Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (66 page)

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Authors: Ross King

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Architects, #History, #General, #Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945), #Photographers, #Art, #Artists

11

Archives Claude Monet
, p. 105.

12

Matisse on Art
, p. 5.

13
The story of this artistic competition is wonderfully told in Jack Flam,
Matisse and Picasso: The Story of Their Rivalry and Friendship
(Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2004). For their competition in the early years of the war—including a discussion of
Bathers by a River
—see pp. 102–12. For Matisse’s experiments with Cubism: John Golding,
Matisse and Cubism
(Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 1978), pp. 14–19.

14
Quoted in Flam,
Matisse and Picasso
, p. 109.

15

L’Anti-Boche
, July 8, 1916.

16
On this transition, see Jack Flam, “Introduction”,
Matisse on Art
, p. 5.

17
WL 2207.

18
WL 2205a.

19
WL 2208.

20

New York Herald
, March 11, 1917.

21
WL 2014.

22
WL 2212.

23
WL 2210.

24
WL 2211.

25

Le Figaro
, February 1, 1917.

26

Le Matin
, February 3, 1917.

27

Le Figaro
, January 30, 1917.

28
WL 2217.

29
Quoted in Stuckey,
Claude Monet
, p. 248.

30
WL 2216.

31
Quoted in Wildenstein,
Monet, or the Triumph of Impressionism
, p. 408.

32
WL 2219.

33

Le Petit Parisien
, February 19, 1917.

34
Ibid., July 28, 1915.

35
Ibid., August 13, 1915.

36
Paul Léautaud, quoted in Carr,
Anarchism in France
, p. 161.

37
Quoted in Carr,
Anarchism in France
, p. 161

38
For a discussion of the affair, see Carr,
Anarchism in France
, pp. 161ff; Léon Werth, “Le ‘Testament politique d’Octave Mirbeau’ est un faux,” in
Combats politiques de Mirbeau
, ed. Pierre Michel et Jean-François Nivet (Paris: Librairie Séguier, 1990), pp. 268–73; and Michel et Nivet,
Octave Mirbeau: l’imprécateur au cœur fidèle
, pp. 920–24.

39
WL 2232.

40
Clemenceau,
Claude Monet: Les Nymphéas
, p. 25.

41
WL 2242.

42
Gimpel,
Diary of an Art Dealer
, p. 58.

43
Clemenceau,
Claude Monet
, pp. 28 and 31.

44
Quoted in Watson,
Clemenceau
, p. 258.

45
See Vollard,
Recollections of a Picture Dealer
, pp. 238–40.

46
Vollard,
Recollections of a Picture Dealer
, p. 240. For Clémentel sketching his colleagues, see “Exposition de Peintures et Dessins d’Étienne Clémentel,”
La Renaissance de l’art français et des industries de luxe
(July 1926), p. 637.

47
WL 2230.

48
Quoted in House,
Nature into Art
, p. 246, n. 56.

49
Charles Morice, “Introduction” to Auguste Rodin,
Les Cathédrales de France
(Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1914), p. 22.

50
Quoted in Stefan Goebel,
The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 181. For the use of Reims in French propaganda, see Yann Harlault, “La Cathédrale de Reims, du 4 septembre 1914 au 10 juillet 1938: Idéologies, controverses et pragmatisme,” thesis directed by Marie-Claude Genet-Delacroix, Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, 2006; idem,
Naissance d’un mythe: l’Ange au Sourire de Reims
(Reims: Éditions Guéniot, 2008); and Patrick Demouy, “Le Sourire de Reims,”
Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres
153, no. 4 (2009), pp. 1609–27.

51
Quoted in Demouy, “Le Sourire de Reims,” pp. 1613 and 1615.

52

Le Matin
, October 9, 1914.

53
Ibid., February 24, 1917.

54

Le Matin
, April 9, 10 and 21, 1917;
Le Croix
, April 14, 1917.

55

Le Matin
, April 21, 1917.

56
Ibid., April 30, 1917.

57
WL 2230.

58

L’Homme Libre
, December 16, 1914.

59
WL 2231.

60
“La Réglementation de la Consommation de l’Essence,”
Bulletin des Usines de Guerre
(May 21, 1917), p. 27.

61
WL 2232a.

62

Le Matin
, April 15, 1917.

63
Ibid., May 10, 1917.

64
See Becker,
The Great War and the French People
, pp. 210ff.

65
WL 2232.

66
WL 2229.

67
Ibid.

68
Marianne Alphant dates the visit to May 10: See
Claude Monet: une vie dans le paysage
, p. 654. For the violent thunderstorms:
Le Matin
, May 11, 1917.

69
Tucker discusses how Matisse “might have been thinking of the elder Impressionist” when he painted
The Music Lesson
: see “Revolution in the Garden,” pp. 70–71.

CHAPTER TEN: THE SMILE OF REIMS

1
For reports of the bombardment in the month before Monet’s July 23 letter to Clémentel, see
Le Matin
, June 22, 27, and 30 and July 7, 8, 11, 13 and 16, 1917.

2

Le Matin
, July 4, 1917.

3

Le Carnet de la semaine
, September 16, 1917.

4
Quoted in John Rewald,
The History of Impressionism
, vol. 1 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961), p. 220.

5
On some of these changes, see Herbert, “Method and Meaning in Monet,” p. 102. For a good account of how the Reims painting would have been at odds with Monet’s usual approach, see Michel Hoog, “La Cathédrale de Reims de Claude Monet, ou le tableau impossible,”
Revue du Louvre
, no. 1 (1981), pp. 22–24. Hoog writes that “pictorial intention trumps concern for representation” in Monet’s paintings, and that “representing the cathedral, let alone describing the damages it sustained, would have meant renouncing all his work, both past and present” (p. 24). Similarly, John House writes that even in Monet’s series paintings of poplars and wheat stacks the “conventional rhetoric of thematic significance” is suppressed “in favor of a parading of the artist’s powers of vision and creativity.” See his review article in the
Art Bulletin
(June 1996), p. 366.

6

American Magazine of Art
(March 1927).

7
Louis Gillet,
Trois variations sur Claude Monet
(Paris: Librairie Plon, 1927), p. 53.

8

Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art
, vol. 1, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), p. 363. For a discussion of Kandinsky’s encounter with Monet’s work, see Natalya Avtonomova, “Vasilii Kandinsky and Claude Monet,”
Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture
9 (2003), pp. 57–68.

9

French Cathedrals, by B. Winkles, from Drawings Taken on the Spot by R. Garland, Architect, with an Historical and Descriptive Account
(London: Charles Tilt, 1837), p. 149.

10
Kenneth Clark,
Landscape into Art
(London: John Murray, 1976), p. 94.

11

Le Carnet de la Semaine
, November 4, 1917.

12
WL 2235a.

13

Le Matin
, July 24, 1917.

14

Le Carnet de la Semaine
, September 16, 1917. Vauxcelles wrote the article under his pseudonym, “Pinturicchio.”

15
Winston Churchill,
Thoughts and Adventures
(London: Thornton Butterworth, 1932), pp. 169, 175, and 177.

16
WL 2238a.

17

Le Matin
, September 30, 1917.

18
WL 2233.

19
WL 2235.

20
WL 2238.

21
Gimpel,
Diary of an Art Dealer
, p. 16.