Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (40 page)

By the time Clemenceau returned to Paris, several possible alternative venues for Monet’s donation had been proposed. At the end of March, Clemenceau, Léon, Bonnier, and Geffroy—though not Monet, who was still not budging from Giverny—went to view two buildings at the west end of the Tuileries, by the place de la Concorde. One of them was the Jeu de Paume, built in 1861 to house the courts for
jeu de paume
, a precursor to tennis, and since 1909 a venue for art exhibitions. (A show of Dutch art featuring “incomparable Rembrandts” was upcoming.)
⁵⁴
The other was the Orangerie, a greenhouse built in 1852. Clemenceau immediately reported the results of the mission to Monet, telling him that the Jeu de Paume, with a width of only eleven meters, would probably not be sufficient, but the Orangerie, somewhat wider at more than thirteen meters, “seems to me very adequate...It will cost more than the Jeu de Paume, but Paul Léon makes his case for it. I suggest you call it a deal.”
⁵⁵

A week later, on April 6, Monet finally stirred from Giverny, paying his first visit to Paris in more than four years in order to view the
Orangerie “with my own eyes.”
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It was a rather undistinguished building about which Monet probably knew very little. Known as the Orangerie des Tuileries to distinguish it from the more famous Orangerie at Versailles, it had been built for the Emperor Napoleon III to replace a sixteenth-century greenhouse erected in the Tuileries by King Henri IV, a lover of oranges. The structure was used to overwinter the orange trees from the Tuileries, and the stately emergence of these trees onto its terrace had long been one of the first signs of spring in Paris. It still housed orange trees in winter but also had a varied career as what today might be called a “multipurpose space.” At various times it served as a studio for the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, who gave lessons to Napoleon III’s son; as an assembly room for school awards ceremonies; and, in the summer of 1878, as the venue for a series of benefit concerts in aid of victims of an explosion in a toy shop in the rue Béranger. By the 1880s it boasted a champagne bar overlooking the Seine, and over the next few decades it hosted operettas, dog shows, a display of insects sponsored by the Société Centrale d’Agriculture et d’Insectologie, and exhibitions of wheat and flour. Its grounds served as a combination of parade ground, fairground, and athletics track: there were footraces and, by 1898, displays of automobiles. The Orangerie narrowly escaped demo lition in 1913, and during the Grande Guerre the charity L’Algérienne took over the premises, serving couscous,
méchoui
(spit-roasted sheep or lamb), and other Algerian foods to wounded North African soldiers.

Within two days of Monet’s visit, a newspaper was reporting that Paul Léon’s administration was dreaming of “expelling the orange trees in order to install an exhibition of the works of Claude Monet.”
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The situation was, however, not so simple or straightforward. Monet had enjoyed his brief foray into Paris, having “a very full and pleasant day,” taking in a lunch with Clemenceau and then a visit to the Louvre, “where I feasted my eyes on everything.”
⁵⁸
But he was, quite understandably, anxious about this new plan. In the middle of April he wrote a long letter to Léon explaining that he was still hoping to sign a deed of donation (thus far, nothing had been made official or legally binding). “But a formal assurance is necessary, and a guarantee also that the necessary work will be carried
out quickly.” As he pointed out, seven months had already passed, “and if it takes as many to decide what to do in the Orangerie, plus a year and a half for the execution, where will that lead us?” He therefore asked for the entire process to be expedited, “and only then shall I agree to sign the protocol of donation”—which, he said, would be null and void if he died before the premises were properly prepared.
⁵⁹

By the end of April, after further consideration, Monet was much less pleased with the Orangerie as a venue. He wrote to Georges Durand-Ruel that things were not going well with the donation “and I’m extremely annoyed.”
⁶⁰
The new space, radically different from that of Bonnier’s pavilion, called for a reconsideration of how many canvases he would donate, how they would relate to one another, and, crucially, how they could be seen to their best advantage in what he was rapidly coming to believe was an unsuitable environment. The new setting was, as Clemenceau pointed out, some thirteen meters wide, but it was also a good deal longer, at just over forty meters, than the pavilion planned for the Hôtel Biron, requiring his canvases to be adapted to the confines of the existing space.

The Orangerie presented, in Monet’s view, three specific drawbacks. First of all, its ceiling was lower than that planned for the pavilion at the Hôtel Biron, ruling out the possibility of the decorative frieze of wisteria panels. He was also concerned that its walls were not rounded, as per his repeated insistence, and that his paintings would therefore be shown on a “completely straight” surface rather than a curved one.
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Finally, the narrowness of the available space—barely half the width of the pavilion planned for the Hôtel Biron—meant that viewers would not be able to stand back from the paintings.
⁶²

Monet therefore came to a momentous decision. On April 25, he wrote to Paul Léon explaining how one of the formal conditions of his donation had been his satisfaction with the room in which the paintings would be shown. The narrow, rectangular space of the Orangerie did not fit the bill. “As you may imagine,” he wrote, “I have thought carefully about the Orangerie and I am, regrettably, obliged to waive the donation that I had wished to make to the State.”
⁶³

Monet may well have been bluffing at this point, threatening to withdraw his donation in order to win vital concessions. Léon did not seem overly concerned at this point. Indeed, biding his time, perhaps waiting for the storm to pass or for Clemenceau to take charge of the situation, he failed to respond to Monet’s letter. However, Monet’s hand was soon strengthened when, a few months later, another buyer for the Grande Décoration arrived in Giverny.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A MOST ARDENT ADMIRER

ON THE FIRST
of June 1921, a distinguished visitor arrived in Paris: the twenty-year-old crown prince of Japan, Hirohito. The young man was treated to a grueling round of Paris’s sights. He was given a tour of the Louvre, a visit to Versailles, and a lunch at Chantilly hosted by the Société Franco-Japonaise. He watched horse races from the presidential box at Longchamp, went on trips to Compiègne and Pierrefonds, saw the battlefield at Verdun, and at Fontainebleau ate dinner in the company of Clemenceau and Poincaré. At some point the schedule permitted His Imperial Highness to spend an hour enjoying the view from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Crown Prince Hirohito was not treated to that rare and sought-after delight, a visit to Monet’s garden. However, during this visit, Clemenceau brought two other distinguished Japanese guests to Giverny: Baron Sanji Kuroki and his wife, Takeko. For the previous two years the couple had resided in France, in elegant rooms in the Hôtel Édouard VII. Baron Kuroki, the son of a famous admiral, had met Clemenceau when he arrived at the Paris Peace Conference as part of the Japanese delegation. Clemenceau’s admiration for Japanese culture was attested to by everything from his collections of netsuke and
kogo
to the bonsai tree that sat on the steps of his apartment, tended by a Japanese gardener.
¹

Baron Kuroki and his wife had already visited Giverny some months earlier, purchasing a painting—a 1907 panel from the
Paysages d’Eau
series—for the hefty price of 45,000 francs.
²
The baron and his wife were part of a steady procession of Japanese artists and collectors welcomed in Giverny in 1921. The wives delighted Monet by wearing kimonos, and Clemenceau, whenever possible, insisted on the honor of ferrying these delegations to and from Paris in his automobile.
³
Then,
in June, Clemenceau’s chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce (on loan from the Greek-born financier Basil Zaharoff) brought its most important Japanese visitor to Giverny: Kojiro Matsukata.

Takeko Kuroki, Monet, Lili Butler, Blanche, and Clemenceau, ca. 1921

As a French journal reported, Matsukata was “an illustrious man of state.”
⁴
The uncle of Takeko Kuroki, he was the son of a former prime minister of Japan and a personal friend of the emperor. As
L’Homme Libre
reported, Matsukata was also “a great friend” of Clemenceau, and he never came to France without paying a visit to the Tiger.
⁵
A debonair fifty-six-year-old tycoon with wingtip collars, a fob watch, and a ubiquitous cigar, he described himself “a captain of industry.”
⁶
As the president of Kawasaki Shipyards, he was a man of astounding wealth. He had become, in the years immediately after the war, possibly the world’s greatest patron of art. The Kawasaki Shipyards constructed massive dreadnoughts thanks to a large crane that Matsukata had bought in England, then dismantled and shipped to Japan. This majestic crane made Matsukata’s fortune during the war, when he supplied the Allies with battleships, but it also led to his interest in modern art: one day in the window of an art gallery
in London he spotted a painting of a shipyard with a crane. The work was by Sir Frank Brangwyn, who henceforth became a trusted friend. His interest in Western art thus strangely piqued, Matsukata, during a visit to Paris in 1916, asked Paul Durand-Ruel, with advice from Léonce Bénédite, curator of the Luxembourg Museum, to put together a collection of modern art for him. “I know nothing about art,” Matsukata explained, “but I consider the contemplation of masterpieces of art a great way to educate the workers.”
⁷

The Japanese collector Kojiro Matsukata

Matsukata’s collection would soon swell to hundreds of paintings that he planned to ship to Japan to form a museum of modern Western art, built to the designs of Brangwyn on a site overlooking Mount Fuji.
⁸
In the meantime the canvases were being stored in the Hôtel Biron, in galleries not open to the public, where they were tended by Bénédite. This museum was to be called Kyoraku Bijutsu Kwan, or the Art Pavilion of Pure Pleasure. A selection of Monets was naturally required, and so in 1921, accompanied by Clemenceau, Matsukata paid a visit to Giverny. Monet had previously advised Matsukata to visit the galleries of Durand-Ruel and the Bernheim-Jeunes, where he would find a greater selection than in his studio.
⁹
But Matsukata did not, understandably, wish to be denied the pleasures of a trip to Giverny. Moreover, he was no doubt intrigued by what he must have heard from Clemenceau about the Grande Décoration.