Misunderstood Genius
If you’ve heard anything about Adolphe Monticelli — and I bet you haven’t — it probably wasn’t very nice. Art critics love to hate Monticelli. Timothy Clifford, director general of the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, goes so far as to choose Monticelli’s A Garden Fete as the worst painting in Britain:
We have been bequested eight paintings by Monticelli, each one more hideous than the last. In my 21 years here, none has been hung because I think Monticelli produces screamingly awful art. I call this one a Fete Worse Than Death.
These days Monticelli’s works languish in museum basements, pulled out only to be ridiculed. But during his lifetime this “hideous” painter was admired by his friend Paul Cézanne and idolized by his follower… Vincent van Gogh, who wrote:
I think of Monticelli terribly often here. He was a strong man — a little cracked or rather very much so — dreaming of the sun and of love and gaiety, but always harassed by poverty — of an extremely refined taste as a colourist, a thoroughbred man of a rare race, continuing the best traditions of the past. He died at Marseilles in rather sad circumstances, and probably after passing through a regular Gethsemane. Now listen, for myself I am sure that I am continuing his work here, as if I were…
