The Texture of Wartime Monet
Going Through Old Notebooks Part 28: "Madame, you are standing too close to the paintings."
Sometimes when I’m in Paris, I will go to visit Monet’s water lilies at the Musée de l’Orangerie as a kind of “art bath,” my urban version of shinrin-yoku, or Japanese forest bathing. This was Monet’s own intention for the Orangeries space at the time. They were designed by him in the wake of the first World War as a place of meditation and reflection. As per Monet’s wishes, signs at the entrance to the galleries ask visitors to observe the works in silence, though most ignore this. They were the last paintings he completed in his lifetime. The museum was inaugurated and the works opened to the public in May of 1927, five months after his death.
He was going blind. He had cancer. He died painting them.
The Musée de l’Orangerie was originally built in 1852 at the request of Napoleon III, as a place to house the citrus trees of the Tuileries gardens in winter (prior to that, the potted trees spent winters in the Grande Galerie of the Louvre.) The building continued to serve as a greenhouse and occasional concert venue until 1922, when renovations began to convert the space into an art museum.
Monet spent twelve years, beginning in 1914, constantly working and reworking more than forty monumental water lily canvases, eight of which are now part of the Orangerie’s permanent installation. All depict the light and reflections on the pond of his beloved garden in Giverny. The two adjoining rooms, with four long murals in each, take the form of an oblong figure eight, the symbol for infinity. This too was intentional.
Sometime in my early twenties, I got the message that I was not supposed to love Monet. I had applied for a master’s degree in Art History but was more or less laughed out of the building when the interviewer asked me to talk about a piece of art that moved me, and I brought up the water lilies. The message was clear: Monet was not cool. Monet made art for calendars and mugs, for little girls and old ladies. His art was gift shop art, which is to say, bad. Or maybe not bad exactly, but not interesting, and with nothing more to say about it. Not edgy or important in the context of an art history career. Not current or challenging or whatever art was supposed to be in that moment.
But Monet’s famous waterlilies were made during the war, and more people should know that. This is what I wanted to say, but couldn’t find the words. Look and you can see beneath the surface of the water: that dread, that waiting. Would it be destroyed, the garden in Normandy, like so many others? Would it all be dug up? Monet’s water garden, that paradise it took him so long to earn, and to build. But then another wife died, and a son, and a beloved dog. Can’t you see them there, the wives, the son, the dog, the war—in his brushstrokes, in the depths of the water?
I too had thought that Monet’s water lilies had looked fine-but-sort-of-boring in the commodified reproductions I had seen of them when I was young—the mouse pads and tea towels, the mugs and scarves.
But then I saw the real paintings, in person.
The first time I encountered one of Monet’s large water lily canvases, at MoMA in New York, I felt like I’d been hit in the chest. The urgency of them was overwhelming. They were about something bigger than beauty. Although I knew nothing about Monet’s biography then, I instantly knew that they were about loss or impending loss; and maybe about something larger than that, too. They were filled with the beauty of grief. There was a tremendous, aching urgency in them—to capture, to see, to save, to love, to experience, to live, to be.
Monet began painting the water lilies the year his son died from an illness. He worked on them all through the terrible war that killed everyone else’s sons, too. Northern France was ripped to muddy shreds, gardens ruined and trees torn down, but not Giverny. In Giverny, Monet had managed to maintain an island of sanity, a sanctuary built by an artist in mourning. He’d lost two beloved wives—the first, Camille, was lost decades before, while the second, Alice, died just three years earlier.
“I shall stay here regardless,” he said, when friends told him to leave Giverny for his own safety during the war. “If those barbarians wish to kill me, I shall die among my canvases, in front of my life’s work.”
Monet began to paint as if going to war himself. It was a last battle against the dying of the light. He was physically unwell. He suffered from cataracts and cyanopsia, so that everything he saw was tinted blue. Georges Clemenceau, then in between his two terms as Prime Minister, made sure that Monet’s art supplies were well stocked during a time of rations and deprivation, so that he could complete the large works. He encouraged Monet to get cataract surgery, to climb out of his depression. Clemenceau thought the French nation, also grieving, as Monet was, were going to need them.
Monet painted his visions of the world’s beauty the way he had once painted his first wife Camille on her death bed, with the light changing in the room and on her face, as her own light went out of her. Now it was the whole world he was trying to capture, before his own vision of it went dark.
I think Monet wanted us to see the peace in his water lilies, and of course the beauty, but I see these other things, too; his garden, but also his son, and Camille, and Alice, and the war. What’s there beneath the water and its reflections. The work of a great artist, but also a widower, and a grieving father. An elegy, and a wonderful defiance. The last stand of beauty against the void.
A version of this essay was originally shared in 2022.
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