The Brooklyn Rail

I never thought I would become an art historian. Before I went to Williams College, I didn’t even know there was a history of art. During my first couple of semesters, I took courses in the field to fulfill distribution requirements, but it wasn’t until my junior year, when I encountered Renaissance art firsthand during a summer program in Florence, that my eyes—and heart—opened. I decided right then, that if one could make a career out of this unlikely discipline, I wanted in. I returned to college committed, completing a dual major in art history and history.  

After only two months at the Toledo Museum of Art, where I was hired after college as an NEH Educational Fellow, I applied to graduate schools and was accepted to Yale. Three years later, I was off to Paris to research a doctoral thesis on Claude Monet’s classic Impressionist paintings of the 1870s at Argenteuil. My mentor, Bob Herbert, wished me luck. He wasn’t sure I would succeed. Two years later, I returned, having completed the dissertation and was awarded my PhD in 1979. Three years later, Yale University Press published the manuscript. I was thirty-one.

Looking back, this progression appears seamless, almost inevitable. But, of course, it wasn’t. There were many moments of extreme doubt. While trying to finish my master thesis on the minor landscape painter Georges Michel, for example, I called Bob to say that I didn’t think I could make the deadline. His candid response cut to the quick: “Can’t help you. Plough on.” No wonder he had had reservations about my ability to complete a dissertation.

Doubt? Bob never exhibited a shred of it when it came to his own work. Not so with Vincent Scully, another mentor. Vince once told me he couldn’t write a general introduction to art history because he didn’t know enough. Hearing this from such a renowned scholar stunned me.

Like Vince, Monet was perpetually haunted by doubt, particularly as he aged, despite a lifetime of dazzling achievements. In his youth, the painter brimmed with self-confidence, driven by a keen eye and a dexterous hand. Truth is, he faced plenty of creative roadblocks after he left Argenteuil, but he negotiated these by constantly reinventing himself. Sheer acts of will bolstered by innate genius? How else does one explain the astonishing “Series” paintings of the 1890s, followed by the magisterial Nymphéas that occupied him from the turn of the century until his death in 1926.  

Ironically, though I have worked on many of Monet’s peers, as well as various twentieth-century artists, I realize that in certain, uncanny ways, my life has paralleled the arch-Impressionist’s. Around the age of thirty, I settled in Boston, just as he did in Argenteuil at the same point in his life. I, too, then started a family, while attempting to establish myself professionally. Though saddled with teaching the survey of Western art when I first arrived at UMass Boston, I was soon assigned a twentieth-century survey, which became my mainstay and allowed me to expand beyond my nineteenth-century roots, just like Monet who, while born in 1840, lived more than a quarter of his life in the twentieth century. I also initiated a contemporary sculpture park on Columbia Point, the university’s two-hundred-acre home in Dorchester, just as Monet convinced his contemporary Auguste Rodin to exhibit with him in 1889, resulting in the largest gathering of their individual outputs ever assembled. Upon retiring from teaching in 2014, I moved to Santa Barbara, as Edenic a site as Monet’s Giverny.  

Eden is never without serpents. Even the tranquility of Giverny couldn’t assuage the angst Monet felt in 1914 as he began the monumental water lilies that would eventually occupy two grand galleries in the specially designed Musée de l’Orangerie. Having embarked on something utterly novel at the age of seventy-three, the same age I am now, Monet continually questioned his ability to complete what he had begun. After laboring for twelve consecutive years in the twilight of his life, he was reluctant to release these canvases from his studio despite a binding contract. Little wonder. He knew that these were his last artistic statements, and even he was surprised, if not even baffled by them. What were these gestural, expressionistic, unprecedented paintings? Were they fully realized? Were they contemporary enough? Were they worthy of public scrutiny? Most troubling, would they stand the test of time? 

Monet’s ambivalence haunts me, just as I am haunted by the trajectory of his remarkable life. A reporter once asked me what I would ask Monet if I ever met him. My response? “Did I get it even a little bit right?”