Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (18 page)

*
  The only exception—albeit in the United States rather than France—was Mary Cassatt’s
Modern Woman
triptych created for the Women’s Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A GRAND ATELIER

ON THE MORNING
of June 17, 1915, a Tuesday, two automobiles arrived at the station in Mantes-la-Jolie to collect a small party of passengers disembarking from the eight thirteen train from Paris. The vehicles then wound their way through the country lanes to where Monet was hosting at his house what was, in effect, a road trip for the Académie Goncourt. “I’m counting on you,” he had written to Gustave Geffroy three days earlier, “to remind Descaves, Rosny, in fact everyone.”
¹

Not all ten members could make the expedition, but at least five of Les Dix clambered into the automobiles to be conducted the fifteen miles to Giverny. Besides Geffroy and Mirbeau, the group included Lucien Descaves, Léon Hennique, and J.-H. Rosny the Elder. Also present was Mirbeau’s wife Alice, a former actress and a novelist in her own right. It was to this cast of distinguished writers and friends that Monet was about to offer an early viewing of his Grande Décoration.

This audience was an appropriate one. Les Dix were a band of literary rebels committed to shaking up French literature and society in much the same way that, years earlier, the Impressionists had challenged France’s conservative artistic tastes and institutions. They had come together as an alternative to the Académie Française, whose forty members (known as Les Immortels) had long been the arbiters of French literary taste in the same way that the Académie des Beaux-Arts—the bête noire of the Impressionists—had been the arbiters of French artistic taste. If Les Immortels were the guardians of tradition, Les Dix were determined to promote (according to the instructions in the will of Edmond de Goncourt) freshness, originality, and “new and venturesome leanings in thought and form.”
²
These leanings were exemplified in the work of the Belgian-born Rosny, who once confessed to Edmond de
Goncourt that he was writing “a little bit in opposition to the currents of contemporary literature.”
³
This was something of an understatement in light of his novels about aliens, mutants, vampires, parallel universes, life five hundred years in the future and, in his 1909 novel
La Guerre du Feu
, thousands of years in the past. “I read all of his books,” Monet later reported, “which are admirable and full of substance.”
⁴

On that warm day in June, these writers were treated to the delights of Monet’s table, followed by those of his garden; afterward they were conducted into the studio, which was accessed through a staircase in the garage where he kept, besides his automobiles, an aviary where parrots squawked and turtles “wandered around among the leaves of lettuce.”
⁵
As Descaves later recollected: “A surprise lay in store for us.” The walls of the spacious, high-ceilinged studio, which doubled as a showroom, were covered with paintings from throughout the course of Monet’s long career. It was, however, the newest canvases—his impressions of the water lily pond—that naturally attracted their attention, in particular their size. “He set out these impressions,” reported Descaves, “on huge canvases some two metres high and between three and five metres wide.”
⁶
These paintings were therefore at least double the size of those in the 1909
Paysages d’Eau
exhibition, with some of them (if Descaves’s memory served) as much as fifteen feet wide. Monet’s friends were suitably impressed, especially when they learned that more canvases were planned. Mirbeau asked Monet how much longer his ambitious new project would take. Another five years, Monet informed him. But Mirbeau, witnessing Monet’s commitment and intensity, protested: “You exaggerate. Let’s say two more years.”
⁷

From this estimate, Monet’s friends could have been left in little doubt regarding the scale of his ambitions. Monet, they knew, was capable of covering a lot of canvas in a two- or three-year period. He was a painting machine who, when working at his customary pace, produced canvases at a terrific rate. A two-month stay in Venice in 1908 resulted in thirty-five paintings, or one canvas every two days, most of them two and a half by three feet. Three separate stays in London between 1899 and 1901, during which time he spent some six months in total in
the city, saw him produce a total of ninety-five canvases: once again, a painting roughly every two days (although some of these London views were, controversially, completed in Giverny—as indeed were some of the Venice paintings). Mirbeau’s prediction indicates his expectation that the Grande Décoration would encompass as many as a hundred or more large canvases.

Monet in his first studio, ca. 1914, after its transformation into a sitting room. Rodin’s sculpture of Monet is to the left.

Monet’s guests must have wondered about the ultimate purpose and final destination, and indeed the practicality during wartime, of this series of huge canvases. How exactly he displayed the works for them is not recorded, but he may have arranged them about the studio in an oval or circle to offer a rough impression of the final effect. He no doubt explained his old dream, expressed as early as 1897, to decorate a circular room with paintings. Intriguingly, the wood-paneled Salon Goncourt in the restaurant Drouant was oval in shape. Monet must have been struck during his luncheons by the fact that here was exactly the sort of space he had been coveting: an elegant salon populated by (as
Raymond Poincaré once called Les Dix) “a small number of men entirely devoted to the cult of beautiful things.”
⁸
However, Monet’s ambitions had grown along with the size of his canvases, and the visitors in his studio would have been hard pressed to envisage the intimate space of the Salon Goncourt hosting more than the merest fragment of these rapidly expanding decorations.

What room, indeed, could have been large enough to encompass Monet’s Grande Décoration? For some of the guests, there may well have been a faint whiff of folly about the project: such a major undertaking in a time of war by a man on the cusp of his seventy-fifth birthday.

MONET REVEALED ANOTHER
plan to his friends on that June day. Lucien Descaves reported that Monet was “having a studio constructed specifically for this series.”
⁹
The need for more space no doubt struck Monet’s visitors. Virtually every inch of the studio’s walls was covered with canvases, while many others stood upright in ranks along the floor beneath. The studio already featured his two
grandes machines
from the mid-1860s,
Luncheon on the Grass
and
Women in the Garden
, both some eight feet high by seven feet wide. Now adding to the impressive square footage of Monet’s painting career were these new, even larger canvases.

A large new studio was therefore required. Monet received a construction permit on July 5, several weeks after the visit of his friends. Soon afterward construction began on what would be his third studio in Giverny, with a builder and quarry owner from Vernon, Maurice Lanctuit, taking charge of the project. This new structure was to stand on the northwestern edge of the property, at a right angle to the house, and on a piece of land that Monet had recently acquired from a neighbor. After demolishing a dilapidated outbuilding that stood on the site, Lanctuit began raising an enormous building that would ultimately cost Monet 50,000 francs.
¹⁰

In July 1915, the very month that ground for the new studio was broken, a French geologist expressed concerns about the scarcity of materials needed for rebuilding the country’s war-ravaged fortresses, roads, and railways.
¹¹
Lanctuit, however, seems to have experienced few if any
difficulties acquiring materials, with the limestone for the walls coming directly from his nearby quarry. Construction proceeded through the summer on the structure that, once completed, would occupy a space seventy-six feet long by thirty-nine feet wide. The rakingly pitched roof, fitted with skylights, rose to a height of forty-nine feet; as such, it towered over Monet’s house.

As the structure took shape over the course of the summer, Monet began to experience misgivings about its expense and—even more—its size and its frankly industrial-looking appearance. In August he confessed in a letter to Jean-Pierre Hoschedé, who by now was driving an ambulance at the front, that it had been unwise to involve himself in such a “gigantic” building project. “Yes, it’s folly, sheer folly, especially since it’s so expensive. Lanctuit built me such a monstrosity. I’m ashamed of it—I, who always shouted at those who try to uglify Giverny.”
¹²
Twenty years earlier he had campaigned vigorously against a plan by the town council to sell a piece of land to a chemical company proposing to build a starch factory. His campaign against uglification even saw him responding with fury to the appearance in Giverny of telegraph poles.
¹³
Yet he was raising in the heart of Giverny a studio the size of an aircraft hangar, to which it bore an unfortunate resemblance.

Monet had another reason to be embarrassed about this large studio. There was a fine irony in the fact that a man who made his reputation by setting up his easel in the open air should construct one of the grandest ateliers in the history of art. Monet was keen to foster the myth that he did not use a studio and that he was, as Geffroy dutifully wrote in support of the legend, “the first artist to start and finish a painting in front of his chosen subject, refusing to reconstruct or repaint his canvas based on studies done in the atmosphere of the workshop.”
¹⁴
When, in 1880, a journalist asked to see his studio in Vétheuil, Monet acted incredulous: “My studio? I have never had a studio...This is my studio!” he replied with an expansive gesture at the great outdoors.
¹⁵
In fact, at the time of the interview, Monet had both a studio in Vétheuil and a second in Paris in the rue de Vintimille, the rent for which was paid by his friend Gustave Caillebotte.

Eighteen years later, a journalist reported that Monet did not have a studio in Giverny because “the open-air painter works only out of doors.” He concluded emphatically: “Nature is his studio.”
¹⁶
These statements were likewise patently false. The paint was barely dry, at the time of this declaration, on the commodious two-story atelier that Monet, with input from the Art Nouveau architect Louis Bonnier, had constructed as a replacement for the converted barn he had previously used.

Working in the open air was still essential to Monet’s project, even though he was tackling some of the largest canvases of his career. Three days after receiving the permit for his new studio, on July 8, he was photographed beside the lily pond, hard at work on a canvas five feet two inches wide by five feet ten inches high. This painting is an example of what Jean-Pierre Hoschedé later called Monet’s
grandes études de nymphéas
—that is, large studies of water lilies.
¹⁷
Jean-Pierre claimed that Monet used these
grandes études
—most of which were some six feet across, and all of which were painted out of doors, beside the pond—as the basis for the even larger works that for logistical reasons he produced in the studio.

The photograph from that July day shows Monet sitting on a long-legged wooden chair beneath an enormous parasol, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat. Blanche, likewise straw-hatted and dressed in white, sticks faithfully to his side. She no doubt helped arrange his canvas, easel, and paints. Besides wrestling with his easels, she also appears to have assisted with the preparation of his canvases. Clemenceau later said: “She worked on his canvases. She prepared the grounds for him.”
¹⁸
Blanche firmly denied that she ever applied paint to his canvases: “It would have been a sacrilege.”
¹⁹
However, it would have made sense for Blanche to help Monet to slather gesso (a chalk-based primer) across the expansive surfaces of the canvases before lightly sanding them and adding another coat—repetitive and unskilled work on which it would have been imprudent or unnecessary for a septuagenarian to expend his limited fund of physical resources. But Blanche’s value to Monet extended far beyond her physical labors with his canvases. He had come to depend on her for solace and companionship, just as he had earlier depended on
her mother. She spent the first year of the war by his side, sitting with him in the library in the evenings or playing backgammon with him. She traveled with him wherever he went, she oversaw his finances, and she even shared his sometimes eccentric tastes in foods, such as a peppery salad oil that no one else would touch.
²⁰
To Clemenceau, she was an angel: the Blue Angel, as he always called her, or sometimes the Queen of Angels, the Azure Angel, or the Angel with Azure Wings.