Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (15 page)

MONET, ON THE
other hand, had slipped his fetters: by the end of November he was painting again. “I have returned to work,” he announced in a letter to Geffroy on the first of December. “It is still the best way to avoid dwelling on the present calamities, though I feel a little embarrassed about making investigations into shape and colour while so many people are suffering and dying for us.”
⁶⁰

Monet’s embarrassment was understandable. A year later, in November 1915, the English art critic Clive Bell would complain in an article entitled “Art and War”: “From every quarter comes the same cry—“This is no time for art!”
⁶¹
Indeed, many French painters had downed brushes and donned uniforms, leaders of the avant-garde among them. “Today almost all of our artists are at the front,” announced
Le Figaro
.
⁶²
That was true, at least, of the younger generation. Monet’s friend Charles Camoin, a thirty-five-year-old Fauve who lived nearby in Vernon, had been mobilized in August and immediately dispatched to the front, as had another sometime visitor to Monet’s house, the Cubist Fernand Léger. Likewise in uniform were the Fauves Maurice de Vlaminck and André Derain, and Georges Braque, the Cubist.

Many other French artists, especially the older generation, had already begun serving their country—or would soon be doing so—in a
different capacity: with their brushes and paints. At the Battle of the Marne in September 1914, a forty-three-year-old artist named Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola, a former student at the École des Beaux-Arts, was serving in the artillery when his unit—all dressed in their bull’s-eyered pantaloons—came under heavy enemy fire. “It was at this moment,” he later wrote, “that, vaguely at first, then more and more precisely, the idea of camouflage came to me. There had to be, I thought, a convenient way to disguise not only our unit but also the men who served in it.” Guirand de Scévola therefore began working on ways to make his fellow soldiers and their environment “less clearly visible” by means of experiments in “shape and color.”
⁶³

Guirand de Scévola’s ideas were quickly ratified by the Ministry of War. The first camouflage team would be established early in 1915, initially with thirty artists but ultimately drawing on the services of three thousand
camoufleurs
, all wearing handsome uniforms adorned with their insignia designed by Guirand de Scévola himself: a golden chameleon on a red background. Included in their ranks was Braque, rescued from the trenches along with other Cubists such as Jacques Villon, Roger de La Fresnaye, and André Mare. The Cubists had been reviled in the prewar years as unpatriotic and anti-French, but Guirand de Scévola claimed their style was absolutely vital to his enterprise: “To completely deform the object, I employed the methods of the Cubists, which allowed me to hire a number of talented painters who, because of their very special vision, could disguise any object whatsoever.”
⁶⁴

As Guirand de Scévola’s team was about to start its work of concealing French soldiers by replacing their proud kepis with paint-spattered
cagoules
(hoods), yet another team of artists was also doing war service by the end of 1914. In September, following the Victory of the Marne, the painters Pierre Carrier-Belleuse and Auguste-François Gorguet, assisted by a team of twenty “elite artists”, began work on a gigantic painting called the
Panthéon de la Guerre
in Carrier-Belleuse’s studio in the boulevard Berthier. This work was to be a panorama, the kind of pictorial entertainment invented at the end of the eighteenth century and wildly popular during the nineteenth: a 360-degree view of a cityscape or a
battle executed with painstakingly detailed realism on the inside of a large rotunda and viewed from a platform in the middle. Featuring battle scenes and hundreds of French war heroes, the
Panthéon de la Guerre
was to have, the press reported, a circumference of 115 meters.
⁶⁵

THERE WAS ONE
more way in which French artists could serve their country: as shining beacons of the glories of French culture and civilization. The French newspapers had few doubts about what was at stake in 1914. The conflict was, they declared,
une guerre sainte
—a holy war. As
Le Matin
declared on August 4, France versus Germany amounted to a “holy war of civilization against barbarism.” Less than a week into the conflict, France’s most famous intellectual, the philosopher Henri Bergson, addressing its most august intellectual organization, the Institut de France, declared that the Germans in their “brutality and cynicism” had “regressed to the state of savagery.”
⁶⁶

Such claims seemed hideously confirmed when at the end of August the Germans slaughtered hundreds of Belgian civilians and burned the city of Louvain—the “intellectual metropolis of the Low Countries,” as
Le Matin
reminded its readers
⁶⁷
—and its ancient library of more than 250,000 medieval books and manuscripts. Then two weeks later the Germans turned their guns on the cathedral of Reims, whose medieval sculpture had been celebrated by Rodin as the greatest of all masterpieces of European art and by France’s foremost medieval scholar, Émile Mâle, as the height of human civilization. The Germans, wrote Mâle, “have turned their cannons on the beautiful statues that have spread peace about them, that speak only of charity, of gentleness, of forgetfulness of the self...The entire world has been moved by this crime: everyone feels that a star had paled, and that beauty had been diminished on the earth.”
⁶⁸

Upholding French artistic and cultural values in the face of such barbarism was an important part of the war effort. “French art has to take revenge every bit as seriously as the French army!” declared Claude Debussy in September.
⁶⁹
This enterprise became even more urgent a few weeks later, in the middle of October, when the first German salvo
was fired on the cultural and literary front. On October 13,
Le Temps
carried a German manifesto (originally published in the
Berliner Tageblatt
) entitled “An Appeal to Civilized Nations.” It had been composed and signed by a group of ninety-three German scientists, scholars, and intellectuals, including the biologist Paul Ehrlich, the physicist Max Planck, and Wilhelm Röntgen, the discoverer of X-rays. Their manifesto protested “the lies and calumnies” used to smear “the good and just cause of Germany in the terrible struggle that has been imposed upon us.” What followed were a series of self-serving excuses and outright lies: that the French and English, not the Germans, had violated the neutrality of Belgium, that no French or Belgian works of art or architecture had been damaged, and that no Belgian citizen had been harmed by a German soldier except through the “hard necessity of self-defense.” As for the French and British claim to represent European civilization: “Those who ally themselves with the Russians and Serbs, who are not afraid to excite the Mongols and Negroes against the white race, offering the civilized world the most shameful spectacle imaginable, certainly have no right to uphold themselves as the defenders of European civilization.”

Such assertions were all the more shocking for having been composed and endorsed by intellectual titans—many revered by their French counterparts—supposedly dedicated to scrupulously truthful scholarly inquiry. What truly affronted many French intellectuals, however, was the invocation of German cultural luminaries at the end of the piece: “Believe that in this struggle we shall go on to the end as civilized people, as people in whom the inheritance of a Goethe, a Beethoven and a Kant is as sacred as our soil and our home.”

The French began preparing their own responses, with risible efforts being made to prove that Beethoven was not German after all but, rather, Belgian.
⁷⁰
The composer Camille Saint-Saëns had waded into the fray in the first weeks of the war. In an article for a daily newspaper,
L’Écho de Paris
, he acknowledged that it would be futile to deny the accomplishments of German artists and scholars (“That would be to imitate the Germans who say the French are a race of monkeys”). But he lamented the “absurd Germanophilia” that had corrupted public taste
by, for example, foisting Wagner on French audiences. “Goethe and Schiller,” he went on, “are great poets, but how overrated!” He ended with a nationalistic flourish: “It’s sometimes said that art has no country. This is absolutely false. Art is directly inspired by the character of a people. In any case, if art has no country, artists do have one.”
⁷¹

The nation’s artists and intellectuals responded with a publication of their own, one whose one hundred signatories combined France’s intellectual and cultural might: the writers Octave Mirbeau, Anatole France, and André Gide, the composers Saint-Saëns and Debussy, and of course both Georges Clemenceau and Claude Monet. As the most famous painter in France—if not indeed the world—and as a sensitive and celebrated interpreter of French cathedrals, the very monuments being desecrated by German guns, Monet was essential to this cultural offensive. He had therefore quickly been recruited to lend his name and efforts. He responded to the publisher’s overtures by saying that ordinarily he was not one for committees (which was true enough), but “things are not the same nowadays, and if you think that my name can be of some help in the work you’re doing, feel free to make use of it.”
⁷²

The response to which he readily added his name took the form of a book called
Les Allemands: destructeurs des cathédrales et de trésors du passé
(
The Germans: Destroyers of Cathedrals and the Treasures of the Past
). Addressed to foreign writers and artists, as well as “all lovers of beauty,” it billed itself as a “memoir” of the bombardment of Reims, Arras, Louvain, and other cities. The volume was accompanied by photographs and other evidence for what Anatole France, writing in the appendix, called the “brutal and senseless destruction of monuments consecrated by both art and time.”
⁷³

This would not be the last time Monet was called upon to lend his name and talents to the French war effort. In the meantime he could resume his investigations into color and form comfortable in the knowledge that by doing so he was, in a very important way, serving his country.

CHAPTER SIX

A GRANDE DÉCORATION

BY DECEMBER 1914,
as Monet resumed work at his easel, Paris, too, resumed its more usual activities. The government returned from Bordeaux on the tenth. The Moulin Rouge reopened for matinees and evening spectaculars, while the Comédie-Française and the Opéra-Comique both staged plays and operas, topped off with stirring renditions of the “Marseillaise.” Signs of the war were everywhere, it is true: the rehabilitation hospital for wounded soldiers in the Grand Palais; the ugly yellowish panes replacing the stained glass in the windows of Notre-Dame; the shaded lamps and darkened streets that caused visitors to rechristen the City of Light a “city of shadows.”
¹
But a cautious optimism was taking hold. “Toward the Final Success,” declared
Le Matin
after printing official communiqués reporting the supposedly dismal failure of German assaults in Picardy and the Forest of Argonne.
²
“The year 1915 will bring us victory and peace,” a French general, Pierre Cherfils, confidently announced.
³

Georges Clemenceau was not quite so optimistic. “The war will last a good six months,” he wrote to Monet from Bordeaux in the first week of December, “unless,” he added grimly, “it takes three years.”
⁴
A few days later, along with the politicians and diplomats, he was back in Paris, and within a day of his arrival he made his way to Giverny. The poor weather conditions, foul and gloomy with intervals of showers,
⁵
meant an inspection of Monet’s garden—which was in any case bedded down for the winter and lacking the tender ministrations of the gardeners now at the front—would have been limited. However, the same gastronomical pleasures were to be enjoyed. Food was not yet in short supply in France for those who had money (although the French papers would soon be gleefully reporting on how the Germans were rioting over potatoes
and choking down
les saucisses de chien
—dog-meat sausages—and bread made from straw).
⁶
Monet must have shown Clemenceau the new paintings, but by now the Tiger possessed other, more urgent priorities than encouraging the efforts of his friend. He was, instead, bucking up the entire nation, penning long rallying cries in his newspaper. Each day a thundering new editorial of more than two thousand words appeared on its front page. In one of them he praised the “superhuman energy” of the French soldiers but made a chilling appeal: “Today France cries that in order to survive she needs her children to give their lives.”
⁷