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

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Authors: Ross King

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

BOOK: Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

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

Ross King

Bloomsbury USA (2016)

Rating: ★★★★☆

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

Biography & Autobiographyttt Artists; Architects; Photographersttt Artttt Historyttt Generalttt Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945)ttt

Claude Monet is perhaps the world's most beloved artist, and among all his creations, the paintings of the water lilies in his garden at Giverny are most famous. Seeing them in museums around the world, viewers are transported by the power of Monet's brush into a peaceful world of harmonious nature. Monet himself intended them to provide “an asylum of peaceful meditation.” Yet, as Ross King reveals in his magisterial chronicle of both artist and masterpiece, these beautiful canvases belie the intense frustration Monet experienced at the difficulties of capturing the fugitive effects of light, water, and color. They also reflect the terrible personal torments Monet suffered in the last dozen years of his life.

Mad Enchantment
tells the full story behind the creation of the
Water Lilies
, as the horrors of World War I came ever closer to Paris and Giverny, and a new generation of younger artists, led by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, were challenging the achievements of Impressionism. By early 1914, French newspapers were reporting that Monet, by then 73 and one of the world's wealthiest, most celebrated painters, had retired his brushes. He had lost his beloved wife, Alice, and his eldest son, Jean. His famously acute vision--what Paul Cezanne called "the most prodigious eye in the history of painting"--was threatened by cataracts. And yet, despite ill health, self-doubt, and advancing age, Monet began painting again on a more ambitious scale than ever before. Linking great artistic achievement to the personal and historical dramas unfolding around it, Ross King presents the most intimate and revealing portrait of an iconic figure in world culture--from his lavish lifestyle and tempestuous personality to his close friendship with the fiery war leader Georges Clemenceau, who regarded the
Water Lilies
as one of the highest expressions of the human spirit.

Review

"King, author of books on Michelangelo, Leonardo and Machiavelli, offers a well-researched and in-depth account, based on Monet's letters and the reminiscences and writings of his many friends and admirers. . . . Readers will come away with an enhanced understanding of Monet's art, about which King is insightful and articulate. And when King animates the colorful politics of Monet's France, the book sparkles." - Philip Kennicott,
The Washington Post

"[A] sensitive, deeply researched and altogether delightful biography." -
Newsday

"A vivid account of Claude Monet (1840-1926) facing his greatest artistic challenge in the last years of his life. . . . King elegantly reveals the soul of a great artist, the last impressionist standing at the end of one of history's most remarkable art movements." - starred review,
Kirkus

"Biographer Ross King once again puts a human face on the historical narrative of an artistic triumph . . . . [Monet] described himself as 'at war with nature and time,' and 'Mad Enchantment' captures that war with page-turning intensity." -
Christian Science Monitor

"King, an exhaustive researcher and a pleasing writer, has produced a perceptive chronicle of war and friendship, shifting tastes and lasting art -- and of the painted reflections of a pond that became a mirror." - Christopher Sullivan,
The Associated Press

"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." - starred review,
Library Journal

"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. . . . Never before has the full drama and significance of Monet’s magnificent
Water Lilies
been conveyed with such knowledge and perception, empathy and wonder." - starred review,
Booklist

"King's marvelous storytelling draws us back to these sublime, timeless paintings, so remote from -- and yet, paradoxically, so necessary a part of -- our own unquiet times." -
Dallas Morning News

"Ross King has a knack for explaining complicated processes in a manner that is not only lucid but downright intriguing . . . Fascinating." -
Los Angeles Times on BRUNELLESCHI'S DOME

"An altogether enchanting tale." - Dava Sobel, author of LONGITUDE and GALILEO'S DAUGHTER, on BRUNELLESCHI'S DOME

"[A] dramatic, vivid, and brainy mix of biography and art history." - starred review,
Booklist on LEONARDO AND THE LAST SUPPER

"A fascinating and in-depth story of one of the world's most famous works of art that will appeal to general readers as well as academics. Highly recommended." - starred review,
Library Journal on LEONARDO AND THE LAST SUPPER

"Riveting . . . Such material could have been tedious in less nimble literary hands. But so thorough is King's grasp of the Second Empire's cultural politics, so ironic his wit and choice of detail, that his text remains a page-turner throughout." -
Los Angeles Times on THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS

"Scrupulously researched, written with wit and panache, Ross King's
Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling
is a sublime peek into a remarkable era." -
Miami Herald on MICHELANGELO AND THE POPE'S CEILING

About the Author

Ross King
is the author of
Brunelleschi's Dome, Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, The Judgment of Paris, Leonardo and the Last Supper,
and
Machiavelli: Philosopher of Power,
along with two novels,
Ex Libris
and
Domino.
He has twice won Canada's Governor General's Award, and his work has been nominated for a National Book Critics' Circle Award, the Charles Taylor Prize, and the National Award for Arts Writing. He has lectured at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian, the Aspen Institute, and the Frick Collection, and in Florence, Milan, Paris, and Giverny. Born in Canada, he now lives near Oxford with his wife, Melanie.