers, they communicate a life of ease, beauty and comfort — meals in the cheery dining room, with turquoise and blue paneling and lots of Japanese prints of far-away villages with their tiny people, boats and animals. The big sofas in the painter's first studio provide a comfortable place after meals, and the garden delighted as a place for walks and restful contemplation from various well-placed benches.

Monet's visitors were legion and, for the most part, well-heeled — from French aristocrats to titans of industry from Chicago. They also included a Japanese prince and Monet's close friend, Georges Clémenceau, who went on to become the president of France. The visits were pleasant and productive — a stroll through the gardens, a look at the most recent work, an ample luncheon, a smoke and a chat. What is not perfection about this?

But the reality was much more grim and painful. Monet's second wife, Alice Hoschedé Monet, was diagnosed with spinal leukemia in 1910 and died the following year. His eldest son, Jean Monet, died an early death in Giverny in 1914, and his younger son, Michel, endured surgery in Paris the same year. If that world of crises and mourning was not enough for the elderly painter, German forces were stopped just short of Paris in September of that year, and the long horrible Great War began. Michel Monet, recovered from surgery, joined the French army, leaving his father essentially alone in his home and garden to last out the war.

Claude Monet in his studio at Giverny 1920 Gelatin silver print (Henri Manuel / Kimbell Art Museum)

A new, ambitious project

Yet, just as personal and national crises hit Monet, he decided, with the help of many friends and his various dealers, to commence the largest project of his life and the single largest pictorial project of any French artist before him — the enormous "grand decorations" — the large water lily paintings that are today the glory of the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris. For these, an immense, naturally lit studio was built at Giverny, largely because the canvases were so large that they would not be painted out of doors in the manner Monet had used throughout his life.

The scale of this endeavor had a double effect on the artist. It gave him an urge to work as hard as he ever did at a time when his body — and particularly his eyes — suffered the effects of age. But, at the same time, the very impossibility of this project weighed on him throughout the war and for the remainder of his life.

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The exhibition that Shackelford and his team of art historians and conservators have created allows us to experience the full range of Monet's emotions, illnesses, ambitions and doubts in a way that is simply triumphant. Indeed, it is an exhibition that any lover of Paris will want to study before one's first or repeated visit to the two oval rooms of large-scale paintings at the Orangerie that are his masterpiece — and one of the greatest achievements in world art.

Perhaps, of earlier artists, only Peter Paul Rubens and his studio surpassed Monet in pictorial ambition with the cycle of 24 paintings commissioned for the French capital by her queen and regent, Marie de' Medici, wife of Henry IV and mother of Louis XIII. Monet knew that extraordinary series well. Yet, he conceived of an almost equal square-footage of canvas to be painted completely by the artist himself, with none of the studio assistants who painted most of the Rubens cycle three centuries earlier.

To be able to work on such a large scale, Monet had to do two things: to study the effects of light and atmosphere directly in front of the motif so that he could work in the studio on the large canvases, and to produce smaller-scale works that would be salable for the hundreds of collectors and museums eager for work by the elderly master.

Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926) "The Artist's House Seen from the Rose Garden" (Muse Marmottan Monet / Kimbell Art Museum)

Legacy of light and color

These are the works in Shackelford's exhibition. A good percentage of them come from the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, where the residue of Monet's studio left to his son Michel is now housed. These works, many with sticky black fake "signatures" that are in fact posthumously applied studio stamps, were essentially works in progress that reveal the startling boldness of Monet's gestures and experiments with color. It is no wonder that Joan Mitchell, the American abstract expressionist master who lived in France decades later, studied these works assiduously.

Others were works that made it onto the market, either in Monet's lifetime (these are the ones with autograph signatures and occasionally dates) or in the decade following his death. Several of these latter works are so thickly layered and doubt-filled as to seem overworked or at the very edge of the artist's control. Two of the most moving of these, each representing The Japanese Bridge, are in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art and both look as if the canvas itself is on fire.

Others allow flowering branches and stems the free reign of the artist's arm-length gestures in a rhythmic pictorial dance that Claude Debussy could only attempt in music. The sheer energy — fueled both by angst and by the ecstasy of an elderly master — make this exhibition one of the must-see events of 2019 in North Texas.

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There is no doubt that Monet's emotions will communicate directly to each of us in the exhibition. His weeping willow writhes in the shadows in a way that suggest that such emotion was channeled by Monet for all of France following the Great War, when he sent two pictures of this group as a gift to the French nation.

The final wall of paintings has the elderly Monet, well in his eighties, looking back at his house from the garden, with two painted under a burning sky. Monet channels his emotions to us today as we cope with the anxieties of our global world, allowing us to experience his with a directness rare in the history of art.

Rick Brettell is a contributing writer and the former art critic of The Dallas Morning News. He is the founding director of the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Details

"Monet: The Late Years," through Sept. 15, Kimbell Art Museum, 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth. kimbellart.org $18 for adults, $16 for seniors and students, $14 for ages 6-11, free for children younger than 6. Admission is half-price Tuesdays and after 5 p.m. Fridays. Admission to the permanent collection is free.