Show me the Monet

Even relatively modest works readily command seven-figure sums at auction. According to artprice.com, the internet service that logs the auction prices achieved for the work of major artists, few are matching Monet’s escalating investment values, which it calculates to have advanced by more than 50% during the past five years alone.

Back in November 1999, a waterlily study entitled Nymphas was sold for 22.6 million at Christie’s in New York. A few weeks later, I spotted a waterlily-inspired tea towel in a souvenir shop in the Louvre. For less than 100 francs, one could dry the dishes on a replicated fragment of the great man’s work. Matching mugs and oven gloves were available.

Monet, it struck me, was no longer merely a revered artist. He had become an iconic brand, commanding recognition and appeal far greater than that achieved through the multi-million-dollar traffic of his paintings alone. He had become a commodity to be traded, reproduced and sampled at will. Record-breaking attendance figures for each and every Monet exhibition bolstered my view that he is painting’s surefire superstar, whose signature commands the reassuring and compelling familiarity of a Gucci logo or Nike’s celebrated swoosh.

Yet, there were those periods both during and after Monet’s life when his work was very much less revered than it is today - times when impressionism was simply out of fashion. One such period was the 30 years immediately following the artist’s death. Another, in the late 1870s and early 1880s, at the beginning of his career, forms the intriguing focus of this summer’s Monet exhibition at the National Gallery’s newly restored Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh.

Enthusiasts certainly despaired over the apathy that greeted the posthumous installation of Monet’s extraordinary waterlily project at Paris’s Muse de l’Orangerie after the artist’s death in 1926. The art market declined greatly during the depression of the early 1930s, and Monet’s reputation undoubtedly suffered as demand for impressionist paintings collapsed.

It was quite some time after the Second World War before interest rallied. Indeed, it took major retrospectives (one, famously, at the Edinburgh Festival in 1957) and scholarly re-evaluation by such figures as William Seitz in the early 1960s to re-establish Monet’s reputation and unleash the massive popularity that the artist’s work has subsequently enjoyed.

Other coincidental factors fuelled this renewal of interest. Michel Monet, the artist’s son, died in 1966, bequeathing an extraordinary body of work plus the Giverny house and garden to the Muse Marmottan within the Acadmie des Beaux-Arts. This legacy allowed the Acadmie to create a new focus on Monet and his fellow impressionists. And, thanks to the restoration work on Monet’s inspirational garden at Giverny, which began in 1977, the cult of Monet achieved a unique and engaging focal point.

During the 1970s, Monet’s Poppy Field at Argenteuil became Athena’s best-selling art poster. Monet had become the very height of fashion, taking his place (by way of reproduction) among deep-buttoned chesterfield sofas and Habitat Japanese paper lampshades in the homes of that era’s style-literate 20- and 30-somethings.

A new generation was looking at the work of this artist for the first time. It liked what it saw. Why? On a superficial level, impressionist painting seemed to fit that era’s nostalgia, its yearning (in soft-focus, if you please) for a world far removed from late-20th-century urban realities. Monet’s subjects - the French countryside, the sea and shoreline, the natural wonders he found in the wild as well as his own very cultured back yard - appealed to a generation that found itself rejecting more brutal manifestations of post-war modernism such as concrete tower blocks and nuclear power stations.

Monet’s work suited the mood of a moment in which Victoriana had displaced futurism as the driving force of fashion. Women who shopped at Biba in the early 1970s resembled the figures whom Monet might have planted in one of his paintings. Consider the trend for floor-length romantic dresses, soft-brimmed hats and parasols... This look seemed the very height of fashion in those years, and it evoked the clothes worn by Camille Monet when she posed in that poppy field at Argenteuil a hundred years earlier.

This rather faddish enthusiasm for Monet during the 1970s matured into the deep-rooted and near-universal approval that greets any mention of Monet’s name today. During the 1880s, Monet’s one-man exhibitions attracted very little attention. Today, a Monet show is nearly guaranteed to prove a blockbuster. Practically no other artist can match the numbers prepared to queue for the opportunity to view this man’s work. Indeed, the Royal Academy in London had to open around the clock in 1999 to accommodate the number of art lovers desperate to see an exhibition of his later works. Clearly, impressionism now holds no terrors. Paintings geared to conveying the sense rather than merely the scene no longer mystify us. We all seem to be up to speed on the important possibility that art can provide an evocation of mood or circumstance as much as a visual record.

Popular perceptions change. The way we view things, and precisely what we think we see, evolves. Today, for example, we generally read any pattern of black and white stripes as black on a white background. However, in The Devil’s Cloth, Michel Pastoureau suggests the medieval eye would have sensed the exact reverse. These days, we can sense depth within images devoid of perspective, that great discovery of Renaissance art.

When looking at ostensibly abstract forms, we may exhibit an ever-increasing ability to read resonance from the natural world; we may even divine a comment on the human condition. This is not simply a matter of education or increasing sophistication. Our understanding and interpretation of what we see is transformed as our visual sensibilities evolve.

These days, Monet’s work is regarded as great art. What once may have seemed so daring, so downright difficult and in some instances so unfathomable to all but the most finely attuned critical eye is now accepted with the minimum of debate. Monet is not only revered; he has achieved all the respectability of an establishment figure, coupled with the phenomenon that we term celebrity.

His world-famous name has become a byword for the type of unequivocal excellence that explains the gilded reputations of Beethoven and Mozart in classical music or the legendary status of Pele in football. For, having challenged the conventions of his own time, Monet has come to define the orthodox taste of ours. We may remain unsure of the enduring impact of Damien Hirst’s livestock in formaldehyde. We may wonder about the importance of Tracey Emin’s infamously unmade bed. But in Monet we can trust. His significance has become a matter of record; his reputation is now beyond reproach.

Or is it? His work no longer contains the capacity to shock or appal. These days, it generates widespread enthusiasm rather than controversy. Does such extraordinary popularity harbour a damaging downside? Does familiarity breed contempt?

It is certainly hard to believe that the critical lite of the art world can maintain the same passion for an artist who commands universal acceptance as they might muster for a new discovery fted as the next big thing. The case for Monet has been made - and won; other artists, they may argue, now deserve their support.

These days, the best-selling artworks at any John Lewis department store are contemporary collages and abstract prints rather than reproductions of Monet’s greatest hits; 21st-century homemakers are now more likely, it seems, to choose a Rothko print to complement their Ikea sofas and laminate floors. Perhaps the great impressionist is losing his grip on our senses. Has the strength of emotional response demanded by Monet’s work been diminished by its ubiquity?

Monet’s incredible popularity engendered the commodity status, as a result of which his canvases became totems to be toyed with and traded on an art investment market that may have only a tangential connection to art appreciation. We may resist the folly of considering Van Gogh as being four times as great an artist as Monet simply because, at auction, his portrait of Doctor Gachet achieved nearly four times as much as any work by Monet.

But our judgment may easily become confused or compromised by an understandable inability to disassociate market value from true merit. The strength of market forces, and the determination with which corporations now bid against art institutions to secure celebrated artworks, encourages us to think of Monet’s depictions of waterlilies and poppy fields as trophy investments rather than masterpieces.

People buy paintings for diverse reasons. Many ignore the disdain of art critics and buy Jack Vettriano’s work because, one must assume, its dark subtext engenders a strong emotional response. Some buy avant-garde work from emerging names in the hope that such speculative acquisition will reap a handsome return once those artists’ reputations advance.

Much of Monet’s initial commercial success around 1870 may be explained by this latter factor. One can’t help but wonder whether Charles Saatchi buys a severed head or an elephant-dung painting because he finds it stimulating, in an agreeable sort of way - or whether he views those Brit Art discoveries as an interesting investment opportunity. Possibly both. Monet certainly benefited during his own lifetime from collectors who balanced their enthusiasm for his art with a capitalist’s eye for a speculative investment opportunity.

Monet’s towering reputation still depends on the enduring capacity of his work to stimulate an emotional response as well as sustain art-market demand. The problem with waterlily-inspired tea-towels and oven-gloves, one could argue, is that they only diminish our regard for Monet’s most familiar work, reducing its status from icon to clich. Even so, every major exhibition seems to engender a demand for tangible souvenirs. And the National Gallery of Scotland gift shop is readying itself with Monet-inspired fridge magnets, mousemats, memo pads and all manner of other memorabilia. Everything, in fact, from umbrellas to pot stands.

More importantly, this exhibition, covering the five years from 1878 during which Monet lived first in Vtheuil and then Poissy, may re-ignite debate about his work and force us to reconsider our response to it. For this brief period proved something of a bridge between the relative success the artist had enjoyed a decade earlier and the huge esteem engendered in his later years - a time when Monet was forced to reconsider many aspects of his life and work.

The period began as a time of retrenchment, obviated by expediency. Monet’s move from Paris to the countryside in 1878 was necessitated by financial difficulties. He had an ailing wife and two tiny children to support, and was struggling to achieve a fraction of the prices paid for his work half a decade earlier. To make matters worse, Ernest Hosched, the friend and once wealthy business associate on whom Monet had come to depend, was now in the throes of bankruptcy.

In the hope of reversing his diminishing fortunes, Monet chose to concentrate on landscape and seascape painting - vigorous works that could be accomplished outdoors at speed and that would most likely command an immediate sale. Serious personal problems demanded a pragmatic artistic response, and Monet planned to churn out money-spinners.

His first year in Vtheuil was especially tough, characterised by near-penury, and overshadowed by his wife’s disintegrating health and eventual death. The results of his labours were not especially well received. "Monsieur Monet," surmised the critic Albert Wolff in his review of the 1879 impressionist group exhibition, "has submitted 30 landscapes that look as if they were done in one single afternoon." Even friends and past supporters reproached Monet for the unfinished look of these paintings.

Meanwhile, at his bankruptcy sale, Hosched’s extensive collection of impressionist art commanded very little interest. A Pissarro was sold for just 10 francs. And Monet’s Impression: Sun Rising made only 210 francs - a quarter of the sum that Hosched had originally paid for it. The inference was that impressionism was little more than a fad that had now run its course.

Yet, those five years that Monet spent in Vtheuil and Poissy proved regenerative. He started to see the natural world very differently, and he embarked on a period of bold experimentation. He became fixated with the varying effects of light and climate. The result was a body of more than 350 works, extraordinary in their vigour - works that seem, suggests Richard Thomson, Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art at Edinburgh University, in his introduction to the upcoming exhibition, "lyrical and muscular".

Perhaps the turning point came in the bleak midwinter of 1879. Temperatures had fallen sufficiently low for the Seine to freeze over. In the first week of January 1880, however, a sudden thaw occasioned a great natural disaster. As water levels rose, huge blocks of ice swept away bridges and riverside buildings. Monet captured the destruction at Lavacourt.

The powerful resulting work, accepted for inclusion in the Paris Salon of 1880, was subsequently sold to an important collector - one of the French nouveaux-riches whose adventurous tastes were stirring up the art market. This could be said to represent the first tentative step in Monet’s return to critical favour and commercial success. It was certainly one of those moments when market forces played into an artist’s hand.

Now that Monet’s work commands such unstinting admiration, it is fascinating to focus anew on a period during the artist’s own lifetime when his reputation was less assured. This exhibition will force us to look beyond Monet’s celebrity status, fuelled by the multi-million-dollar values attached to his most famous paintings, and consider anew what we really like about his work.

It will, of course, remind us that there’s much more to Monet than those wonderful yet familiar poppy fields and waterlilies. It may even demand of us an emotional response unhindered by the notion of Monet as a commodity.

• The National Gallery of Scotland’s exhibition, Monet: The Seine and the Sea - Vtheuil and Normandy, 1878-1883, opens at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh on August 6 and runs until October 26.

See www.nationalgalleries.org for information about tickets and opening hours.