Monet's gift of peace...and the moat behind the Chateau

Dear Friend,

Last week’s letter touched on a new project at the Chateau, planting waterlilies. These will grow in the bassin, part of the original medieval moat system, that you see from the windows on the north side – or when you are taking a walk behind the Chateau.

The project is dear to the heart of Mr Martyn, our new gardener. And when I entered into the subject, I too, was enthralled. Not only are waterlilies a beautiful plant, they are intimately connected to France’s cultural history (as we saw last week) – and one of its great artists.

**

“D'où vous est venu, mon cher maître, ce goût pour les nymphéas ?” asked the distinguished man of letters of his elderly companion.

“J'ai mis du temps à comprendre mes nymphéas. Je les avais plantés pour le plaisir ; je les cultivais sans songer à les peindre. Un paysage ne vous imprègne pas en un jour. Et puis, tout d'un coup, j'ai eu la révélation des féeries de mon étang. J'ai pris ma palette. Depuis ce temps, je n'ai guère eu d'autre modèle.”

“From whence, my dear Master, comes this taste for waterlilies?”

“It took me some time to understand my waterlilies…” began Claude Monet.

The conversation became a book, still in print today, “A Giverny chez Claude Monet,” by Marc Elder. Elder had won the Prix Goncourt for his first novel, written about life in a fishing village off the Atlantic Coast. He visited Monet in 1924. The Maître was still at work on his grande décoration, his final paintings, “Les Nymphéas.”

“I planted them for pleasure,” continued the artist, “but a landscape does not permeate your being in a day. Then, of a sudden, I saw fairies, magic, in my pond. I took up my palette. Since then, I have rarely used another model.”

It wasn’t strictly true. Monet painted his first waterlily in 1896 as it floated near his pont japonais. Although he painted the waterlilies in his pond at Giverny for the next 30 years of his life, during this time he also painted the bridges and fogs of London and the shimmering canals of Venice. He painted irises, agapanthus, roses, and dim figures of his family in the garden and, once, a self-portrait.

In 1914 – the same year that Marc Elder won the Prix Goncourt for his novel – Monet had stopped painted. His oldest son had died. A few years earlier, his second wife had wasted away from leukemia. And he was going blind. He tried to paint and said he dreamed that the Cathedral of Rouen – which he had painted so many times -- was falling on him, changing colors as it flew through the air.

At last, it was the waterlilies that saved him. And perhaps his old friend Georges Clemenceau, the fiery radical turned white-haired homme d’état, Prime Minister in the last two years of the World War I.

Monet and Clemenceau, born a year apart, had grown up in the glory days of Napoléon III’s Second Empire, when France rivaled England in economic and industrial development. They matured through the grand Belle Epoque of the 1890s and early 20th century, when Paris was the center of the literary and artistic world. Clemenceau, an influential art critic as well as a politician, was an early admirer of Monet. The “Cathédral de Rouen, Harmonie brune” hangs in the Musée d’Orsay today, thanks to Clemenceau’s advocacy.

Clemenceau visited Monet often during La Grande Guerre. Together, they witnessed the devastation of France. And Clemenceau urged Monet to keep painting.

Perhaps as a result of Clemenceau’s urging, Monet made a series of monumental canvases of his waterlilies, shown from the vespéral to the crépesculaire, from rising of the sun through the first glimmer of evening light. The day after the Armistice was signed in 1918, Monet wrote to Clemenceau and offered to give the nation two of his canvases. He ended making a donation of 19 of them, and designed the two oval galleries of the Orangerie – built by Napoleon III to overwinter his orange trees -- to present them.

The “Nymphaeas” series was unusual in Monet’s oeuvre. More than any of his other paintings, these works announced painting as an abstraction of color and texture. In the first “waterscapes,” as Monet called them, there was a fixed point of view. A figure at the water’s edge. The green bridge. Trees. But over the years, those fixed objects vanished from the canvas. The perspective floated away…and the waterlilies, the water, the reflection of the sky fused together.

"It's not much, but it's the only way I can take part in the victory," he wrote Clemenceau.

But the war had changed many things, including dearly-held assumptions about civilization and the role of art.

Monet and the Impressionists were part of a happy old world, celebrating and exploring light, color and movement, often focused on the home and on private spaces, like gardens. They were part of the Art Nouveau tendence that called for art and beauty to infiltrate all aspects of life. Impressionist painters often titled their work “décorations,” and they painted many surfaces besides canvas, from walls and ceramic tiles to fans.

The new generation of artists, however – Cubists and Futurists,  Surrealists and Modernists -- were revolutionaries, whose work represented the principles of a new, ideal, and not necessarily pretty world. When in 1928, two years after his death, Monet’s monumental “Nymphéas” series was exhibited at the Orangerie, it attracted few visitors and much criticism.

Twenty years later, the Waterlilies found a new champion. “In Monet we find a world of art, with the variety and spaciousness and ease of a world,” the critic Clement Greenberg wrote in 1956. He had seen one of Monet’s Nymphéas panels the year before.

Monet’s later paintings, he wrote, prefigured Abstract Expressionism, a movement which Greenberg considered to be the highest form of art of the time. The subject matter of Abstractionism is paint and a canvas. It does not attempt to deceive or manipulate the viewer by depicting another reality. Nor is it concerned with the decorative aspects of art.

It’s not clear that Monet would have agreed with Greenberg. Illusion was very much part of his goal for Les Nymphéas, as he related to the art critic Roger Marx in 1909:

“Un moment la tentation m’est venue d’employer à la décoration d’un salon ce thème des nymphéas : transporté le long des murs, enveloppant toutes les parois de son unité, il aurait procuré l’illusion d’un tout sans fin, d’une onde sans horizon et sans rivage ; les nerfs surmenés par le travail se seraient détendus là…et, à qui l’eût habité, cette pièce aurait offert l’asile d’une méditation paisible au centre d’un aquarium fleuri.”

“At once, the temptation came to me to use, as a decoration in a salon, this theme of waterlilies: transported along the walls, enveloping all the surfaces with its unity, it would procure the illusion of an endless whole, of a wave without a horizon or a beach; nerves exasperated by work would be relieved here…and, to one who lived in it, this room – as if in the center of a flowering aquarium -- would be an refuge for peaceful meditation…”

It would be difficult to find better words to describe Monet’s enduring legacy. And, perhaps, of the regenerative, restorative power of art…and of a garden.

Elisabeth

info@chateaudecourtomer.com

www.chateaudecourtomer.com

P.S. If you are in Paris, a new exhibition, “Impressionist Decorations: Tracing the Roots of Monet’s Waterlilies,” is on show at the Orangerie (until July 22) Looking back to the 18th-century and artists such as Boucher and Fragonard, it explores the theme of the artist as decorator. It is accompanied by a video and sound installation commissioned for the exhibit from Ange Leccio, “d’Après Monet” (until September 5).