Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (50 page)

Enough, finally, was enough. Clemenceau was done with cajoling. He angrily pointed out what was at stake: “At your request, a contract was drawn up between you and France in which the State has fulfilled its commitments. You asked for the postponement of yours and, with my intervention, you obtained one. I acted in good faith, and I don’t want you to take me for a lackey who performed a disservice to art and to France by bowing to the whims of his friend. Not only did you oblige the State to make significant expenditures, but you have required and granted your approval for the site. You must therefore bring things to a conclusion, for the sake of both art and honour.”
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But Monet was forsaking both art and honor. Late in 1924, or perhaps in the first days of 1925, he wrote to Paul Léon, without first informing Clemenceau, that he was canceling his donation.
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*

MONET HAD CLEARLY
reached a point of crisis surpassing the one precipitated by the terrible struggle with his waterscape paintings almost two decades earlier. Back then, he had been infuriated by the difficulties of painting vegetation such as water lilies, shadows, and reflections on the surface of the water, as well as the bleary fathoms, all unified by the fugitive effects of light glimpsed at particular hours of the day. He was dissolving the visible and materializing the invisible, and placing his vision of this “luminous abyss” before the spectator without perspective or frame, in what Gillet called “upside-down paintings.” Now, with the Grande Décoration, he was attempting all of these same feats, but on a much more ambitious scale. The size and logistics of the donation had been complicated by its dramatic enlargement from a pair of panels to nineteen, by the change of venue, and by the modification of the single room to a pair. His paintings needed to be site-specific and mindful of spatial dynamics and viewing angles—a complex yet coherent program of a sort that he had never before attempted. And he had set himself this difficult task at a time of life, what was more, when his normally robust health was faltering and his eyesight failing.

By his eighty-fourth birthday, Monet appeared to believe that he had failed at his prodigious endeavor, and that he was no longer capable of painting anything worthwhile. However, no one who saw his panels during those dark years of anguish and doubt could agree with him. Clemenceau, of course, believed he was still painting masterpieces, singling out as evidence the massive composition called
The Clouds
. This composition—a triptych that would ultimately stretch to a width of 12.75 meters (41 feet 10 inches)—must have been largely completed by 1920 because it had featured in Monet’s plans for the pavilion at the Hôtel Biron. However, he must have extensively reworked the canvases over the next few years, even as his sight failed, because in the spring of 1924 Clemenceau spoke of “the panel of the cloud” as one of Monet’s new creations.

Monet disagreed with Clemenceau’s assessment, but the Tiger was far from alone in his opinion. Various other visitors to Giverny in
1924 were astounded by his work, including the recent efforts done while he was in the throes of despair and semi-blindness. The painter Maurice Denis, who came to Giverny in February, wrote in his journal: “Astonishing series of large water-lilies. This little man of eighty-four pulling on the wires of his window blinds, shifting his easels...And he can only see through one eye with a lens, the other is closed up. Yet his tones are more exact and more true than ever.”
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The artist and illustrator Henri Saulnier-Ciolkowski saw the paintings in 1922 and then again in October 1924, the very moment when Monet was hopelessly floundering in his slough of despond and starting to light bonfires. He wrote in amazement: “Far from having spoiled them, the old master... has developed them further.”
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Indeed, successive photographs reveal that in these worst years of visual disturbance Monet somehow managed not only to harmonize his colors but also to create ever more subtle effects of shadow and light. The Monet scholar Virginia Spate notes that in one of the works destined for the Orangerie,
Clear Morning with Willows
, largely repainted following cataract surgery, he “created luminous sparkling shadows across the base of the three panels, aerated the water, softened and diminished the far-off lily islands so that they suggest infinite distance...and added delicate accents of clear color so that the whole painting seems to vibrate with light.”
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The three large canvases making up the
Agapanthus
composition were likewise extensively reworked (even though they had been dropped from the Orangerie scheme): forms became more abstract, depth and detail disappeared, and the colors—blues, lavenders, yellows, and pinks—became ever more subtle and nuanced.
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Evidence that Monet was painting and repainting his canvases comes from the fact that in places he applied no fewer than fifteen layers of paint.
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Monet’s evident aplomb with his paintbrush despite his dimming eyes and faltering body raises the question—which was, as it happens, about to be raised by a German professor named Albert Brinckmann—of what happens to a great artist as he gets old and infirm but continues to paint. In a slim volume called
Spätwerke großer Meister
(
Late Works by
Great Masters
), published in 1925, Brinckmann would argue that certain artists achieved powerful and distinctive styles as they grew old, creating works markedly different from, and arguably more adventurous than, those of their youth or middle age. Donatello, Michelangelo, Titian, Poussin, Rubens, and Rembrandt—all developed in the last years of their lives, according to another German professor, “a sublime style” that displayed “a deepening and broadening in form and idea” that compensated for “the natural uncertainty of vision caused by the decay of bodily forces.”
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Characteristics of this sublime style included an increasing abstraction and an exuberantly expressive handling of paint, combined, however, with what an English critic, Kenneth Clark, has called an “astonishing vitality of touch.”
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These innovating visions—often scenes of turmoil and even torture—were not always appreciated during the artists’ lifetimes: J. M. W. Turner’s late works were described by a critic as the “outbreaks of a madman,”
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while Rembrandt’s enormous
Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis
, painted for the town hall in Amsterdam, was regarded as far too uncouth and disturbing to hang in such an august setting: it was promptly returned to the artist.

Over the previous decade, Monet’s paintings were undoubtedly affected by his deteriorating vision as well as by his fierce rage and gathering gloom. Larger, bolder, more experimental, visionary, and abstract, these canvases were manifestly different from the work of his youth and middle age, which had already been revolutionary. Arguably, only Michelangelo and Titian ever achieved as much, or developed as forcefully, as they worked in their ninth decades.

Where did this renewed artistic power come from? The last poem of Edmund Waller, composed in 1686, when he was over eighty and nearly blind, contains a couplet about wisdom and vision in old age: “The soul’s dark cottage, batter’d and decay’d, / Lets-in new light, thro’ chinks that time hath made.” As the body falls apart, in other words, an eternal light pours through. It is difficult to separate discussions of an artist’s “late work” from romantic associations of blind seers offering up unutterable visions from beyond the threshold, or of old men raging against the dying of the light. But it is undeniable that as his eye filmed
over and his vision slowly dimmed, Monet, “who caught and sang the sun in flight,” focused ever more intently on the fleeting rays of light that he had always chased and cherished.

AS CLEMENCEAU RECOGNIZED,
Monet was plagued by a moral crisis that went beyond the problems with his eyesight. His vision cannot have been so bad that he did not appreciate the quality of his new work. On some level he must have recognized that, as Clemenceau put it, “all your masterpieces were created in the midst of your complaints about them” and that the wild lamentations were necessary to his creative process.
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His steady stream of visitors in 1924 indicates that he was certainly not shy about showing the Grande Décoration to all and sundry. Indeed, this hospitality belied his claims that he had ruined his work. Important critics like Gillet, artists such as Barbier, Denis, and Saulnier-Ciolkowski—all were freely admitted into the grand atelier to see what the master had been creating, and all were duly and sincerely impressed with the results. At the beginning of June, on the very day he informed Paul Léon in no uncertain terms that it would be impossible to ship the panels to the Orangerie, he had enthusiastically welcomed into his studio the painter Paul César Helleu and the Comtesse de Béarn. The countess was yet another example of the exotic and glamorous women who beat a path to Giverny: a fifty-five-year-old named Martine Marie-Pol de Béhague, scion of an aristocratic family and ex-wife of the Comte de Béarn. A traveler and collector, she owned paintings by Watteau, Fragonard, and Titian. She had placed the poet Paul Valéry in charge of her library, and in her home in rue Saint-Dominique she hosted concerts and salons, entertaining her guests while wearing a green wig and sprawled on a sofa covered in animal skins. Monet’s doubts and fears about the quality of his work cannot have been too vivid if he was willing to invite this erudite and cultured visitor into his studio.

A large part of Monet’s crisis was that he simply did not wish to relinquish his canvases while he still drew breath. Indeed, he had told Thiébault-Sisson as early as 1920 that he wished to keep these works in
his studio “to the end.” For the past ten years the Grande Décoration had given him a purpose in life. It had carried him through the bleak years following Alice’s death, through the terrible years of the war, and through the endless difficulties with his eyesight. Without his “vast circle of dreams” awaiting his obsessive attentions, he would no longer have any function or motivation. Tellingly, the lower right-hand corner of one of the huge canvases on which he had worked for at least two years, the twenty-foot-wide panel
The Setting Sun
, remained untouched by his brush: a bare triangle of blank canvas that he could have filled in a few minutes of work but evidently chose not to. Like Scheherazade’s stories or Penelope’s everlasting shroud, the Grande Décoration was something that must never reach its end.

EVEN SO, MONET’S
decision to cancel his donation had been a drastic step. At first he gave no hints to Clemenceau of this dramatic resolution, and in the last months of 1924 their letters were lighthearted and affectionate, with Clemenceau ribbing Monet as a “frightful old hedgehog” and Monet sending dahlias and willow herb for the garden at Belébat.
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The week before Christmas, Monet informed Clemenceau that his sight had improved thanks to his latest pairs of spectacles, which had been prescribed by Dr. Mawas and once again dispensed by Meyrowitz. These were not yet the special Katral lenses for which he had been waiting almost six months, but in early December he reported to both Mawas and Barbier that, thanks to these new, untinted lenses, he saw colors “much better” and therefore worked with more certainty.
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Clemenceau was much heartened. “I received your letter, which warmed my heart...I’d like to give a few kicks to the stars.”
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His heart was not warmed by Monet’s next letter, which arrived a few weeks later and undoubtedly made him wish to aim his kicks elsewhere. Early in the New Year, Monet belatedly related to Clemenceau what he had told Paul Léon: that he was retracting his donation. The letter has not survived, and it is easy to imagine the Tiger angrily tearing it to shreds. Predictably, he was furious. He wrote first to Blanche, telling her that he had received the “abominable letter” and that Monet would
receive his answer by the same post. “If he does not alter his decision,” he told her, “I shall never see him again.”
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Monet was one of the few people in France in whom Clemenceau did not inspire a perpetual terror, but even he must have quailed before the anger and disappointment in the Tiger’s reply. Addressing his “unhappy friend,” Clemenceau made plain that he felt deeply insulted and disrespected by Monet’s “foolish whim,” but that by cynically going back on his word Monet had damaged himself more than anyone else. “No one, no matter how old or feeble, whether an artist or not, has a right to go back on his word—above all, when he gave his word to France.” He then revisited familiar territory, emphasizing the “grandeur and beauty” of the Grande Décoration (“Everyone who has seen the panels declares them incomparable masterpieces”) and how Monet’s troubles were stubbornly self-inflicted because, “like a bad child,” he refused to have an operation on his left eye. He concluded with the same harsh but heavyhearted ultimatum he had delivered to Blanche: “If I love you, it’s because I gave myself to the person I believed you to be. If you are no longer this person, I shall continue to admire your paintings, but we will no longer be friends.”
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CHAPTER TWENTY

“SEND YOUR SLIPPER TO THE STARS”