Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (41 page)

All of this Japanese interest in Monet was welcome, fitting, and happily reciprocated. Like Clemenceau, Monet had been a devotee of Japanese art and culture for many decades, ever since the “magical day” (in the words of Mirbeau) when, visiting Holland in 1871, he went into a grocery store in Zaandam and afterward, opening his purchases,
discovered that the fat man behind the counter had wrapped his pepper and coffee in a Japanese woodblock print. Full of “infinite admiration,” he bought the rest of these exotic wrapping papers, which had come from the Far East in the hold of a ship carrying spices. Among them, supposedly, were works by Utamaro and Hokusai.
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This story may well be apocryphal, but there could be no doubting Monet’s genuine enthusiasm for Japanese art, in particular the work of Utamaro, Hokusai, and Hiroshige, the latter of whom he called a “Japanese Impressionist.”
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In 1909, Monet was quoted in an interview as saying: “If you absolutely insist on affiliating me to others, let it be to the old Japanese”
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—by which, presumably, he meant Hokusai and his contemporaries in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1921, around the time of the visits by Kuroji and Matsukata, Monet told another journalist: “I’m especially flattered that the Japanese understand me, since they are the masters who have felt and represented nature so profoundly.”
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This statement—like any artist’s statement about “nature”—is virtually meaningless. So what was it that Monet actually admired and sometimes, perhaps, emulated in Japanese art? He told another interlocutor, the duc de Trévise, that what Western artists valued in Japanese art was the “bold manner in which the subjects are outlined.”
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That may well have been so in the case of painters such as Van Gogh or Toulouse-Lautrec, but the fact is that one looks in vain for a bold outline in any of Monet’s paintings. Nor does one find the large areas of unmodulated colour that many Western painters took from Japanese art. The shock of recognition and feeling of infinite admiration in that Zaandam spice shop came, rather, from the fact that Hiroshige and his contemporaries depicted scenes of modern Japanese life in beautiful but modest surroundings: beside rivers, on bridges, in busy streets, during local festivals, and in teahouses or flowering lakeside gardens. These were, of course, exactly the sort of places that the Impressionists, with a French twist, had been busily depicting in their own work since the early 1860s. The Utamaro, Hokusai, and Hiroshige prints collected by Monet were known as
ukiyo-e
(Pictures of the Floating World). The “floating world”
was a Japanese-style bohemia of Kabuki theaters and licensed brothels populated by actors, prostitutes, and the emerging class of wealthy merchants: a milieu not entirely different from that of Paris of the belle époque.

Japanese prints therefore gave Monet and his friends permission to see beauty in the simple and analogous vistas in their own world: city streets, riversides, women’s fashions, sailboats, bridges, theaters, and opera houses. Pleasure and leisure, rather than myth and history, became the preferred subject matter of the Impressionists. Japanese depictions of gardens and the landscape were particularly important for Monet. Various prints from Hiroshige’s series
One Hundred Famous Views of Edo
, published in the 1850s, include weeping willows draped over lakes, irises sprouting by the water, and festoons of cherry blossoms by a Japanese bridge. Many of these subjects and the radical ways of composing them—strong diagonals, asymmetrical compositions, and unexpected angles of vision, such as slanting or downward-looking points of view—had become second nature to Monet.

Monet also took away something else: a Japanese practice that none of his fellow enthusiasts except for Cézanne applied to their work. Japanese artists often did multiple views of a single motif. Hokusai and Hiroshige, for example, each did a series called
Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji
showing vistas of the holy mountain from various angles and distances, in different weather, seasons, and times of the day, and with numerous different scenes occupying the foreground. The most famous of them, Hiroshige’s
The Great Wave off Kanagawa
, featured Mount Fuji in the distance with a giant wave rearing menacingly in the foreground. These series of landscapes, in which a single motif was picked out dozens of times under differing viewing conditions, may have influenced Monet’s approach in his wheat stack paintings and led him into his decades-long experiment with series painting. They also influenced Cézanne, who painted, not coincidentally, thirty-six views of Mont Sainte-Victoire.
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THERE WAS ONE
further Japanese influence on Monet. In 1904 a journalist observed that Monet’s garden with its peonies, irises, and little green bridge looked distinctively Japanese—a point, he noted, likewise made by Tadamasa Hayashi, the man from whose Paris gallery Monet bought many of his Japanese prints.
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In France, Monet was far from alone in creating a garden inspired by those of Japan. The exotic specimens of plants and flowers on display at the Japanese pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878 had caused a horticultural sensation matched only by that created eleven years later in 1889, when a Japanese garden designed by Wasuke Hata, featuring bonsai trees and miniature cypresses, was created at the Trocadéro. By that time the traveler and photographer Hugues Krafft had already designed a Japanese garden at Loges-en-Josas, near Versailles, where his twelve-hectare wooded park, complete with a pavilion constructed by carpenters specially imported from Japan, was christened Midori-no-sato (Hill of Fresh Greenery). Krafft hired Hata, after his Trocadéro triumph, to tend Midori-no-Sato. Hata also designed a much smaller space for the aristocratic dandy Robert de Montesquiou, a friend of Mirbeau, at his home in the rue Franklin. This same apartment came to be occupied, a few years later, by Clemenceau, who shared Montesquiou’s enthusiasm for all things Japanese.

Another of Wasuke Hata’s creations had been the garden for Edmond de Rothschild’s château at Boulogne-Billancourt, a few miles outside Paris. In the spring of 1913, Clemenceau took Monet to see this garden, which boasted a pagoda and a tearoom, in order to cheer him during his long depression following the death of Alice and the diagnosis of cataracts. Afterward, Edmond’s wife, Adelaide, wrote to Clemenceau: “We are delighted that Monsieur Claude Monet had a pleasant impression of his walk in Boulogne. If his magic palette could capture a corner of our Japanese garden, we would have great joy in seeing this reflection.”
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But the only garden whose reflection Monet was interested in capturing on canvas was his own. He once denied that he had attempted to create a Japanese garden at Giverny.
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That may sound at first like one of
his perverse misdirections. He had, after all, planted bamboo, Japanese apple and cherry trees, and Japanese tree peonies, some of which had been given to him by Japanese friends. The edge of his pond, meanwhile, was graced by a Japanese-style bridge straight out of a Hiroshige print. However, his garden included none of the features of a traditional Japanese garden: stepping-stones, waterfalls, bonsai trees, pagodas, Buddha statues, or areas of raked sand. Moreover, his bridge had been painted green, whereas the more authentic color (such as the bridge at Midori-no-sato) was crimson. Monet was inspired less by actual Japanese gardens, with which his acquaintance was slight, and more by the appealing motifs of ponds, bridges, and trailing willow branches that he had seen in his collection of Japanese prints. By a happy coincidence, five days before he purchased the parcel of land for his water garden in 1893, he had attended an exhibition of Utamaro and Hiroshige prints at the Galerie Durand-Ruel. On display were three hundred prints depicting bamboo forests, Japanese bridges, cherry blossoms, and weeping willows.
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KOJIRO MATSUKATA, ON
his visit to Giverny in 1921, found Claude Monet to be “a delightful gentleman.”
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His ambition to fill the Art Pavilion of Pure Pleasure with the finest specimens of modern painting meant his trip with Clemenceau—who introduced Matsukata to Monet as “one of your most ardent admirers”
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—had ended in a buying spree: some fifteen paintings. He was treated to lunch, naturally, and was then given a tour of the studio. Clemenceau told Monet: “Show him your best work and give him, as my friend, a good price.” But Matsukata made it clear that he did not expect any special favors: “Go ahead and ask high prices,” he instructed Monet, “because I’m used to treating my friends well and I would blush to make a profit from a friendship.” Monet then showed some of his finest canvases to Matsukata, who “made his choice and handed the artist a check for a million francs.”
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This vast sum, stated in
L’Homme Libre
, was also reported in another reliable source,
Le Bulletin de la vie artistique
, a publication of the Bernheim-Jeune brothers.
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Matsukata’s purchases included wheat stacks, poplars, snowscapes, views of London, and the cliffs of
Belle-Île—a fairly comprehensive range of Monet’s periods and series.
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If the figure of a million francs is correct, Matsukata was paying almost 70,000 francs for each canvas. When he went to New York in early 1922 to buy a selection of American paintings, the
New York Herald
reported with awe at how this “mysterious Japanese” was paying “extravagant prices” for all kinds of works of art.
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One of Brangwyn’s assistants suspected that Matsukata was being unduly exploited by avaricious dealers,
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and, to be sure, if the reports of a million francs can be credited, he had certainly paid beyond the market price for Monet’s paintings.

Matsukata, on his visit to Giverny, seems to have fixed his eye on another prize. In the middle of June, Monet wrote to Arsène Alexandre: “I have received a serious offer on a particular part of the decorations.”
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Having seen the Grande Décoration in Monet’s studio, Matsukata expressed an interest in acquiring at least some of these large decorative panels. Monet had already rejected similar offers from Zoubaloff and Ryerson, but by the summer of 1921, frustrated with the difficult logistics of his donation to the state, he was willing to entertain Matsukata’s overtures. As the door of the Orangerie closed, that of the Art Pavilion of Pure Pleasure creaked invitingly open.

Matsukata was therefore able to purchase part of the Grande Décoration, one of Monet’s 4.25-meter-wide canvases,
The Water Lily Pond, Willow Reflections
. Matsukata proudly told a journalist that one of the canvases he had purchased in Giverny was “fourteen feet in length... It is a scene of his garden. What did it cost? I don’t remember.”
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If the story about the check for a million francs is correct,
The Water Lily Pond
was presumably, along with the canvases of poplars, cliffs, wheat stacks, and London, part of this remarkable purchase. No price, it seemed, was beyond the abilities of Matsukata’s checkbook. But he had also done something even more remarkable than spend a million francs on paintings: he had pried loose from Monet’s studio part of the Grande Décoration.

BY JUNE 1921,
Paul Léon had still not responded to Monet’s letter announcing the retraction of his gift to the nation. His bluff called, Monet reopened negotiations through the art critic Arsène Alexandre,
who had recently served as inspector general of France’s museums and who was in the midst of composing Monet’s biography. Monet confessed to Alexandre that not being able to keep his promise to the state had been a “great pain” and that the purchase of
Women in the Garden
—for which he received a check for 200,000 francs—had put him in a position of acute embarrassment. How could he refuse to deliver his paintings after banking the check from the government?

He therefore told Alexandre: “If the Ministry of Fine Arts can broaden by three or four meters that part of the Orangerie reserved for my paintings, I am still committed to donating them, and moreover, donating enough for two rooms. I think I cannot say better than that. If this is possible, I should be very happy.”
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But the offer was met with further silence from Léon. Monet fretted anxiously for two weeks before writing again to Alexandre: “Have you communicated my last letter to Paul Léon? Has he said if the enlargement of the Orangerie will be possible?”
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Still no answer came. Monet therefore—perhaps unexpectedly for all concerned—put the difficulties from his mind and calmly went back to work in his garden. In the spring he had been experiencing more troubles with his eyesight: “My poor sight,” he wrote in May. “I feel it diminish each day, almost by the hour.”
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But either his eyesight or, more likely, his mood had improved by the end of June, perhaps due to the lucrative attentions of Matsukata, and he spent the next few months “working flat out with great enthusiasm.”
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So content was he with his work that as autumn approached he began contemplating a trip to the seaside—not to his beloved Normandy coast, but to the far-off Vendée in order to visit Clemenceau. The Tiger was surprised but delighted that Monet had finally taken him up on his offer. “What? Claude Monet enters circulation like an ancient coin from Merovingian times that has come out of hiding to impress our counterfeit banknotes. Hallelujah in the highest!”
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