Read Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies Online

Authors: Ross King

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

Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (68 page)

31
   
France-États-Unis: revue mensuelle du Comité France-Amérique
(January 1919), p. 379.

32
   
Le Figaro
, November 25, 1917. I have also used details from the description of the funeral in
Le Matin
, November 25, 1917.

33
   
Archives Claude Monet
, p. 137.

34
   WL 2288, 2289, 2290.

35
   Gimpel,
Diary of an Art Dealer
, p. 74.

36
   WL 2292.

37
   
Le Matin
, December 5, 1918.

38
   WL 2294.

39
   
Le Matin
, August 2, 1918.

40
   Ibid., September 6, 1918.

41
   WL 2296 and 2299.

42
   
Art et Décoration: Revue mensuelle d’Art moderne
(July–December 1910).

43
   
New York Times
, January 11, 1914.

44
   
New York Sun
, October 7, 1917.

45
   Ibid., April 14, 1918.

46
   WL 2280.

47
   WL 2294.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: AN OLD MAN MAD ABOUT PAINTING

1
    See
Le Petit Parisien
, January 9, 1919, and numerous reports in other newspapers.

2
    WL 2296.

3
    WL 2297.

4
    WL 2296.

5
    WL 2308.

6
    WL 2306.

7
    
Archives Claude Monet
, p. 12.

8
    WL 2306.

9
    The
Times
, December 2 and 4, 1918.

10
   
Paris 1918: The War Diary of the British Ambassador
, p. 83.

11
   
Paris 1918
, p. 287.

12
   On this controversy, and the distinction between
candeur
and
candour
, see Dallas,
1918
, p. 216.

13
   Quoted in MacMillan,
Paris 1919
, p. 27.

14
   Quoted in Dallas,
1918
, p. 212.

15
   The
Times
, December 31, 1918.

16
   Ibid., January 23, 1919.

17
   Details of the assassination attempt come from reports in
L’Homme Libre
,
Le Petit Parisien
, the
Times
, and the
New York Times
, February 20, 1919.

18
   
La Croix
, May 7, 1912.

19
   
L’Homme Enchâiné
, October 20, 1916. Her presence in the rue Franklin in February 1919 is reported in
Le Figaro
, February 23 and 24.

20
   L. Delamarre,
Lettre à mes soldats
(Paris: A. Rasquin, 1919), p. 4.

21
   
Archives Claude Monet
, p. 31.

22
   Quoted in Holt,
The Tiger
, p. 228. Cottin was released from prison, due to poor health, in August 1924.

23
   Quoted in Dallas,
1918
, p. 177.

24
   The
Times
, December 5, 1918.

25
   For these statistics, see William McDonald,
Reconstruction in France
(London: Macmillan, 1922), pp. 24–30.

26
   Dallas,
1918
, p. 84.

27
   
Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes
, vol. 2, ed. Donald Moggridge and Elizabeth Johnson (London: Macmillan, 1971), p. 94.

28
   
Le Figaro
, April 9, 1919.

29
   WL 2319.

30
   WL 2316.

31
   WL 2313.

32
   WL 2319.

33
   
Le Figaro
, August 16, 1919, and reports in the
Times
, August 14 and 18, 1919.

34
   WL 2319.

35
   
The Literary Digest
, February 3, 1917.

36
   
Le Looping
, August 10, 1918.

37
   Cocteau,
A Call to Order
, trans. Rollo H. Myers (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1926). On this subject, see the ground-breaking work by Kenneth Silver,
Esprit de Corps: The Art of the
Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Silver shows how foreign, noncombatant artists working in France during the war fell under suspicion and how modernism in general and Cubism in particular came to be associated with the German enemy. Silver has subsequently expanded the scope of his argument in
Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–19
, exhibition catalogue (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2010).

38
   Pierre Lampué,
Rapport: Au nom de la 4e Commission (1), relatif aux diverses propositions de la glorification de la Victoire
(Paris: Conseil Municipal de Paris, 1919), p. 2.

39
   Marius Vachon,
La Guerre artistique avec l’Allemagne: L’Organization de la Victoire
(Paris: Librairie Payot et Cie, 1916), pp. 138, 140.

40
   For a good discussion of how Monet’s late paintings went against the artistic grain of the postwar period, see Tucker, “Revolution in the Garden,” pp. 78–9.

41
   WL 2324.

42
   Clemenceau,
Claude Monet: Les Nymphéas
, p. 31.

43
   See
Archives Claude Monet
, p. 140.

44
   WL 2326.

45
   “L’Épitaphe,” in
Les Névroses: les âmes, les luxures, les refuges, les spectres, les ténèbres
(Paris: G. Charpentier, 1885), my translation. For Rollinat’s study of psychiatric patients, see Rae Beth Gordon, “From Charcot to Charlot,” in Mark S. Micale, ed.,
The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 105.

46
   Quoted in Levine,
Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection
, p. 148.

47
   WL 923.

48
   Levine,
Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection
, p. 105.

49
   Quoted in Émile Vinchon, “Maurice Rollinat dans la Creuse,” in
Mémoires de la société des sciences naturelles et archéologiques de la Creuse
, vol. 27 (1938–40), p. 318. I am indebted to this work for details of Rollinat’s life in Fresselines.

50
   WL 2326.

51
   Quoted in Lawrence Hanson,
Renoir: The Man, the Painter, and His World
(London: Leslie Frewin, 1972), p. 248. Hanson writes that there is more than one version of this remark, “but the sense of all is identical” (p. 270, n. 64).
Le Monde illustré
reports what it calls “la Légende” as early as December 20, 1919, with Renoir uttering as he expired: “
Je faisais encore des progrès!
” (“I’m still making progress!”).

52
   Quoted in Ray Rushton, “Ingres: Drawings from the Musée Ingres at Montauban and Other Collections,”
Journal of the Royal Society of Arts
(February 1980), p. 159.

53
   Quoted in A. Hyatt Mayor and Yasuko Betchaku, “Hokusai,”
Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin
, New Series, vol. 43 (Summer 1985), p. 5.

54
   Ambrose Vollard,
Renoir: An Intimate Record
, trans. Harold L. Van Doren and Randolph T. Weaver (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925), pp. 225–6.

55
   
Archives Claude Monet
, p. 135.

56
   WL 2328 and 2329.

57
   
Le Radical
, December 4, 1919.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: MEN OF IMPECCABLE TASTE

1
    
Le Gaulois
, January 19, 1920.

2
    Gimpel, p. 127.

3
    Quoted in Robert C. Byrd,
The Senate, 1789–1989
, vol. 1:
Addresses on the History of the United States Senate
(Washington, DC: Senate Historical Office, 1988), p. 424.

4
    Quoted in the
Times
, December 11, 1919.

5
    For Lloyd George’s involvement, see Dallas,
1918
, p. 501.

6
    
Le Monde illustré
, January 24, 1920.

7
    Quoted in Holt,
The Tiger
, p. 247.

8
    WL 2319b.

9
    
La Revue hebdomadaire
, February 6, 1909.

10
   
Le Bulletin de la vie artistique
, February 1, 1920.

11
   
Archives Claude Monet
, p. 78.

12
   WL 2333.

13
   Wildenstein writes: “It has been alleged—though no evidence is forthcoming—that Clemenceau took a foreign collector to Giverny by way of revenge against his ungrateful countrymen” (
Monet, or the Triumph of Impressionism
, p. 412). If this collector was Zoubaloff, he was hardly foreign in the sense that he would have spirited the Grande Décoration out of the country. Nor, if he did bring Zoubaloff to Giverny, would Clemenceau necessarily have been acting out of spite: Zoubaloff almost certainly would have purchased the panels (as he did so many other works of art) for the nation.

14
   WL 2335.

15
   
Le Petit Parisien
, February 12, 1922.

16
   WL 2341.

17
   WL 2336. For the high prices fetched by Monet’s paintings in America at this time, see
La Renaissance de l’art français et des industries de luxe
(January 1920), which reports (p. 193) that his works were being sold for as much as 130,000 francs.

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