Mad enchantment Claude Monet and the painting of the water lilies

Review by New York Times Review

IS THERE anything left to be said about Claude Monet, the celebrated Impressionist who took painting out of the studio and into the breezy, sneezy countryside? He gave us the defining view of French leisure and remains a perpetually bankable subject of museum blockbusters. His images of poplar trees and stacks of wheat, of stone cliffs off the coast of Normandy, of women strolling beneath the shade of their tilted parasols - they suggest that life is inherently pleasurable, a series of languorous afternoons whose only hazard is overexposure to the sun. Yet Monet was plenty radical, especially in his Grande Décoration, as he referred to his wall-to-wall paintings of water lilies. He began the series in 1914, at the age of 73, setting up his easel beside his pond in Giverny and staying put as World War I flared around him. Ross King's "Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies" is an engaging and authoritative portrait of the aged artist and his travails. By 1920, Monet was twice widowed and suffering from cataract-clouded vision. His confidence was at such a low that he frequently destroyed finished paintings. He had been famous for so long that many people assumed he was dead. As the last surviving French Impressionist, he pined for the company of absent friends - Renoir and Cézanne, especially - and felt estranged from a younger generation that considered his work passé beside the razzmatazz of Picasso's demoiselles. "Les Nymphéas," as his water lilies paintings were officially titled, are among art history's greatest last acts. Compared with Monet's earlier paintings, with their direct transcriptions of the countryside, the water lilies dispense with contours and boundaries and veer toward abstraction. They mark the advent of "all-over painting," a phrase that was coined in New York in the 1950 s, when Monet was abruptly rediscovered. Critics who were eager to construct an instant lineage for Jackson Pollock's then-new drip paintings looked to Monet, who, though trained as a 19th-century realist, helped pioneer the 20th-century belief that vision is fundamentally subjective, a rush of shifting sensations, a stream (or pond?) of consciousness. The Monet who emerges from King's pages is a sympathetic and vivid character - less the wizened patriarch of French Impressionism than a crotchety septuagenarian afflicted with toothaches. Tired of his once-frequent forays into the French countryside, he reinvented himself as a homebody painter and designed his pond as a way of solving his problem of what to paint. In the process of constructing it, he applied to the local authorities for permission to reroute the Ru river to his property. His neighbors were initially suspicious. Here was a celebrity artist who seemed to snub French horticulture in favor of Oriental traditions. Instead of manicured hedges and Versailles artifice, he built a water garden of Zen tranquillity, complete with a Japanese foot bridge and stalks of bamboo. To be sure, Monet had his partisans. They included his doting biographer, Gustave Geffroy, and the art critic Octave Mirbeau, who frequently traveled out to Giverny to see his work. And then there was Georges Clemenceau - yes, that Clemenceau, the world-famous statesman who steered France through World War I and served twice as the country's socially progressive prime minister. The friendship between Monet and Clemenceau amounts to its own fascinating story and resembles an odd-couple comedy. Monet had little interest in politics and never voted in an election. But Clemenceau was a true intellectual with a daunting cultural range. His apartment in Paris was cluttered with his Japanese collectibles - tiny netsuke figures, lacquered tea bowls, woodblock prints by Utamaro and Hiroshige, a reminder that he and Monet were not provincial in their tastes. You can even see Monet's lily pond as an expression of their shared passion for things Japanese and their increasing closeness after the end of their respective marriages. It was Clemenceau, implausibly, who oversaw the treatment of Monet's eye problems, an "unspeakable drama," as he described it. He found an ophthalmologist for Monet and persuaded the artist to undergo a much-postponed cataract operation. Monet did not excel as a patient. During his long recuperation, he sent off cross and accusing letters to his doctor. His eyes watered all the time; he saw black dots floating in front of him. He regretted the operation and told the doctor it was "criminal to have me put in this situation." A second operation was needed. Clemenceau, an architect of the Versailles Treaty, drew on his deepest diplomatic skills to make peace between Monet and the eye doctor. To be sure, Clemenceau had a professional interest in Monet's well-being. At the end of World War I, immediately after the signing of the Armistice of Nov. 11, 1918, Monet graciously offered to donate some paintings to the people of France. After nearly a decade of on-again, off-again negotiations, a series of now-famous lily paintings were installed on specially constructed, curving walls at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, surrounding the viewer with a blue-hued blur of water and plants and reflections of clouds. Astoundingly, the murals were ignored for years and treated shabbily. As King notes, they were once covered up to make room for a temporary exhibition of Flemish tapestries. King, who has previously written books on Brunelleschi's dome, Leonardo's "Last Supper" and Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling, has made it a practice-bordering-onformula to take on just one work of art at a time. This lends his books a welcome focus. His prose is admirably clear, although, in describing paintings, he can lapse into hyperbole. At the Orangerie, for instance, three of Monet's murals "are flanked by the graceful curves of truncated willow trees showering their branches in fragile, flickering cascades as they gather us in a sweeping embrace." The book is short on analysis and fails to definitively explain the role played by Monet's illness in the development of his late style. Nonetheless, "Mad Enchantment" offers a moving portrait of the artist as an old man, and usefully shatters the myth of him as a lone genius sequestered in his garden, communing with the birds. It has often been said that Monet painted the water lilies in near-total seclusion, so it's heartening to read about the bustle of appreciative people around him, from his staff of gardeners, to his stepdaughter, Blanche, who lived with him until the end, to his dear friend Clemenceau, who was at his bedside, holding his hand, when he died. In art, as in so much else, it takes a village. ? DEBORAH SOLOMON, the art critic of WNYC public radio, is writing a biography of the artist Jasper Johns.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 11, 2016]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Best-selling King (Leonardo and the Last Supper, 2012) consummately meshes biography with art history as he turns the creation of one resounding masterpiece into a portal onto the artist's life. His most recent inquiry, his seventh, is particularly affecting, perhaps because the legendary Impressionist Monet and his revolutionary paintings remain so radiantly vital and exquisitely evocative. Writing with a historical novelist's attunement to the interplay of place, temperament, and society, King brings readers to Giverny, where Monet designed his inspiring garden with its now immortalized pond, Japanese bridge, and water lilies. Right from the start, in 1895, Monet, age 55, envisioned a circular room with wall-filling canvases depicting the erratically shifting phantoms of light and color, a dream that precipitated 30 years of struggle. King sumptuously describes the pleasures of Giverny, from Monet's delight in food and wine to his close and sympathetic extended family, joys imperiled by WWI and Monet's terrible anxiety and depression and ever-worsening eyesight. Yet he persisted in painting dauntingly complex works in his mad striving for the impossible, sustained, as King reveals in unique and moving detail, by his profound friendship with the heroic prime minister Georges Clemenceau, who, after Monet's death, helped secure a permanent home for the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism. Never before has the full drama and significance of Monet's magnificent Water Lilies been conveyed with such knowledge and perception, empathy and wonder.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Library Journal Review

Readers will rejoice at this critical and social "biography" of Monet's stunningly ambitious final signature painting cycle, Water Lilies, a deeply immersive companion to the author's memorable The Judgement of Paris. Here King (Brunelleschi's Dome) turns his mind, heart, and eyes to Claude Monet (1840-1926), his prolific oeuvre, his celebrated home, and his carefully curated gardens at Giverny in northern France. Beginning the story on the eve of World War I, King takes readers through the 1920s. He shows us an aging, ailing, yet determined artist, one of the last surviving impressionists in a time that celebrated the "wild beasts," aka les fauves, and monitored the seismic stirrings of the war, cubism, and abstraction. Monet desperately needed to make his final creative statement and longed to enjoy the enduring prestige of a museum (L'Orangerie) devoted to his purpose-made art. Portraying such iconic characters as Monet's friend/champion George -Clemenceau, King is ever the brilliant docent murmuring the right, telling details and critical backstories in our ear as we move through space and time. He ultimately brings the man and his work into perfect focus while increasing his audience's interest in both all the more. VERDICT This work is essential. Expect strong demand.-Barbara Genco, Library Journal © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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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." In 1889 a critic had scoffed that Monet's paintings were nothing more than a matter of "geography and the calendar." 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. 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."       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. Because lighting effects changed quickly--every seven minutes, he once claimed--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." 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." 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. 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."         One irony of Monet's approach was that these paintings of fleeting visual effects at single moments in time actually took many months of work. "I paint entirely out of doors," he once airily informed a journalist. "I never touch my work in my studio." However, virtually all of Monet's canvases, although begun on the beaches or in the fields, were actually completed back in the studio, often far from the motif and with much teeth-gnashing labor. Octave Mirbeau reported that a single Monet canvas might take "sixty sessions" of work. Some of the canvases, moreover, were given fifteen layers of paint. His London paintings were finished not beside the banks of the Thames but as much as two years later in his studio in Giverny, beside the Seine, with the assistance of photographs. The revelation that Monet used photographs caused something of a scandal when this expedient was revealed in 1905 thanks to the indiscreet and possibly malicious comments of several of Monet's London acquaintances, including Sargent. Monet had risked a similar kind of scandal when he took one of his Rouen Cathedral paintings to Norway.         There was another irony to Monet's paintings. Many of them evoked gorgeous visions of rural tranquility: sun-dappled summer afternoons along a riverbank or fashionable women promenading in flowery meadows. As Mirbeau wrote, nature appeared in Monet's paintings in "warm breaths of love" and "spasms of joy." His pleasingly bucolic scenes were combined with a flickering brushwork that produced delicious vibrations of color. The overall result was that many observers regarded his paintings as possessing a soothing effect on both the eye and the brain--and Monet himself as  le peintre du bonheur  (the painter of happiness). Geffroy believed Monet's works could offer comforting distraction and alleviate fatigue, while Monet himself speculated that they might calm "nerves strained through overwork" and offer the stressed out viewer "an asylum of peaceful meditation." The writer Marcel Proust, an ardent admirer, even believed Monet's paintings could play a spiritually curative role "analogous to that of psychotherapists with certain neurasthenics"--by which he meant those whose weakened nerves had left them at the mercy of fast-paced modern life. Proust was not alone. More than a century later, an Impressionist expert at Sotheby's in London called Monet "the great anti-depressant." This "great anti-depressant" was, however, a neurasthenic who enjoyed anything but peaceful meditation as he worked on his paintings. Geffroy described Monet as "a perpetual worrier, forever anguished," while to Clemenceau he was  le monstre  and  le roi des grincheux --"king of the grumps." Monet could be volatile and bad-tempered at the best of times, but when work at his easel did not proceed to his satisfaction--lamentably often--he flew into long and terrible rages. Clemenceau neatly summed up the quintessential Monet scenario of the artist throwing a tantrum in the midst of blissful scenery: "I imagine you in a Niagara of rainbows," he wrote to Monet, "picking a fight with the sun." Monet's letters are filled with references to his gloom and anger. Part of his problem was the weather. Monet could pick a fight with the sun, the wind, or the rain. Painting in the open air left him at the mercy of the elements, at which he raged like King Lear. His constant gripes about the wind and rain had once earned him a scolding from Mirbeau: "As for the nauseatingly horrible weather we have and that we will have until the end of August, you have the right to curse. But to believe that you're finished as a painter because it's raining and windy--this is pure madness."         It was a strange contradiction of Monet's practice that he wished to work in warm, calm, sunny conditions, and yet for much of his career he chose to paint in Normandy: a part of France that was, as a nineteenth-century guidebook glumly affirmed, "generally cold and wet...subject to rapid and frequent changes, and fairly long spells of bad weather that result in unseasonable temperatures." Working on the windswept coast of Normandy in the spring of 1896, he found conditions exasperating. "Yesterday I thought I would go mad," he wrote. "The wind blew away my canvases and, when I set down my palette to recover them, the wind blew it away too. I was so furious I almost threw everything away." Sometimes Monet did in fact throw everything away. On one occasion he hurled his color box into the river Epte in a blind rage, then was obliged to telegraph Paris, once he calmed down, to have a new one delivered. On another occasion, he flung himself into the Seine. "Luckily no harm was done," he reassured a friend. Monet's canvases likewise felt his wrath. Jean-Pierre Hoschedé witnessed him committing "acts of violence" against them, slashing them with a penknife, stamping them into the ground or thrusting his foot through them. An American visitor saw a painting of one of his stepdaughters with "a tremendous crisscross rent right through the centre"--the result of an enraged Monet giving it a vicious kick. Since he had been wearing wooden clogs at the time, the damage was considerable. Sometimes he even set fire to his canvases before he could be stopped. On occasion his rages became so intense that he would roam the fields and then, to spare his family, check into a hotel nearby in Vernon. At other times he retreated to his bedroom for days at a time, refusing both meals and attempts at consolation. Friends tried to coax him from his gloom with diverting trips to Paris. "Come to Paris for two days," Mirbeau pleaded with him during one of these spells. "We shall walk. We shall go here and there...to the Jardin des Plantes, which is an admirable thing, and to the Théâtre-Français. We shall eat well, we shall say stupid things, and we shall not see any paintings." There was another contradiction in Monet's practice. He loved to paint and, indeed, he lived to paint--and yet he claimed to find painting an unremitting torment. "This satanic painting tortures me," he once wrote to a friend, the painter Berthe Morisot. To a journalist he said: "Many people think I paint easily, but it is not an easy thing to be an artist. I often suffer tortures when I paint. It is a great joy and a great suffering." Monet's rage and suffering before his easel reveal the disingenuousness of his famous comment about Vincent van Gogh. Mirbeau, who owned Van Gogh's  Irises , once proudly showed the work to Monet. "How did a man who loved flowers and light so much," Monet responded, "and who painted them so well, make himself so unhappy?" Some of Monet's friends regarded his torture and suffering as a necessary condition of his genius--as a symptom of his search for perfection, or what Geffroy called the "dream of form and color" that he pursued "almost to the point of self-annihilation." After witnessing yet another fit of dyspepsia, Clemenceau wrote to Monet that "if you were not pushed by an eternal search for the unattainable, you would not be the author of so many masterpieces." As Clemenceau once explained to his secretary apropos of Monet's dreadful fits of temper: "One must suffer. One must not be satisfied...With a painter who slashes his canvases, who weeps, who explodes with rage in front of his painting, there is hope."         Clemenceau must have realized that in persuading Monet to paint large-scale canvases of his water lily pond he had not only rekindled the painter's hopes but also, as a sore temptation to fate, his exasperation and rage. Excerpted from Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies by Ross King All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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