Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (26 page)

Monet managed to get by in what he called “these times of austerity” with a little help from his friends, such as the Bernheim-Jeunes, who sent him a “superb package” of treats in the middle of May.
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He also managed to produce a lunch for none other than Henri Matisse, whose invitation to Giverny—extended one day after Clémentel and Dalimier visited—clearly indicated how the Reims commission had enhanced his mood. “If Matisse and Marquet want to set a day next week to come and eat,” he wrote to the Bernheim-Jeunes, “it will be my great pleasure.”
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Albert Marquet was an old friend of Matisse, a forty-two-year-old Fauve who, like Matisse, had cut his artistic teeth on Monet’s works. He had also painted many canvases of Notre-Dame in Paris, and several of his works had been on display on the walls of Mirbeau’s home in Cheverchemont.

Matisse and Marquet came to Giverny on May 10. After shunting along the tracks for nearly three hours on a stopping train—“There is
no other choice,” Monet ruefully informed them—they arrived at the station in Mantes-la-Jolie, where an automobile was waiting to collect them.
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Unlike the visitors who, if the weather was fine, found themselves rushed to the door as soon as the lunch plates were cleared from the table, enabling the master to get back to work, the two painters enjoyed an entire afternoon chez Monet. The automobile delivered them back to Mantes-la-Jolie on time for the six
P.M.
train. By that time the heavens had opened—contrary weather, to be sure, for the backdrop to this springtime idyll of France’s two great painters of sun-drenched landscapes.
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No record has been left of their conversation. However, Matisse’s memories of his afternoon in Monet’s garden linger in a work he painted only a few weeks later,
The Music Lesson
. The painting shows Matisse’s family gathered in the living room of their home in Issy-les-Moulineaux. His daughter Marguerite instructs one son, Pierre, at the keyboard while another—seventeen-year-old Jean, soon to be drafted into the army—reads a book, cigarette in mouth, forelock adroop, adolescent moustache proudly in evidence. Through the open window, in the background, beyond where Matisse’s wife sits obliviously sewing on the balcony, we see the profuse greenery of a garden, complete with pond and statue. The rich and savage vegetation—not to mention the nude statue of a voluptuously reclining woman—provide a dramatic contrast to the calm interior domestic space. In the center of the garden, gathered like a bouquet, are a half-dozen heart- and teardrop-shaped leaves that look unmistakably like the pads of water lilies.
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CHAPTER TEN

THE SMILE OF REIMS

THE HEAVY GERMAN
bombardment of Reims continued throughout the summer of 1917. Indeed,
REIMS BOMBARDED
was an almost daily newspaper headline in the months after Monet received his commission to paint the cathedral. The papers kept a faithful grisly toll of the German onslaught—remorseless barrages of more than a thousand shells a day. An official communiqué on July 13 reported that “the Germans violently bombarded Reims. Sixteen hundred shells fell on the city.” A few days later, on July 16, Reims was blasted by a further 2,537 shells.
¹

That month,
Le Matin
dispatched a special correspondent to Reims to view the ruins of the city. He poetically evoked the horrors of the bombardment, describing the “dishonoured towers” of the cathedral rising against a sunset in the midst of a thunderstorm. As the horizon kindled and flamed, the stones of the cathedral were cast in shades of red: not merely from the rays of the dying sun but also from “the red of the fires in the town...blazing like candles beside a dying man.” Then, after the sun had set, “there began what, in Reims, passes for a normal night, one shaken by explosions and terror.”
²

“Everything changes,” Monet had once written, “even stone.” The reporter’s vision of a beautiful cathedral bathed in a flickering reddish
enveloppe
evoked an Impressionist vision, one recalling Monet’s paintings of Rouen Cathedral, some of which showed the façade blazing in the sunset with molten shades of red and orange. This depiction in
Le Matin
comes close to achieving in words what Clémentel and Dalimier expected Monet to produce in paint.

The critic Louix Vauxcelles, getting wind of the assignment, excitedly predicted that “the glorious leader of French Impressionism” would crown his career with his paintings of the ruined cathedral.
³
However,
Monet’s talents did not readily lend themselves to a frank depiction of the horrors wreaked by the bombardment. He was always strictly faithful to the spirit—his impression—of the motif, but his stock-in-trade was not a nearsighted concern for accurately documenting the minute details of the physical objects he painted. He would have agreed with Édouard Manet, who once told a student, “You wouldn’t dream of counting the scales on the salmon, would you?”
⁴
Monet occasionally took liberties with the visual facts for the sake of a better composition. In his paintings of the Manneporte at Étretat, for instance, he adjusted the position of the giant stone arch, while in some of his Argenteuil paintings he raised the height of the tollbooths on the bridge and even reduced the number of the bridge’s arches from seven to five.
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Faithfully depicting architectural features was less important to him than creating a striking composition. He once gave a visiting American painter a bit of advice: “When you go out to paint,” he told her, “try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow.” He even told her that he wished he had been born blind and then suddenly regained his sight, “so that he could have begun to paint in this way without knowing what the objects were that he saw before him.”
⁶

This statement should not be taken to suggest that Monet played fast and loose with the visual evidence, or that his subjects, such as the wheat stacks and poplars, were chosen willy-nilly and bore no significance to him. However, the upshot of Monet’s approach—concentrating as it did on the fuzzy
enveloppe
surrounding the objects—was that it was sometimes difficult for a viewer to know what his squares, oblongs, and streaks were meant to represent. As a friend of Monet wrote of his works: “The light becomes the most important thing in his paintings. Everything else is secondary. The subject doesn’t matter.”
⁷
This was to overstate the case, since the subject was, in fact, of great importance. But when the painter Wassily Kandinsky first saw one of Monet’s wheat stack paintings in the mid-1890s, he struggled to identify what exactly he was looking at. He was disturbed at first, believing that “the painter had no right to paint so indistinctly. I had a dull feeling that the object
was lacking in this picture.” But Kandinsky believed that in a Monet painting the object was less important than how it was painted, since “objects were discredited as an essential element within the picture.” Instead, Monet’s paintings depended on the “power of the palette”—on the virtuoso use of color for its own sake, not the depiction in a lucid, recognizable way of objects in the natural world.
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Painting a canvas that was intended to document architectural destruction would therefore be something of a novel experience for Monet. In his previous paintings of a cathedral, that of Rouen, the fine architectural details had been elusive. A nineteenth-century guidebook described its façade as abounding with “niches and statues, and an almost endless variety of open and free tracery of the most beautiful description.”
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Yet Monet’s canvases were decidedly short on this welter of architectural detail, emphasizing instead light, colors, shadows, and the day-to-day atmospheric effects. An architecture buff would examine them in vain for visual information about medieval statues. Indeed, someone studying Monet’s canvases of the cathedral might well be surprised to learn that the façade is actually adorned with dozens of stone figures, from the Virgin Mary surrounded by angels to Salome dancing before Herod and then presenting the severed head of John the Baptist to her mother. For an English critic, he turned this masterpiece of Gothic architecture into “melting ice-creams.”
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HOWEVER IMPROBABLE IT
may have seemed, Monet remained enthusiastic about the Reims commission. Nonetheless, the evacuated populace and daily artillery barrages in the summer of 1917 hardly boded well for his plein air sketching. When he painted in peaceful Rouen more than two decades earlier, he had actually set up his easel not in the open air in front of the cathedral but, rather, inside a lingerie shop. War-ravaged Reims offered no shelters in which he could install himself so safely or commodiously. Louis Vauxcelles soon began to have second thoughts about Monet crowning his career with these paintings. “Perhaps Claude Monet will not create a masterpiece at Reims,” he ruminated. “When he and Pissarro did their paintings of the cathedral
at Rouen, they took their time, living for a long time in front of their stone model, in communion with it.”
¹¹
There would be precious little time for such leisurely communion in Reims.

Given the bombardment of Reims through the spring and summer, Clémentel may have been surprised to receive a letter from Monet at the end of July with some astonishing news. “Dear Minister and friend,” Monet’s letter began, before going on to express his fears about the cathedral commission, which was not yet official. Clémentel had failed to answer several previous letters, leaving Monet anxious that he was making a nuisance of himself, and indeed that the project had been scuppered—thereby bringing to an end not only the prestige of a state-sponsored commission but also his special supply of petrol and other concessions. “I feared you found me very annoying because I wrote of my troubles getting petrol, coal and so forth,” he confessed. In one of his previous letters he had frankly asked if the commission was still standing, and Clémentel, much to his relief, finally affirmed that it was. Monet then dropped his surprise: “You may know that I went to see it.”
¹²

Did Monet truly go to Reims in the summer of 1917? On the day he wrote his letter to Clémentel, July 23, an official communiqué reported that 850 more shells had just fallen on the city.
¹³
It would have been either brave or foolhardy to undertake a painting expedition at such a time, and Monet, the septuagenarian homebody, was neither. No paintings or sketches of the cathedral record this casual claim of a visit. One could speculate that, fearful of losing the project, with all of its prestige and the happy privileges accruing to it, Monet was hoping to convince Clémentel of his enthusiasm and initiative with the help of some overstatement and even deceit.

Nonetheless, in the middle of September a journal carried a report on Monet’s plans to paint the cathedral. The writer, Vauxcelles, added as an aside: “Thanks to his old friend Clemenceau...Monet got to go to Reims.”
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Vauxcelles was always well informed about Monet’s plans and actions. It is therefore possible that Monet went to the western front in the company of Clemenceau, who made almost biweekly excursions
to visit the men in the trenches. If so, it would have been a hair-raising adventure. Winston Churchill left behind an account of his visit to the front with Clemenceau, a white-knuckle ride across muddy roads, through desolate countryside scarred by trenches and cratered by shells. “The projectiles whined to and fro overhead...Rifle fire was now audible in the woods, and shells began to burst in front of us on the road and in the sopping meadows on either side.” After twelve hours of “touring along the roads at frantic speed,” the forty-three-year-old Churchill was exhausted, but “the iron frame of the Tiger appeared immune from fatigue of any kind or in any form.” When Churchill protested that he must not expose himself to enemy fire, Clemenceau replied:
“C’est mon grand plaisir.”
¹⁵

This kind of frantic, dangerous expedition was hardly the sort favored by Monet. But thanks to Vauxcelles’s testimony, we can perhaps visualize the scenario—however unlikely and improbable—of Monet and Clemenceau setting off early one summer morning, their staff car barreling in a convoy over the rutted roads, passing snarls of barbed wire and the inevitable poppies that may have reminded Monet of the beautiful poppy fields outside Giverny that he had painted in the summer of 1890—a lifetime ago, before these flowers came to symbolize blood and death.