Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (30 page)

Monet kept busy in his garden throughout the spring and into the summer, raging against old age and the bad weather. “I haven’t long to live,” he told Gaston Bernheim-Jeune, “and must dedicate all my time to painting, with the hope of finally achieving something good—something that, if possible, might satisfy me.”
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What he achieved during those months was a number of remarkable canvases that reveal a combination of artistic experimentation, mental disturbance, and defiant resolution in the face of age and death. Most striking were a series of paintings of his Japanese bridge, virtually all of them painted on canvases only three feet high—much smaller, that is, than either the
grandes études
or the panels making up the Grande Décoration. All of them were painted only at certain times of the day. In February he had explained to Thiébault-Sisson that in order to preserve his eyesight he painted outdoors only in the early morning and late afternoon. Most of these paintings are therefore depictions of dawn and dusk, of gauzily lit mornings and fierce, sulfurous sunsets. Many he would later rework, but all were painted with wildly undulating forms added in flickering tongues of tropical color. In some, the Japanese bridge is outlined with bloodred accents; other times it dissolves into a sea-green reverie with calm sapphire highlights; while in other canvases (probably retouched later) the bridge is a multicolored arch twisting across a lake of fire and blood, with a conflagration raging in the background—an apocalypse devouring a fairyland. Monet might not have made it to Reims to paint its ruined cathedral by the harsh light of artillery barrages, but in his garden he had imaginatively reconstructed a scene of devastation.

Monet once speculated that his paintings might calm strained nerves and offer “an asylum of peaceful meditation.” The vertiginous paintings of the Japanese bridge could hardly serve that pacifying function. Nor could another series of works begun that summer, some ten paintings of the weeping willows beside his pond. The motif was an interesting one to choose after almost four years of war and more than a million French dead. The weeping willow had been a symbol of death and mourning ever since its introduction to Europe early in the eighteenth century. It was often either personified as a woman or used to
symbolize female mourning in particular. A prose poem in the illustrator J. J. Grandville’s
Les Fleurs animées
(
Flowers Personified
), published in 1847, was typical: “Come into my shade, all you who suffer, for I am the Weeping Willow. I conceal in my foliage a woman with a gentle face. Her blond hair hangs over her brow and veils her tearful eye. She is the muse of all those who have loved...She comforts those touched by death.”
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More to the point for Monet, in 1877 his friend Maurice Rollinat wrote a poem describing weeping willows “that look like mourning women / Bowing painfully into the wind.”
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Such associations meant that weeping willows were a common sight in French cemeteries. The image of a willow shading a grave, famously made by Desdemona in Gioachino Rossini’s 1816 opera
Otello
(“Willow...prepare a merciful shade for my woeful tomb”), was picked up by the poet Alfred de Musset in his 1835 poem “Lucie”:

My dear friends, when I die
,

Plant a willow in the cemetery
.

I love its weeping foliage;

Its pallor is so dear to me
,

And its shadow will be gentle

Upon the ground where I shall sleep
.
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A weeping willow was duly planted beside Musset’s grave in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise following his death in 1857, although a nineteenth-century guidebook reported that this “famous willow” (once upon a time arguably the most celebrated tree in France) was often stripped of leaves and branches by souvenir hunters.
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Monet’s paintings of his weeping willows have something of these traditional elegaic qualities, alluding to sorrow and loss. But he added a new twist—literally—to the motif. In his weeping willows we find no merciful shadows, gentle female faces, and pallid, outstretched limbs. Rather, the weeping willows of Giverny, with their contorted branches and Monet’s darker palette, suggest torture and suffering. The images are fraught and disturbing, echoing lines from one of his letters in June:
“What anguished lives we lead.”
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Monet may have been painting in order to distract himself from the Grande Guerre, but the war infuses every inch of these canvases. They are a firm riposte to anyone who regards Monet simply as the “great anti-depressant.”

Grandville and many others personified the weeping willow as female, but it is possible to see a different kind of figure in Monet’s anthropomorphized trees: the vivid image, as Paul Hayes Tucker intriguingly suggests, of “a weathered landscape painter.” The willow is, he proposes, the “ideal metaphor” for Monet himself, a kind of emblem of the artist heroically struggling during the war years.
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In one of the weeping willow paintings the canvas is divided between a shower of mustard-colored light and an inky darkness. The willow stands in between, its gnarled branches stretching toward the iridescent glow. A similar canvas depicts the same tree at closer range, its slender trunk ablaze and its limbs forcefully aloft, clutching at the lurid phosphorescence of its sunlit canopy—an image recalling Rollinat’s description in his poem of the “fantastic” branches of the willow looking like rays thrown by a sorcerer.

Monet had earlier turned an old oak in the Creuse valley, which he called “my tree” and painted more than a dozen times in 1889, into what Tucker has called “a kind of personal symbol” of his rages and suffering.
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It is not difficult to read, with Tucker, an autobiographical element into Monet’s renderings of these trees beside his pond—these bent willows that are partially engulfed in darkness but defiantly thrusting their crooked boughs outward as if raging against the dying of the light.

MONET WAS VISITED
in August by an art dealer, René Gimpel, who faithfully recorded his impressions in his diary. Gimpel and another dealer, Georges Bernheim—no relation to Josse and Gaston Bernheim-Jeune—took their bicycles on the train to Vernon and then cycled the three miles from the station to Monet’s house.

The thirty-six-year-old Gimpel was one of Paris’s up-and-coming art dealers, a junior partner in Gimpel & Wildenstein, a firm cofounded by his father, Ernest. René was enviably well connected, since his family tree included not only Louis Vuitton (his great-uncle) but also the
art dealers Nathan Wildenstein (his grandmother’s cousin and his father’s business partner) and Joseph Duveen (his brother-in-law). With premises in the rue La Boétie in Paris and on Fifth Avenue in New York, Gimpel & Wildenstein primarily specialized in Old Masters and eighteenth-century painters such as Jean-Honoré Fragonard—what an American publication, describing their wares, called “high class old paintings.”
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However, since his father’s premature death from diphtheria in 1907, René had begun expanding the collection to cover what might have been called “high class new paintings,” in particular the Impressionists. Earlier in 1918 he paid court in the South of France to both Renoir and Mary Cassatt. Now he had his eye on another, even bigger prize.

The visit marked Gimpel’s first meeting with Monet, whose appearance and manner left a vivid impression on him.
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He appeared before his guests wearing a “big pointed straw peasant’s hat” and then, without further ado, launched into a long monologue that—if Gimpel recorded it faithfully—amounted to an artistic manifesto tinctured with personal eccentricities. “Ah, gentlemen,” he greeted them, “I don’t receive when I’m working, no, I don’t receive. When I’m working, if I’m interrupted, it just finishes me, I’m lost. You’ll understand, I’m sure, that I’m chasing the merest sliver of color. It’s my own fault, I want to grasp the intangible. It’s terrible how the light runs out, taking color with it. Color, any color, lasts a second, sometimes three or four minutes at most. What to do, what to paint in three or four minutes? They’re gone, you have to stop. Ah, how I suffer, how painting makes me suffer! It tortures me. The pain it causes me!”

Despite these dramatic protestations, Monet invited to the two men to join him for lunch. For Gimpel, the painter’s supposed distress about his impossible task was offset by his jaunty vigor. “I’ve never seen a man of that age look so young,” he confessed. “He can’t be taller than about five foot five, but he is absolutely erect.” Gimpel was also favorably impressed by Monet’s garden, but even more—once he and Bernheim were finally conducted into the sanctum sanctorum of the large studio—by his paintings. Monet staged a special exhibition for the
two men, arranging series of a dozen canvases in a unique way. He placed them not upright on their easels but rather in a circle on the floor. He therefore created a simulacrum of the lily pond in his studio, or what Gimpel called “a panorama of water and water lilies, of light and sky.” He found the effect almost overwhelming. “In its infinity, the water and the sky had neither beginning nor end,” he wrote. “It was as though we were present at one of the first hours of the birth of the world. It was mysterious, poetic, deliciously unreal.”

Gimpel estimated the size of these canvases at “about six feet wide by four feet high.” These dimensions indicate that Monet showed his two guests not the Grande Décoration—whose individual canvases, at six feet six and a half inches by fourteen feet, were much larger—but, rather, works painted in the spring and summer of 1918, many of them on a smaller set of canvases ordered at the end of April. Though only a dozen of these smaller canvases were put on display, Gimpel guessed that Monet had completed as many as thirty of them. If Gimpel’s estimates can be accepted, Monet had produced 180 feet of canvas in addition to the approximately 112 feet photographed nine months earlier and then seen by Thiébault-Sisson in February.

Gimpel was puzzled by what would become of all of this paint and canvas. He believed that even the smaller canvases, each some six feet wide, were still too large for one of Monet’s most reliable markets: the homes of affluent Americans. Most of the Monets decorating American homes were roughly half that size, although it would surely not have been difficult to imagine his six-foot-wide canvases gracing the salons of Manhattan town houses or Newport mansions. However, Gimpel had another use for them: he believed they would make great decorations for swimming pools.

ON AUGUST 3
a newspaper headline triumphantly declared: complete success on the aisne at reims.
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At four
A.M.
on August 8, a combined force of British, Canadian, and Australian troops launched a massive attack on the German Second Army near Amiens, striking with such speed and intensity that Canadian troops, bursting out of
the morning mists, captured virtually the entire 117th Division. It was the greatest defeat yet sustained by the Germans—“the black day of the German Army,” as General Ludendorff famously wrote in his diary. Kaiser Wilhelm, despairingly appraising the situation, declared to his generals three days later: “We have nearly reached the limit of our powers of resistance. The war must be ended.”
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Clemenceau continued making his trips to the front to confer with the generals and inspire the troops. On September 1, a photographer captured him having lunch among the ruins at Roye, southeast of Amiens, complete with a table draped in white linen. He was also photo graphed on the shattered ruins of a battlefield, sitting on a stack of two-by-fours and eating lunch from a wicker picnic basket with his son, Michel. On one such visit to the front his motorcar came under heavy artillery fire. When officers tut-tutted his imprudence in putting himself at risk, he retorted: “These damned generals are always scared about something.”
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On another of these visits, Clemenceau was presented with a garland of flowers plucked from the roadside by a young soldier, “frail, dried-up stalks” that he promised the young soldier he would take to his grave.
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By this time the soldiers began calling him by the name that would soon spread quickly from the trenches to the towns and villages all over France: Père-la-Victoire (Father Victory). The name was an allusion to a military song, “Le Père la Victoire,” popular in the cafés concerts of the 1880s and 1890s. The lyrics tell the story of a one-hundred-year-old veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who urges France’s youth to follow his valorous example. After running through highlights of the old man’s career—in which a fondness for wine, women, and song feature along with battlefield heroics—the song ends with a passionate exhortation: “
Marchez à la gloire, mes chers enfants / Revenez triomphants
” (“March to glory, my dear children / Return triumphant”). The song was revived in 1917 for a two-minute-fifty-four-second film by Paul Franck called
Le Père la Victoire
, which included two of the original six verses—and which no doubt inspired the soldiers who watched it in the cinemas to think of Clemenceau, their own feisty old warrior.