EXHIBITION REVIEW: EUGENE BOUDIN AT THE SOMPO MUSEUM

Troupeau s’abreuvant (1880) Reims, Musée des Beaux-Arts, C. Devleeschauwer ©

If you dared to visit the Artizon’s ongoing Monet exhibition, you probably suffered from the stampede and have the bruised ribs to prove it.

When the work of a great Impressionist artist is in town, Tokyo’s art crowd can get into a "feeding frenzy." But there is an almost equally high quality show with a strong connection to Impressionism that it is totally safe to visit, somewhere that you can enjoy the pictures without having to look over a row of heads. This is Eugène Boudin: Maître de l’instantanéité (“Master of the Instantaneous”) at the Sompo Museum of Art in Shinjuku. 

“Eugène who?” some of you at the back of the class are asking. Just the artist that Monet himself acknowledged as his master, that’s who. “If I have become a painter, it is entirely due to Eugène Boudin,” he once (or maybe several times) said.

Marée basse (1884) Musée d’art et d’histoire de Saint-Lô © Musée d’art et d’histoire de Saint-Lô, Pierre-Yves Le Meur

Thankfully, the Japanese art public is not fully aware of this fact, which makes the Sompo show a much better—or at least more relaxing—art experience than the relative "rugby scrum" at the Artizon. Running until well into June, the show brings together around 100 works, primarily oil paintings, but also drawings, pastels, and prints, all backed up with some heavy-duty curating both from France and Japan.

So, how well aware is the Japanese public of the Boudin-Monet connection?

“The name of Eugène Boudin is not widely known in Japan,” curator Sakurako Okasaka informs us. “However, those with an interest in Impressionism or nineteenth-century French art, or who frequently visit related exhibitions, may well have encountered his works or recognize him under the epithets ‘forerunner of Impressionism’ or ‘mentor to Claude Monet.’”

This is the first major exhibition of Boudin’s work in Japan in approximately thirty years, and the Sompo has worked with the Eugène Boudin Museum and the Museum of Modern Art André Malraux, among others, along with the expertise of French art historian Laurent Manoeuvre, with whom I had a nice chat at the opening party.

At that time, I was struck by Boudin’s seascapes and how “Dutch” many of his paintings seemed, and not just the ones that were directly inspired by Dutch painters of centuries earlier, like “Le Tempête (d’apres Jacob van Ruisdael)” (1853), but also a much later work like the simply titled “Marine” (1883), which depicts the busy boat traffic in and out or the port of Le Harve.

Marine (1883), installation view

It is Boudin’s connection to his native Normandy which is key here. The tempestuous Northern seas with their changeable skies were very much an influence on him, as they were on that other important precursor of Impressionism J.M.W. Turner. It was the scudding clouds and transient light, and the mercurial speed needed to capture them, that pushed both painters in the direction of depicting the ephemeral, giving life to their art. Although in Turner’s case, Okasaka believes he was too tied to Romanticism to be the "First Impressionist," a view popular in French academic circles.

“Turner’s depictions of turbulent seas and dazzling light are, in comparison with Boudin, highly Romantic in character” she explains. “Boudin, by contrast, sought to strip seascape painting of such dramatic, emotionally charged effects, and instead to depict nature as it is.”

This is certainly apparent in “Le Croisic” (1897), one of his later works where he seems to be channelling the interplay of surf and rock in an almost Zen-like way on a canvas that seems wild and unfinished. 

Le Croisic (1897) Le Havre, Musée d’art moderne André Malraux © MuMa Le Havre / Florian Kleinefenn

This is something else that Okasaka wishes to highlight.

“Another important aspect of Boudin’s innovation lies in the question of ‘finish’ and ‘unfinish’,” she explains. “In order to capture the fleeting quality of his subject, he left rapid, free brushstrokes vividly visible on the surface of the canvas. While Boudin himself regarded such works as complete, they often appeared unfinished to contemporary viewers. This willingness to present what might seem like a work ‘in progress’ as a finished painting can be seen as anticipating the practices of Impressionism.”

An even more radical example is “Étude de ciel” (Study of the Sky) c. 1880. It is works like this that make the Japanese viewer feel closer to Boudin. Unlike Monet, whose Japonisme is well documented, there is no “smoking gun” of a obvious Boudin-Japan connection, but Laurent Manoeuvre the French curator who worked on the show, is convinced of Boudin’s deep affinity with the Japanese spirit and mindset.

“Boudin’s relationship with Japanese art cannot be demonstrated through concrete evidence,” Okasaka admits. “At the time, the movement known as Japonisme had fostered widespread interest in Japanese art among European artists, including some within Boudin’s circle. It is therefore possible that he was aware of this trend or even encountered Japanese works first hand.”

But such a direct connection is irrelevant when there is a more transcendent one.  

"Boudin’s work is devoted to the fleeting transformations of natural phenomena,” Okasaka continues. “In this respect, his art—attuned to the transience of nature—resonates closely with the Japanese sensibility that finds beauty in the changing seasons, making his work especially accessible to a Japanese audience."

If you visit this exhibition and are won over to Boudin's art, then you might even dare to visit the Monet art stampede at the Artizon, as there are several of his canvases there as well!

A quite moment at the Monet exhibition at the Artizon Museum across town.

EXHIBITION INFO