Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (45 page)

Jules-Eugène Lenepveu,
Hylas Lured by the Nymphs
(1865)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE FATAL PROTUBERANCE

“YOUR STEELY GAZE
breaks through the husk of appearances,” Clemenceau once told Monet, “and you penetrate the deep substances.”
¹
He sincerely believed that Monet with his preternaturally good vision marked an important moment in human evolution. Others were of a similar mind, with the poet Jules Laforgue declaring in 1883 that the Impressionists enjoyed the benefit of “the most advanced eye in human evolution.”
²

Opponents of Impressionism allowed that painters such as Monet did indeed possess an eye different from that of a normal person: they had the defective vision of madmen and hysterics. In 1892 a German writer named Max Nordau had published a work called
Degeneration
in which he pointed to “the craziest fashions in art and literature” in France as evidence that the nation had become hopelessly degenerate.
³
The style of the Impressionists (or “stipplers,” as he called them) could be understood, he claimed, in light of research into the visual derangements of lunatics and hysterics, whose optic nerves were weak or disordered, and whose eyeballs trembled. “The painters who assure us that they are sincere, and reproduce nature as they see it, speak the truth,” he declared. “The degenerate artist who suffers from
nystagmus
, or trembling of the eyeball, will, in fact, perceive the phenomena of nature trembling, restless, devoid of firm outline.”
⁴
J.-K. Huysmans used this same research (conducted on hysterics by the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris) as proof that the Impressionists suffered from degenerating optic nerves and a “malady of the retina.” Monet, he believed, provided ample evidence: he was “a man off his rocker, someone who rams his finger into his eye up to the elbow.”
⁵

Those looking to explain the supposed perversities of the Impression ists could point to their all-too-real real eye afflictions. Pissarro suffered numerous eye infections that badly disturbed his vision, while Edgar Degas had experienced sensitivity to light since the early 1870s, when he was in his late thirties. By his fifties, suffering from a blind spot in his field of vision, he could no longer read the newspaper, and by his seventies he found drawing difficult. His condition baffled the ophthalmologists, whose remedial measures included what Degas called his “lugubrious instrument”: a pair of spectacles with the right lens completed blacked out and the left occluded but for a small, oblique slit.
⁶
None of their correctives provided any improvement, and by the end of his life he was virtually blind.

Although periodically disturbed by cataracts since 1912, Monet’s eyesight had not caused him serious problems throughout his work on the Grande Décoration. However, ten years after his initial diagnosis, his vision began deteriorating. His stipulations for his donation, signed in April 1922, had raised the specter of his failing eyesight, and no sooner had the ink dried on the contract than his vision seemed to worsen, making work on his canvases difficult and even inadvisable. In May he confessed to Marc Elder that working on his panels in his present state of visual impairment had been a big mistake. “Right now I’m almost blind and so must stop all work,” he told him.
⁷
He had ruined several canvases, with the result that he felt compelled to destroy them, as in the old days. Visiting Giverny a short time later, Elder spotted canvases slashed by an “angry hand.” “The trace of the knife was visible, and the painting bled like a wound,” he wrote of one of the victims.
⁸
Monet had instructed the servants to burn other canvases—a jumble of shredded pinks, blues, and yellows heaped beneath a table. None of these works seems to have been among those destined for the Orangerie, but the dismemberments and conflagrations were an ominous development.

Working on the Grande Décoration under such circumstances must clearly have seemed imprudent. Yet Monet continued to paint through the summer. In July he wrote to Joseph Durand-Ruel that he was hoping “to paint everything before my sight goes altogether.”
⁹
Joseph was,
however, unimpressed with the results, finding Monet’s latest works “atrocious and violent.”
¹⁰

Much of Monet’s work in the summer of 1922 was indeed arresting. He recommenced the paintings of his Japanese bridge—the subject of a few blazing canvases from the anxious, tortured summer of 1918—along with some of the rose-festooned pathway leading to his house, a vista he had painted more than two decades earlier.
¹¹
These paintings are truly some of the most remarkable canvases he ever produced, but they would indeed have been difficult for Durand-Ruel to market. Monet dramatically and unrecognizably transformed the beautiful alley of roses into a giddy chaos of oranges, yellows, and purples, all added to the canvas in pyrotechnic swoops and squiggles. In one of the canvases, the alley of well-tended roses leading to his beloved house almost seems to become the maw of some satanic, ravening beast. These dazzling eruptions of color were due, no doubt in part, to his failing eyesight: he complained, that August, about how he saw everything in “a complete fog.”
¹²
But the arresting disintegration of solid form into pure color was the result, too, of a frantic intensity of vision that had less to do with his retinas and photoreceptors and everything to do with his determination to push the boundaries of painting. Some, it is true, were artistic failures, but others were magical, adventurous compositions of light and color that reveal the Old Man Mad About Painting to be, despite everything, still at the top of his game.

Unsympathetically surveying these latest works, Joseph Durand-Ruel believed that Monet’s “great success with the Japanese [had] gone to his head.”
¹³
The Japanese in question was Kojiro Matsukata, who was still busily stocking up on Monet canvases. By 1922 he owned twenty-five of his paintings, and in May a Paris newspaper reported that the great industrialist had handed Monet a check for 800,000 francs and asked him to select a work for him.
¹⁴
If the report was true, this handpicked painting not only exceeded the price of the entire auction of the twenty-five Monets sold from James F. Sutton’s collection in New York in 1917, but it also became the most expensive work of art by a living artist ever purchased, almost doubling the previous record of 478,500
francs for Degas’s
Dancers at the Barre
, bought by Louisine Havemeyer in 1912. Monet could certainly drive a hard bargain, as indicated by the 200,000 francs he pocketed for
Women in the Garden
. Moreover, having contracted to give to the state the fruits of almost ten years of unrelenting labor, he was no doubt determined to recompense himself from other sources.

The identity of this 800,000-franc painting is unclear, although it was almost certainly—like the work purchased by Matsukata in Giverny in 1921—part of the Grande Décoration. The most likely candidate was
Water Lilies
, one of the
grandes études
, painted in 1916: a six-and-a-half-foot square canvas purchased by Matsukata in 1922 and now in the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo. As Tucker has pointed out, this painting was unparalleled among Monet’s surviving studies, virtually unique in its level of finish, with a brilliance of color, touch, and composition that made it stand out from among the other
grandes études
. It was no doubt dear to Monet’s heart, and it was a canvas, he must have known, that would worthily represent him among the masterpieces in the Art Pavilion of Pure Pleasure.
¹⁵

BY SEPTEMBER 1922,
Monet’s eyesight was bad enough that he overcame his strong aversion to Paris, and his even stronger aversion to doctors, to consult an ophthalmologist. His doctor was Charles Coutela, an eminent ophthalmologist and friend of Clemenceau’s whose office was found in the rue La Boétie. The forty-six-year-old Dr. Coutela confirmed the drastic worsening of Monet’s vision: he was legally blind in his right eye—always the worse of the two—and enjoyed only 10 percent vision in his left. As Monet informed Clemenceau a day later: “Result: one eye completely gone, with an operation necessary and even unavoidable in the near future. Meanwhile, a course of treatment might improve the other eye and permit me to paint.”
¹⁶

Coutela hoped to operate on Monet’s right eye, but he found his patient timid and reluctant. He therefore prescribed mydriatic eyedrops for the left eye in order to dilate the pupil. The results, at first, were encouraging. The following week Monet wrote a jubilant letter to Coutela, telling
him that the effect of the eyedrops was “simply wonderful,” that he could see better than he had in a long time and that he regretted not consulting him sooner. “That would have allowed me to do some good work rather than the awful smears I did when everything was a fog.”
¹⁷

Nothing short of an operation could, however, rejuvenate the vision in Monet’s right eye, which was becoming “even more warped.”
¹⁸
He soon became resigned to the inevitability of going under the knife, no doubt thanks to some gentle pressure exerted by Clemenceau. Plans were arranged for him to submit to what he called “the dreaded operation”
¹⁹
in early November, with a follow-up procedure scheduled for a few weeks later. However, on the eve of the first operation, feeling physically unwell, he suffered a failure of nerve, asking Clemenceau to cancel his appointment with Dr. Coutela. He claimed that he was in “too unfortunate a condition” to risk an operation, and that he was “too afraid of the result.”
²⁰

Having helped resolve the problem with the pavilion, Clemenceau was now asked to manage yet another crisis involving his friend. However, he would not be available to chastise and encourage. The day after he received Monet’s letter, he boarded an ocean liner in Le Havre, bound for the United States. As the
New York Times
reported, Clemenceau was “ready again to take up political life...in a fashion which is altogether new.”
²¹

BY 1922, CLEMENCEAU
had become increasingly discouraged by international politics. In particular, he was troubled by the American withdrawal from Europe, by the various conferences that weakened the Treaty of Versailles, and by the fact that the Germans had failed to pay any reparations to France, while the Americans were insisting on full repayment of monies loaned to the Allies. Unless the Germans were forced to fulfill their obligations under the Treaty of Versailles, and unless the measures to protect France against German aggression were taken, “everything,” he portentously declared, “would begin all over again.”
²²

Clemenceau quickly became embroiled in an international controversy. The catalyst was an interview with Rudyard Kipling published on
September 10 in the
New York World
. Some months earlier, Kipling had hosted the English sculptor Clare Sheridan, Winston Churchill’s cousin, at his home in Sussex. Since she did not reveal that she was working for a newspaper (she arrived for tea in the company of her children), Kipling was duped into voicing intemperate anti-American opinions. He supposedly claimed that the war had not been fought to a finish, that the Americans had entered the war “two years, seven months, and four days too late,” and that they had quit on the day of the armistice, forcing the Allies into making peace at the first opportunity rather than marching on Berlin.

Kipling denied having made any such statements, but the topic of America’s role and responsibility was suddenly open for debate.
²³
Many in France shared Kipling’s opinion, if not necessarily about America’s evasion of responsibility, then at least regarding the necessity of pressing the Germans to pay reparations. Indeed, on the same day that Kipling’s interview appeared, Raymond Poincaré was in the ancient cathedral city of Meaux to observe the anniversary of the Battle of the Marne. He gave an impassioned speech about the need to hold Germany to account: “It is...necessary to make it clear, before all, that we mean to recover our credits on Germany. If we are reproached with insisting on our rights, we repeat that we cannot renounce our claims without ruining France, and the ruin of France will be for Europe the most terrible of catastrophes.”
²⁴