Lust for Monet

Through the early morning fog, the pavement beneath the stark red banners looks pleasingly queue-less. This is going to be easier than anticipated. Then, crossing Piccadilly Circus, things become clearer. Those are the banners of the Meridien Hotel. The queue next to the rather less garish banners of the Royal Academy is already snaking down Piccadilly and into Old Bond Street. We must suffer for our art.

This is the last day set aside for Friends of the Academy – the public get their chance this morning. “Queuing for a private view?” said a lady with a cut-glass voice. “Bloody hell. I didn’t think there’d be a queue today.” It appears that true art lovers do not read newspapers.

The women are wearing fur hats, the men Barbours, and some have come prepared for a vigil. One man near me is reading Amsterdam, another The English Patient; somehow a blockbuster art show and two Booker winners connect – art at its most unsinkable. The little coffee shop opposite is doing great business and an enterprising Big Issue seller is working the line.

It is freezing and passers-by look at the queue with a mixture of pity and disbelief. After an hour the feet have gone numb, but the entrance is in sight and excitement is mounting. The only question now is whether to use the temporary loo erected in the courtyard outside.

A French TV team is setting up in the foyer – our Monet-mania is news there. Sky TV has nabbed the secretary of the Academy, David Gordon, and grills him about this strange phenomenon. A woman who has had her purse pinched while standing in the queue is telling her story to the attendants, who wear tail-coats. Do their uniforms slow them down when it comes to chasing thieves?

Inside, the nine smallish galleries are full, but it is manageable. Seven people per picture at a rough estimate in the first room, more in others, fewer in the room devoted to Venice. The critics assured us that Monet’s Venetian studies were not masterpieces, and we seem to have got the message. Voices are hushed and moving is sometimes difficult: the best method is to walk like a crab and whisper “sorry” every so often.

Two sensibly dressed ladies are sitting on a sofa staring at the pictures. “They look like lily pads floating on a muslin curtain,” said one. “I can’t quite get it. I have to keep looking at it. It’s much better from this oblique angle. It’s coming, it’s coming, it’s getting clearer, it’s starting to make sense…”

Unfortunately, at that point a large man unwilling to obey the gallery etiquette and stand well back from the rail plonks himself in front of the picture as if trying to smell the water lilies. The vision fades. “I’m glad we left our coats downstairs,” she said plaintively. “It makes an awful lot of difference.”

Some say the RA’s return to Monet after its 1990 blockbuster smacks of opportunism – a chance to pull in half a million punters and clear its deficit. Monet, say the cynics, is the master of “chocolate box art”, his pictures adorn countless living room walls, and people will want to come to the exhibition touted as the season’s hot ticket. In that analysis, the queues actually help; it becomes a “phenomenon”.

Mr Gordon insisted that the show was not merely a commercial exercise. “We never do an exhibition with an eye just on its financial consequences,” he said. “If we did, there are some exhibitions we would never do because the risks look horrendous. An exhibition starts off with a good argument, and if the argument stacks up you do the exhibition.

“The surefire blockbusters – that is to say, a show which will bring in more than 300,000 people – are Van Gogh and the Impressionists, but there is a limit to the number of shows that you have a really strong argument for doing. There is something to say about Monet in the 20th century because he became recognisably a different painter in that period.”

One critic remarked on the space set aside for sponsors’ parties and suggested it might have been better used to display Monet’s vast later canvases. Gordon dismisses such thinking as old-fashioned. “Commercial sponsors are the modern patrons,” he said. “Art has always required patrons. Would people who criticise our commercial links be happier if the royal family were still our patrons?”

Advance sales for the exhibition – which costs £1.7 million to stage – stand at 150,000, and the RA hopes it will attract more than 600,000 visitors during its three-month run. Success on that scale would transform finances. “It is difficult to predict in advance exactly how it’s going to go, but the numbers are quite big and we are looking for a substantial surplus,” said Mr Gordon.

Some of the Friends were less convinced about the balance between Monet and money: “This has been very shrewdly managed indeed,” said one. “All the evening bookings have gone to corporate sponsorship, every one of them. When the Academy did the Monet in 1990, they saw what they could do.”

So, is it really no more than art for conversation’s sake – a chance to say you’ve been, milled, looked, bought the Monet mug? “Some people will always come because they want to be able to talk about it at a dinner party,” said a lady from Twickenham, south-west London. “But even they will learn something from the exhibition, because it has a real theme. I think you’re too cynical about people’s motives in coming.”

“But that’s your job, isn’t it?” chimes in her husband. Time to head back into Piccadilly, where the fog has lifted and the back of the queue is now clearly visible.

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