Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (49 page)

THE APRIL OPENING
date of this “vast circle of dreams” was, however, still very much in doubt. Before Christmas, Léon had asked Clemenceau how Monet was progressing. “I told him that you were at work and that I had reason to believe that all was going well,” Clemenceau informed Monet. “I added that I would resume my conversation with you in a month. He seemed satisfied.” As the annus horribilis of 1923 ended, Clemenceau therefore appeared to believe that all was going well: Monet was painting again, the panels would be ready for delivery in April, and the Orangerie, as Léon had assured him, would be prepared to receive them. The day after Christmas, Clemenceau had written to
Monet that the pair of them would have a talk at the end of January or early in February “in which you’ll let me know your state of mind and what you’ve done.”
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Clemenceau duly arrived in Giverny in early February, eager to have Monet specify a date for the delivery of the panels. The results of the meeting were inconclusive and no date was set. A month later, as the deadline loomed, Clemenceau became ever more frustrated. Monet was once more becoming discouraged after “slaving away” for months on end and, in his opinion, achieving nothing worthwhile due to the poor state of his vision. “Life is a torture to me,” he wrote in his familiar refrain to Coutela. He added forlornly: “I am Bernique.”
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The reference was to a song from his youth, Gustave Nadaud’s “Mon ami Bernique,” a popular song that described a man whose hopes and plans—to practice law, seduce women, make a fortune from wine, travel to America, inherit money—all come to nothing.

Clemenceau was treading a delicate line, impatient for Monet to relinquish his canvases but conscious that, in his present condition, he must not be placed under too much pressure. He wrote him an affectionate letter at the beginning of March, addressing him as “my dear old nutcase” and praising his decorations, “la Création Monétique,” as “the most prodigious assembly of observation and imagination.” He tried to buck up his spirits by pointing out, quite rightly, that Monet had always thrived under adversity: “Your life has been spent between successive crises and dealing with hostile reactions to your work. These are the very conditions that have made your triumphs possible.” These same adversities now came to him in the form of an “overworked retina.” And indeed, despite his impaired sight, he had managed to create, Clemenceau assured him, “a consummate masterpiece,”
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yet another example of his triumph over disaster and misfortune. Monet, however, could not agree that his recent work was any good, and it became increasingly obvious that the panels would not be delivered by April.

At this point, Monet’s stress and frustration at his impaired vision and inability to paint made him unbearable for those around him. As the deadline for delivery approached, Monet seems, not for the first
time, to have made Blanche’s life a misery. His frequent tempers had caused her great distress over the years. Two years earlier Monet confessed to Clemenceau: “The poor Blue Angel has a hard time with me.”
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As Clemenceau wearily explained to a friend: “Monet writes me black letters...His stepdaughter weeps.”
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The weeping and the black moods seem to have reached their peak in the spring of 1924. Distraught at his impossible eyesight and failed task, and with the deadline lurching ever closer, Monet became insufferable, leading Clemenceau to write several letters gently urging him to—as he put it in one of them—stop ruffling and plucking the feathers of the Blue Angel.
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Clemenceau adored Blanche, constantly flirting with her through his letters to Monet, referring to himself as her “chubby little love.”
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Even more, he admired her because of her complete devotion to Monet, which was even more valuable than his own support and encouragement. “She was admirable in every way,” he later noted. “She took care of him, pampered him. She watched over him as if he had been her child.”
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As Clemenceau knew, without Blanche’s saintly support there could have been no Grande Décoration.

BY THE END
of March, the work at the Orangerie had more or less been finished. “Work on the terrace beside the water seems to have stopped,” Clemenceau reported to Monet. “I think it’s done.” The dogs that each spring for the past few decades had invaded the Orangerie for the Exposition Canine Internationale de Paris were exiled, in 1924, to the Grand Palais. The two oval rooms, designed to Monet’s specifications, now awaited the canvases. But of course no panels were delivered. Clemenceau’s request for an extension was met by prolonged silence from Paul Léon before, some months later, a postponement was agreed on. Having done everything he could, Clemenceau prepared to step back from the affair. “I think that the best service I can do for you at this point,” he wrote to Monet, “is to leave you to your own devices so that you’re on your own whenever you have a fit.”
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Only a few years earlier, Clemenceau had written that the sun would never set on his friendship with Monet. However, Monet’s refusal
to undergo another operation, and his failure to deliver the panels to the Orangerie, put a serious strain on their relationship. Clemenceau’s leisurely lunches at Giverny looked in danger of becoming a thing of the past. On April 22, two days after Easter Sunday, Clemenceau wrote a letter that revealed his frustration and disappointment, although he was as understanding and encouraging as ever. He was reluctant to come to Giverny, he said, because what Monet needed most of all was tranquillity. “So don’t take for a snub what is really done out of friendship.” He also dissuaded Coutela from visiting because, as he pointed out, Monet was suffering from problems other than ones with his eyesight. “You’re having a moral crisis in which a crazy fear robs you of confidence in yourself. I see no other remedy than a self-examination. Criticism from others only makes you more obstinate.” He ended with his usual words of exhortation: “Work patiently or angrily—but go to work. You know better than anyone the value of what you have done.”
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But Monet could not be convinced that his recent work had any value, or that he was capable of finishing the paintings. “Clemenceau may say my last works are masterpieces,” he wrote to Coutela in May, “but either he is wrong or I am.” He had lost faith in Coutela, too, telling him, “I need to see you, although I’m not convinced there’s anything you can do.”
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He continued to experience exaggerated colors, especially blues and yellows, although by the summer of 1924 he was complaining that he could not see yellow at all. At the beginning of June he wrote a curt letter to Paul Léon putting off his proposed visit and informing him that “at the moment it is impossible to dream of transporting the panels in question.”
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Hope sprung eternal, however, and soon Monet’s expectations were raised by the prospect of a new type of spectacles. He already possessed quite a collection, none of which he ever persisted with long enough to allow his eyes to adjust. But during a visit to Giverny in May, Coutela told him about a new development in optics, a special cataract lens made by the German firm Zeiss, a leading manufacturer of optical instruments. Since 1912, Zeiss had begun making nonspherical (or aspherical) lenses known as Katral lenses, in which the glass became progressively flatter toward its periphery, where the magnification was
reduced. In 1923, Zeiss went to market with a special Katral lens specifically designed for those who had undergone cataract surgery. The lenses were difficult to manufacture and enormously expensive, but Coutela promised to acquire a pair for Monet.

Coutela was preempted, however, by the painter André Barbier, “the most enthusiastic of Monet’s admirers,” according to Jean-Pierre.
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By his own account, having learned of the new development, the eager Barbier likewise informed Monet of the corrective Katral lenses, then went on his own initiative to a Zeiss representative in Paris, who referred him to Professor Jacques Mawas, an ophthalmic pathologist at the Institut Pasteur qualified to take the precise measurements necessary for prescribing the lenses. Barbier went to see Dr. Mawas, telling him that he needed the special Zeiss lenses “for an aged painter with cataracts who didn’t live in Paris.” Mawas responded: “It’s Claude Monet.” Barbier admitted that it was. Mawas then explained that he was the oculist to the painter Maurice Denis, that he was very interested in painters’ vision, and that he would be pleased to visit Giverny.
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Accompanied by Barbier, Dr. Mawas arrived in Giverny for a lunch with Monet and Clemenceau in early July. “The Tiger gave me an icy reception,” Mawas claimed.
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Clemenceau was irritated that his friend, Coutela, had been elbowed aside by another doctor and that Barbier had taken upon himself the task of trying to revive Monet’s failing eyes. Monet, however, was in a cheerful mood. Following lunch, Mawas “took the famous measurements,” Barbier later wrote, “and I saw how it was a complicated affair requiring an experienced practitioner.”
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The latest scientific advances were being brought to bear on France’s most famously acute pair of eyes. The measurements included making allowances for the asymmetry of the eyes and ensuring that the lenses were centered on the pupils with their posterior faces at a defined distance from the top of the cornea. A recently invented instrument called a keratometer, a tube with a lens likewise made by Zeiss, was used to measure the diameter of the cornea and pupil.
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Mawas would have gazed down this slender tube into Monet’s eyes like an astronomer peering at the heavens through a telescope. After having the topography of
his eyeballs carefully mapped, Monet showed Mawas into his studio, giving him a tour of the Grande Décoration. Mawas was by no means a disinterested observer: Maurice Denis claimed that the oculist “prefers payment in paintings,”
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although he left Giverny empty-handed as far as canvases were concerned.

The manufacture of the Katral lenses would take several months, but in the meantime Mawas went into action, adding to Monet’s growing collection of eyewear by ordering a new pair of spectacles for him from E. B. Meyrowitz, a dispensing optician in the rue de Castiglione, an upmarket street of expensive jewelers, couturiers, and wine and lingerie shops. According to a 1923 report on France’s trade in luxury goods, E. B. Meyrowitz had made myopia fashionable through its selection of elegant tortoiseshell frames adorned with enamel and precious stones. “How,” asked the report, “with such pretty glasses, can one not see life in tints of rose?”
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When Monet’s new glasses arrived a few weeks later, they did help him to see much better. However, he then promptly lapsed into a depression, because—suddenly able to see properly—he was unhappily confirmed in his opinion regarding his blundering efforts with the paintbrush. He received scant sympathy when he wrote to Clemenceau, who replied sarcastically: “It’s irritating for you not to be able to complain about your sight after all of your wild lamentations. Fortunately, your work ‘gives poor results,’ and therefore you can whine about that instead, because complaining gives you the greatest joy of your life.” However, Clemenceau glimpsed signs of the painter of old stirring beneath these lamentations. He recognized that Monet’s art was bound up with these sorts of complaints, and with a tortured state of perpetual self-doubt. “Keep up this howling,” the Tiger exhorted, “because it is what you need to paint.”
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Or, as he wrote a few weeks later: “If you were happy, you would not be a true artist since it’s necessary for your reach to exceed your grasp...Keep putting yourself in a rage every five minutes, because it stirs up the blood.”
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Monet needed little encouragement, at least, to throw furious temper tantrums. He continued to howl and rage—though not to paint—throughout the summer and autumn of 1924. When Louis Gillet
announced in September that he was coming for a visit, Monet gloomily informed him he would find “a very discouraged man” awaiting him.
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He did not exaggerate, and Gillet became so alarmed at Monet’s emotional state that he feared for what he might do to the Grande Décoration. “I am greatly frightened lest you burn those beautiful, grandiose, mysterious and savage things that you showed me,” he wrote after returning to Paris.
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There was good cause for alarm, since that autumn Monet had set fire to six canvases along with the dead leaves from his garden.
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Gillet’s concern for both Monet’s state of mind and the fate of his donation led him to write a worried letter to Clemenceau, who was fast reaching the end of his patience. “With old people as with children,” he wrote sternly to Monet from Belébat, “we forgive everything we can. However, there are limits.” He then catalogued the oddities, inconsistencies, and self-inflicted difficulties of Monet’s approach in the years since the contract had been signed. “First you wanted to complete the unfinished parts. Though not really necessary, it was understandable. Then you got the absurd idea of improving the others.” Next, with his sight rapidly deteriorating, he began painting new works, “most of which were and still are masterpieces, if you haven’t ruined them. Then you wanted to make super-masterpieces—with vision that you yourself wished to keep imperfect.”