Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (55 page)

Kelly was deeply moved by his visit to Giverny. “There must have been at least a dozen huge canvases,” he later remembered of his tour of the studio, “each on two easels. There were birds flying around. The paintings were more or less abandoned.”
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He was so impressed by the works—their vast scale, their gestural brushwork, their subtle manipulation of colors—that on the following day he produced
Tableau Vert
as an homage. Many decades later he would donate this painting to the Art Institute of Chicago, a museum in a city that had always been particularly receptive to Monet’s art.

Another American studying on the GI Bill, Sam Francis—destined to become “the hottest American painter in Paris” by the mid-1950s
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—was equally impressed by Monet’s late works. “I make the late Monet pure,” he proudly proclaimed at a dinner party hosted by Kandinsky’s wife.
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He became friends in Paris with the expatriate Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, one of whose paintings,
Man with Monet’s White Waterlilies
, revealed the importance for him of Monet’s work in the Orangerie, which he saw for the first time in 1951. In 1957
Life
magazine called Francis and Riopelle “Monet’s heirs.”
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Riopelle lived for many years in Monet country, in a house at Vétheuil, purchased in 1967 by his long-term partner and fellow painter, Joan Mitchell; almost a century earlier, the gardener’s cottage on the property had been Monet’s home.
Mitchell would remain there until her death in 1992 as Monet (according to one art critic) “hovered over her private landscape.”
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The painter Barnett Newman, an exponent of Abstract Expressionism, was therefore not exaggerating when he claimed in 1953 that Monet’s late work was of great interest to “the younger artists today.”
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A 1954 Impressionist exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum proved a revelation. Robert Rosenblum, a future Guggenheim curator and professor of fine arts at New York University, noted that Monet’s paintings bore “unexpected analogies” to recent developments in modern American painting—namely, to compelling new movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Action Painting, and Color Field Painting. “Above all, there are three late Monets, surely the finest group in the show,” wrote Rosenblum. “Before these iridescent canvases one thinks inevitably of the pictorial explorations of a Rothko, a Pollock, a Guston.” He observed that these young painters, like Monet, challenged Cubist notions of formal structure in favor of making “a cohesive work of art from unbounded color areas, from the immediate excitement of the paint surface itself.”
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These connections with the Abstract Expressionists were pointed out a few years later by an even more influential critic, Clement Greenberg. “Monet is beginning to receive his due,” he wrote in an essay published in 1957. The influence of Monet’s late paintings, he pointed out, “is felt—whether directly or indirectly—in some of the most advanced painting now being done in this country.”
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For this reason, he argued in 1959, Monet’s paintings seemed “to belong to our age.”
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THAT MONET’S RENEWED
popularity should have come about because of the example he provided for a group of thrusting young American artists was deeply ironic. Monet had disliked both Americans and the work of many of his
avant-gardiste
younger contemporaries. He was occasionally almost as dismissive of the work of the younger generation as, decades earlier, the older generation had been of him and his friends. “I don’t want to see it,” he stubbornly declared of Cubism, “it would make me angry.”
⁴⁰
Abstract Expressionism might have made him even more furious.

Equally ironic was Greenberg’s claim that Monet seemed to belong to the modern world of the 1950s, described by Jackson Pollock as the age of “the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio.”
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As Jean-Pierre Hoschedé wrote, Monet did not like technological progress: he was outraged by the appearance in Giverny of telegraph poles, he never made a telephone call in his life, and he “ignored the radio, even the phonograph. He never took a photograph...The cinema barely interested him...He had neither the idea nor the inclination to learn how to ride a bicycle.”
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Monet was not comfortably at home in the world of the 1920s, let alone that of the 1950s or 1960s.

It was, moreover, something of an injustice to Monet’s work that he should suddenly have been celebrated because he could be ushered into the company of the Abstract Expressionists. Writing in 1971, Robert Hughes acknowledged Monet’s importance to these artists of the 1950s, but called him “a prophetic figure who was much greater than what he foretold” and pointed out that “Monet did not labor for the sake of Philip Guston or Sam Francis.” Or, as Hughes stressed two decades later: “You can hardly imagine Jackson Pollock’s all-over drip paintings...without the example of late Monet. But the real value of Monet’s work lies not in what it predicted or how it was used by later artists but in itself: its intensity and breadth of vision, its lyrical beauty and the disciplined subtlety of its address to the world.”
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The Abstract Expressionists nonetheless taught others to see Monet with new eyes. Admiration for his intense vision and lyrical beauty was soon shared by museum directors and curators as well as by important, well-heeled collectors. In 1949, Michel Monet loaned five of the large-scale
Water Lilies
for an Impressionist exhibition at the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung in Basel—the first time they had ever left the studio or been seen by anyone but a handful of visitors to Giverny. There the enormous canvases were spotted by the arms dealer and art collector Emil Georg Bürhle, who made haste to Giverny and purchased three works, two of which he promptly offered to the Kunsthaus in Zurich. Next came American collectors like Walter P. Chrysler, the automotive heir and one of the driving forces behind the Museum of
Modern Art in New York. In 1950 he purchased the nineteen-and-a-half-foot-wide canvas simply called
Water Lilies
. Chrysler convinced the Museum of Modern Art to acquire a large-scale composition from the studio in Giverny despite the museum’s director of collections, Alfred H. Barr, having scorned Monet as a “bad example.”
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When the eighteen-foot-wide painting arrived in New York in the summer of 1955, it quickly became one of the museum’s most popular and beloved works. Barr performed an abrupt U-turn, suddenly hailing Monet as the grandfather of Abstract Expressionism. The painting’s object label identified it as an example of a hastily coined movement: “Abstract Impressionism.” After the work was destroyed in a fire in 1958, MoMA urgently purchased a replacement from a dealer in Paris, Katia Granoff, who had bought the contents of the studio in Giverny from Michel Monet a few years earlier and then began exhibiting the large canvases in her gallery. The replacement was the stunning
Water Lilies
, an immense triptych that, once installed, stretched almost forty-two feet along the wall. The rise in Monet’s reputation was signaled by the fact that while MoMA had paid $11,500 in 1955, four years later
Water Lilies
could only be acquired at a cost of $150,000.

There then followed what one American collector called “a regular gold rush” in which prices for Monet’s paintings of his pond seemed to increase by tens of thousands of pounds per week.
⁴⁵
Monet even got the seal of approval from Joseph Pulitzer III, one of America’s most passionate and discriminating collectors of modern art. He displayed his six-and-a-half-foot-wide
Water Lilies
, in keeping with its aquatic theme, in the pool house of his St. Louis mansion—thus fulfilling René Gimpel’s prophecy, made decades earlier, that the paintings would make good decorations for a swimming pool.

IN 1952, AS
the enthusiastic American artists were gathering in its two oval rooms, the painter André Masson, an important influence on Pollock, called the Orangerie the “Sistine Chapel of Impressionism.” In words that must have cheered Sacha Guitry, who in that same year rereleased
Ceux de chez nous
, Masson called these huge canvases “one of
the summits of French genius.”
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However, the official ambivalence and neglect of Monet’s paintings persisted. In August 1944, during the liberation of Paris, the Orangerie narrowly escaped destruction when five artillery shells fell on the building, damaging
Reflections of Trees
, on the entrance wall of the second room. Such was the official indifference that the shrapnel would not be removed for another twenty years.

By that point the paintings had been subjected to further indignities. In 1966, 144 paintings from the Jean Walter–Paul Guillaume collection—a treasure trove that included ten Matisses, a dozen Picassos, sixteen Cézannes, and twenty-three Renoirs—were unveiled in a newly built extension to the Orangerie, one constructed directly above Monet’s elliptical rooms, which found themselves encased beneath slabs of concrete. The natural light, such as there had been, was abruptly extinguished. Works intended to show the delicious vibrations of color, weather, and the subtle alterations of sunlight were relegated to a basement, under artificial illumination. For the next thirty years the
Water Lilies
canvases were effectively entombed in this gloomy cellar.

Finally, in 1996, France’s Ministry of Culture and Communication decided to redevelop the site in order “to rethink the museographical articulation” between the Walter-Guillaume collection and Monet’s
Water Lilies
.
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The Orangerie closed its doors in January 2000, supposedly for eighteen months, although in the end the construction, which cost $36 million, exhausted six years of work. Too fragile to be removed from the walls, Monet’s paintings were hermetically sealed inside reinforced boxes with security alarms, protected by polyester film, and maintained at a constant temperature and humidity. After demolition began in February 2003, they occasionally beeped in distress, like agitated ICU patients, when vibrations from the jackhammers exceeded safe levels. When the doors reopened to the public in 2006, the “museographical articulation” between the two donations had indeed been rethought: Monet’s
Water Lilies
paintings were now in pride of place, bathed in natural light, while the Walter-Guillaume collection went to an annex.

Today, Claude Monet’s house, gardens, and paintings are some of France’s greatest tourist attractions. Each year, some 600,000 people
visit his house and garden in Giverny, many now departing from the Gare Saint-Lazare on the special “Train de l’Impressionnisme” launched in 2015 by the SNCF, France’s national railway company. Its route through the Pays des Impressionnistes passes many of Monet’s old painting grounds and retraces the dozens of journeys he took back and forth from Paris to Giverny and Rouen. Meanwhile, almost a million people visit the Orangerie, making it not the deserted place deplored by Clemenceau and Masson but an attraction for which one often has to join a lengthy queue.

The experience of the two elliptical rooms—at once immersive, interactive, and contemplative—is certainly worth the wait. The first thing we see as we pass through an antechamber and enter the first room is, on the far wall,
Green Reflections
. It is arguably the most beautiful of all the paintings in the Orangerie. From a background of brilliant blues and deep greens leap bright blossoms of water lilies: flames of burgundy and yellow, amaranthine tongues, flashes of salmon pink—what seem to be dozens of distinctive colors all delicately harmonized. So brilliant is the performance here that one suspects Monet must indeed have been going blind if, in the terrible years of 1923 and 1924, he doubted the worth of what he was doing on canvases such as these.

The paintings along the room’s lateral walls are
Morning
—the victim of the knife attack—and
The Clouds
, the panel that amazed Clemenceau, filled with reflections of rococo-style cotton-candy cumulus billows. The compositions are spectacular in size: wraparound art so enormous they could astonish even a veteran painter of large-scale canvases such as Édouard Vuillard. Mirbeau wrote in 1889 that Monet’s works sometimes took sixty sessions, but here the quantity of paint, variety of brushstrokes, and sheer square footage make it possible to imagine the panels consuming hundreds, even thousands of hours. We can imagine the old man in his vast studio, prodding, slashing, scribbling. Layer upon layer of paint is added as cigarettes burn to ash and rays filtered through the skylight sneak across the floor. He stands back at the end of the day, in eye patch and thick spectacles, to appraise the work with dimming eyes as Blanche trundles it across the floor, the two of them perhaps slowly
promenading (as all visitors do) along the reams of canvas, staring into their florid depths.

From this close range we can see how the paintings were not fashioned from dewdrops and the powder of butterfly wings. The paint is thick, textured, even encrusted in places, with the brushstrokes broad and bold, at times added in the controlled
automatiste
frenzy that so impressed Masson and influenced other painters such as Pollock and Riopelle. And yet from these dense layers of impasto come, incredibly, the most delicate effects of light and form, such as the calligraphy of crisscrossing lavender and violet that creates the ruffled waters in the center of
Morning
, or the undulant swipes of the paintbrush, charged with a mix of green and yellow, with which he created the water lilies floating on top of the reflections of willow branches in
The Setting Sun
—the sulfurous vision on the entrance wall.