Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (7 page)

Monet was in danger of becoming an anachronism. As early as 1898 an anonymous critic had written that the art of “Monsieur Monet” would have no future. “The fact is,” he wrote, “that the master of true Impressionism...no longer conquers the youth.”
⁵⁷
That was not entirely true, since young artists such as Henri Matisse and André Derain were greatly inspired by his example. But the most vocal opposition to Impressionism was led not, as in the old days, by conservative art critics but by a new and rising Parisian avant-garde, in particular by the Cubists and their supporters. These and other younger painters, including Pointillists such as Georges Seurat, were labeled “Post-Impressionists” by the English critic Roger Fry in 1910—a name suggesting that they had superseded the Impressionists. Many of them, especially the Cubists, claimed to look to Cézanne rather than Monet as their master. Cézanne, they believed, showed a “calculated and intentional effort” in his rigorously constructed compositions, as opposed to the formless and “hasty fantasy” produced by Monet.
⁵⁸
In 1908, when the Cubist painter Georges Braque staged his first one-man exhibition in Paris, Guillaume Apollinaire, a friend of Pablo Picasso, wrote in the catalogue’s preface that Impressionism was nothing but “ignorance and frenzy.” There was now, he declared, “a place for a nobler art—more measured, more orderly, more cultivated.”
⁵⁹
By which, of course, he meant the Cubism of Braque and Picasso. Another critic, André Salmon, a friend of Apollinaire and Picasso, claimed that the “modern landscapist, as soon as he looks at nature and before he even picks up his brush, pronounces the condemnation of Impressionism.”
⁶⁰

*

THE PURPOSE OF
Clemenceau’s visit to Giverny in 1914 was not merely to escape from Paris and its incessant talk of the election in order to enjoy the delights of Monet’s table and the sight of his garden. He had come, as usual, to offer comfort and encouragement.

Monet was as fortunate with his friends as he was with his family. Old comrades had been rallying around him for the previous three years. “You still have great and beautiful things to do,” urged Gustave Geffroy, who, along with Clemenceau and the novelist Octave Mirbeau, was Monet’s closest friend and greatest supporter.
⁶¹
Another sympathetic friend was the young man-about-town Sacha Guitry, whom
Gil Blas
called an “author, actor, lecturer, caricaturist, man of the world, model husband and delightful friend.”
⁶²
The twenty-eight-year-old Guitry and his wife, Charlotte Lysès, had begun enticing Monet to their country home, Les Zoaques, which stood in the shadow of a picturesquely ruined abbey in the charming village of Jumièges, near Rouen. Fearing that Monet was unlikely to do much more painting, they had coaxed him from his torpor in the summer of 1913 by having him redesign their garden. Monet enjoyed the company of “les Guitry,” as he called them. They were generous hosts, sending luxurious automobiles to collect guests as they disembarked from the train, then plying them with lobster and champagne. “Life here is always delicious,” Monet wrote to Blanche during a stay that August.
⁶³
One other guest at Les Zoaques that summer witnessed a hearty-looking Monet, with typical gusto, downing a bottle of Burgundy and devouring a whole partridge.
⁶⁴

Monet had taken with relish to the task of creating a garden at Les Zoaques. Readers of the gossip columns—in which Sacha, a tireless self-publicist, always featured conspicuously—could follow his progress closely. “Louis XIV had Le Nôtre,” reported
Gil Blas
. “Sacha Guitry has Claude Monet. Sacha Guitry has nothing for which to envy to Louis XIV.”
⁶⁵
Sacha was bedridden in the spring of 1914, seriously ill with pneumonia. (The society pages kept readers apprised of every change in his parlous condition.) But in April, Monet was still making occasional trips to Les Zoaques, armed with drawings and plants from
his garden. Charlotte wrote him affectionate letters, telling him to “stay happy” and calling him her “dear and great gardener.”
⁶⁶

Monet’s “delightful friend,” Sacha Guitry

Gardening was one thing, painting quite another. None of Monet’s friends had surrendered hope of him taking up his brushes again. In the summer of 1913, during one of his stays at Les Zoaques, the “affectionate exhortations” of Guitry and Mirbeau sent him back to his easel.
⁶⁷
A few months later a Paris weekly duly printed a reassuring photograph of the master, resplendently turned out in his Old England tweeds, sitting before the easel in his studio and dabbing away at a canvas depicting the pergola of roses behind his house. “I went three years without painting because of a terribly cruel loss,” he told the interviewer. “I only went back to my easel two or three short months ago.”
⁶⁸
But any work he did was desultory, sporadic and without any of the old enthusiasm. One problem was that he thought he had accomplished everything he could possibly do with a paintbrush. “I always wanted to believe,” he wrote to one of his picture dealers in 1913, “that I would make headway and finally do something worthwhile. But, alas, I must now bury that hope.”
⁶⁹

It was with the determined plan of disinterring that hope that, on the day of his visit to Giverny, Clemenceau at some point—no doubt after lunch and a tour of the gardens—descended with Monet, according to legend, to the cellar. Here in the dank gloom he saw Monet’s first paintings of the water lily pond, the canvases done almost twenty years
earlier, shown to Maurice Guillemot in 1897 but never put on public display. Working up an enthusiasm, Clemenceau told Monet that he was amazed by the paintings, although he later confessed that he found these first efforts, although quite pretty, “not very interesting and quite sober.”
⁷⁰
But he hoped to revive in Monet the old dream, confessed to Guillemot, of decorating a room with a series of large-scale canvases. “Monet,” Clemenceau told him, “you ought to hunt out a very rich Jew who would order your water lilies as a decoration for his dining-room.”
⁷¹

Clemenceau must have been surprised but delighted by Monet’s positive reaction. Indeed, he responded in a way Clemenceau did not anticipate, because rather than doing something with these decades-old canvases he decided to create an entirely new and even more ambitious set of paintings of his pond. Several days later Monet wrote to Geffroy, telling him of Clemenceau’s visit and declaring that he was “in good shape and possessed by the desire to paint.” The poor weather, he said, had prevented him from making a start, but he intended “to undertake great things.”
⁷²

These words must have come as a huge relief to Geffroy, who, as one of Monet’s greatest cheerleaders, had been trying to convince him that, despite everything, his artistic powers remained undiminished. But neither Geffroy nor Clemenceau could in their wildest dreams have imagined the artistic odyssey that their exhortations had unleashed. “You have launched a projectile toward infinity,” Clemenceau would later write. He also described Monet, with his new project, as a man who was “madly striving for the realization of the impossible.”
⁷³

*
  These enormous conical ricks with their thatched crowns were, technically speaking,
meules de blé
(stacks of wheat) rather than haystacks (
meules de foin
). They functioned as silos for the storage of the wheat harvest during the winter. For protection from the elements, the stalks were arranged with the ears facing inward toward the center, while the top, like the roofs of many houses in Giverny at the time, was thatched. What to call
meules de blé
in English (grain stacks, wheat stacks, stacks of wheat?) has been subject to much art historical variation, with haystacks now definitively ruled out. I shall follow recent custom and call them wheat stacks.

CHAPTER THREE

LANDSCAPES OF WATER

MUCH OF CLAUDE MONET’S
life and work had been a mad striving for the impossible. His goal, which he frankly admitted was unattainable, was to paint his carefully chosen object—the cathedral, cliff, or wheat stack before which he raised his easel—under singular and fleeting conditions of weather and light. As he told an English visitor, he wanted “to render my impressions before the most fugitive effects.”
¹
In 1889 a critic had scoffed that Monet’s paintings were nothing more than a matter of “geography and the calendar.”
²
This was, however, to miss the point of Monet’s work. Since objects changed their color and appearance according to the seasons, the meteorological conditions, and the time of day, Monet hoped to capture their visual impact in these brief, distinctive, ever-changing moments in time. He concentrated not only on the objects themselves but also, critically, on the atmosphere that surrounded them, the erratically shifting phantoms of light and color that he called the
enveloppe
. “Everything changes, even stone,” he wrote to Alice while working on his paintings of the façade of Rouen Cathedral.
³
But freezing the appearance of objects amid fleeting phantoms of light and air was no easy task. “I am chasing a dream,” he admitted in 1895. “I want the impossible.”
⁴

Recording the fugitive effects of color and light was integral to Monet’s art. Setting up his easel in front of Rouen Cathedral, or the wheat stacks in the frozen meadow outside Giverny, or the windswept cliffs at Étretat on the coast of Normandy, he would paint throughout the day as the light and weather, and finally the seasons, changed. To reproduce the desired effects accurately according to his personal sensations, he was forced to work outdoors, often in disagreeable conditions. In 1889 a journalist described him on the stormy beach beneath
the cliffs at Étretat, “dripping wet under his cloak, painting a hurricane in the salty spray” as he tried to capture the different lighting conditions on two or three canvases that he shuttled back and forth onto his easel.
⁵

Because lighting effects changed quickly—every seven minutes, he once claimed
⁶
—he was forced, in his series paintings of wheat stacks and poplars, to work on multiple canvases almost simultaneously, placing a different one on his easel every seven minutes or so, rotating them according to the particular visual effect he was trying to capture. Clemenceau once watched him working in a poppy field with four different canvases. “He was going from one to the other, according to the position of the sun.”
⁷
In the 1880s the writer Guy de Maupassant had likewise witnessed Monet “in pursuit of impressions” on the Normandy coast. He described how the painter was followed through the fields by his children and stepchildren “carrying his canvases, five or six paintings depicting the same subject at different times and with different effects. He worked on them one by one, following all the changes in the sky.”
⁸

This obsession with capturing successive changes in the fall of light or the density of a fogbank could lead to episodes that were both comical (for observers) and infuriating (for Monet). In 1901, in London, he began painting what he called the “unique atmosphere” of the river Thames—the famous pea-souper fogs—from his room in the Savoy Hotel.
⁹
Here he was visited by the painter John Singer Sargent, who found him surrounded by no fewer than ninety canvases, “each one the record of a momentary effect of light over the Thames. When the effect was repeated and an opportunity occurred for finishing the picture,” Sargent reported, “the effect had generally passed away before the particular canvas could be found.”
¹⁰