Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (43 page)

Monet’s plan for the donation, as outlined in the contract, was for nineteen panels making up eight compositions, to be distributed across the curving walls of two oval rooms in the Orangerie. Three of the
compositions from the earlier plan for the ill-fated pavilion at the Hôtel Biron were maintained:
The Clouds
,
Green Reflections
, and
The Three Willows
. However, the
Agapanthus
triptych was dropped, along with the decorative frieze of wisteria panels. Five new compositions from the Grande Décoration were added to this latest scheme. In the first room,
The Setting Sun
, made up from a single panel 6 meters (20 feet) wide, would be displayed with another new entry,
Morning
(three panels), along with the
Clouds
triptych and
Green Reflections
. In the second room, the massive, 17-meter-wide
Three Willows
composition (destined for the end wall) would share space with
Reflections of Trees
(two panels), to be placed on the entrance wall. The other walls would feature a pair of other compositions, both encompassing two 6-meter-wide panels and both, at this stage, simply entitled
Morning
.

Many more meters of canvas had obviously been added to the donation since the agreement made with Paul Léon eighteen months earlier. Indeed, the donation had expanded to 83.5 meters of canvas, or just shy of 274 feet. However, most of these compositions were, by the spring of 1922, presumably well on their way to completion. For instance, the largest of the compositions,
Three Willows
, had been virtually finished when its four panels were captured in a photograph in Monet’s studio almost five years earlier, in November 1917.

Monet lay down what he called a number of “inviolable conditions” attached to his donation of the nineteen panels.
⁶⁴
He was donating them, he pointed out, to “a Musée Claude-Monet,” and once in place the works were never to be removed from the Orangerie, nor could other works of art be placed in the two rooms. Anxious to avoid the dull veneer of so many Old Masters, he further stipulated that his paintings should never be varnished. Ominously, he included the proviso that since his eyesight might deteriorate, he would not be able to guarantee the aesthetic quality of the panels.

Clemenceau was delighted at the news of the signed contract, the difficulties and intricacies of whose negotiation must have brought back unpleasant memories of working on the Treaty of Versailles. From Belébat, on the eve of the signing of the contract, he wrote a
long letter of encouragement to Monet: “You know very well that with your brush and your brain you have reached the limit of everything that can be achieved. At the same time, if you were not pushed by an eternal search for the unattainable, you would not be the author of so many masterpieces...You will strive until the last minute of your life, thereby achieving the most beautiful body of work.” He ended with an exhortation: “Paint, paint until the canvas bursts.”
⁶⁵

There was, in truth, very little painting that remained to be done. Monet had two years to deliver canvases that in the spring of 1922—with the possible exception of
The Setting Sun
—were virtually finished. He should have been relaxed and contented, relieved that his masterpieces had found their home, as he had wished, in the very heart of Paris. But the real problems were only just beginning.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE LUMINOUS ABYSS

ON JUNE 25, 1922,
after a Sunday lunch with Clemenceau at Giverny, Monet sat down and wrote a letter to Gustave Geffroy: “No need to tell you how much I have been excited, modesty aside, by the good things you say about my work and myself, and I’m deeply moved...I thank you from the bottom of my heart...With my love and thanks once again for all that is beautiful in this book.”
¹

The book in question was hot off the press: Geffroy’s
Claude Monet: Sa vie, son temps, son oeuvre
(
Claude Monet: His Life, His Times, His Work
).
Le Figaro
called it a “magnificent monument, a great, definitive book,”
²
and Monet did indeed have much for which to thank his friend. In writing the book, Geffroy hoped to perform a number of services for both Monet and Impressionism. In particular, he was at pains to counter the criticism of those, such as the Post-Impressionists and their supporters, who believed that Monet did not capture an underlying essence (as the Fauves and Cubists claimed to do) but only the shimmering surface of things. Instead, he repeatedly stated that Monet’s paintings captured nature’s mix of the ephemeral and the eternal, its magnitude and its minutiae, its glittering appearances and its dizzyingly fathomless depths. His text was peppered with references to “the complex life of things”—to mystery, universality, truth, eternity and (as its final line stated) “the dream of infinity.”

Geffroy was eager to prove, in other words, that Monet’s paintings went beyond pretty pictures of women strolling under parasols or sunlight dancing on the Seine. As a stern riposte to anyone who believed Monet’s paintings were simply about shadows, ripples, and reflections, he wrote that,
au contraire
, Monet inserted himself at the point “where there blossom without ceasing the phenomena that last both an instant
and an eternity.” And to anyone who thought Impressionism a pleasant recreation involving little more than setting up an easel beside a river on a sunny afternoon and slopping bright colors onto a canvas, he memorably described Monet as a tortured, obsessive artist who pursued his dream of form and color “almost to the point of self-annihilation.”
³
It was certainly an account all-too-familiar to those who had made the artist’s close acquaintance.

Geffroy was not the first writer to make these points about the hidden depths of Monet’s paintings. As far back as 1891, Octave Mirbeau wrote that Monet did not “limit himself to translating nature” and that his paintings revealed “the states of unconsciousness of the planet, and the suprasensible forms of our thoughts.”
⁴
A year later, Camille Mauclair enthused that Monet’s paintings were “made from a dream and a magical breath...leaving for the eyes only a mad enchantment that convulses vision, reveals an unsuspected nature, lifts it up unto the symbol by way of this unreal and vertiginous execution.” Monet, he claimed, skimmed over “the philosophy of appearances” in order to show “eternal nature in all her fleeting aspects.”
⁵

Monet was, in these views, a tormented genius who possessed both an intellectual bedrock and a spiritual essence: someone whose paintings plumbed the ineffable mysteries of life rather than merely catching superficial glints. Geffroy’s proof of this intellectual and spiritual power rested above all on works that had not yet been created when Mirbeau and Mauclair celebrated Monet’s “mad enchantment” thirty years earlier: the waterscapes Monet painted beside his pond. All of these canvases were, Geffroy claimed, part of “a measureless dream of life” that Monet “expressed, reprised and ceaselessly expressed anew in his frenzied vision before the luminous abyss of the water lily pond.”
⁶

Mirbeau, Geffroy, Clemenceau—all were familiar with Monet’s volatile temperament and feverish obsessions. However, this talk of anguish, annihilation and the abyss, of frenzied visions and mad enchantments, may have surprised some of Monet’s other admirers. For those travelers who, as they passed through Giverny, paused by the roadside to peer at the beautiful blossoms through the gap in Monet’s fence, or who
craned their necks as their train puffed along the tracks, eager for a sight of the pond and its bright constellations of water lilies, Monet’s garden was a vision of Paradise. “Here is the Eden” was the typical response of one visitor, “here is the Paradise where, under the shade of some airy trees, bright flowers play on the sun-dappled grass.”
⁷
But this place of beauty was also a place where Monet, struggling with his canvases, contemplated what Geffroy called the “unfathomable nothingness.” This unfathomable nothingness was represented for Geffroy by the shifting, reflective surface of the pond and also by the aquatic foliage that had been Monet’s decades-long obsession: the water lilies, which were “more silent and esoteric than any other flower.”
⁸

MONET’S OBSESSION WITH
water lilies had begun when he glimpsed Latour-Marliac’s hybrids at the 1889 Exposition Universelle. By that time the water lily—like the weeping willow with its allusions to grief and loss—possessed special associations and symbolic values. The plant and its flowers went beyond horticulture and botany, inhabiting the realms of art, myth, literature, and religion. Water lilies (and related members of the Nymphaeaceae family, such as the lotus) held an important place in numerous cultures and religions. The word “lotus” comes from the name of a nymph, Lotis, who, as Ovid writes, turned into a water lily “while fleeing from Priapus’ vile pursuit”
⁹
—for which reason water lilies were a symbol of chastity for the ancient Romans, who laid before them the cropped tresses of the Vestal Virgins. For the ancient Egyptians, they were an image of rebirth and immortality because of how their flowers opened in the dawn and closed at dusk, while their circularity made them a symbol of eternity and perfection. In India, the sun god, Surya, was known as “Lord of the Lotus,” and Hindu legend maintained that Brahma was born from a lotus flower placed in the navel of Vishnu as he reclined on the cosmic serpent.
¹⁰
In Buddhist mythology, Gautama Buddha was nourished as a child by a lotus when his mother was unable to nurse him. The Aztec rain god, Tlaloc, was likewise represented with a water lily in his mouth, while both North African “lotus-eaters” (described in book nine of Homer’s
Odyssey
) and
the Mayans of Mesoamerica used water lilies, which contain opiate-like alkaloids, as psychotropic drugs.
¹¹

Monet probably knew little or nothing of this rich cultural freight, but water lilies also had a very distinctive cluster of meanings and associations in nineteenth-century France with which he would have been familiar. Appearing by the dozen in poems and paintings, they evoked the mysterious and the unknown, the feminine, the oriental, the exotic, the voluptuous, and often, at the same time, the sinister, deathly, and gruesome.

The botanical characteristics of the water lily were helpfully explained by Jean-Pierre Hoschedé, a stickler for horticultural detail. “Everyone thinks that Monet
sowed
his water lilies,” he wrote, “when in fact they were
planted
. Many have said that these plants
floated
. This is an error: water lilies root in the mud at the bottom of the water, producing long petioles and peduncles, which rise to the air at the surface, the petioles giving birth to leaves that spread in a circle on the water, and the peduncles to the large flowers.” He pointed out that water lilies lived in stagnant water, such as bogs and ponds.
¹²

Anchored in the mud, their beautiful blossoms floating on stagnant waters—such characteristics were bound to attract symbolic meanings. For the poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, water lilies were primordial plants, “the inhabitants of the original ooze and mud.”
¹³
For the novelist George Sand, they were an emblem of fragile innocence blooming in a foul and dank environment. In her preface to
François le Champi
, first serialized in 1848, she described how her inspiration for the novel came from seeing (in a city she does not identify) a poor boy in a street known as the chemin aux Napes, an ugly and dangerous dead end bordered by a ditch “where in the muddy water, amid salamanders and snakes, grow the most beautiful water lilies in the world, whiter than camellias, more fragrant than lilies, purer than a virgin’s dress.” These plants were, she wrote, “the wild and admirable vegetation of the sewer.”
¹⁴
The image of virgins and sewers was repeated a few years later by a French theologian who argued that the water lily, with its white flower rooted in the mud, symbolized the Virgin Mary because of her obscure origins in the hinterlands of Nazareth.
¹⁵

For other writers, the muddy ponds in which water lilies flourished gave them more ominous connotations. For Monet’s doomed, demented friend Maurice Rollinat, a stagnant pond was always a source of suspicion and anxiety. One of his poems evoked a “black bog, sinister and fearful,” lit by hobgoblins, in which the moon’s reflection looked like a skull and crossbones.
¹⁶
The murky waters in which they thrived therefore gave water lilies not a miraculous purity and chaste innocence but, rather, more than a hint of menace. One of his prose pieces, “The Red Pond,” described “monstrous water lilies” with blossoms of “mortuary white” masking “the perfidy of the deep” and floating on “the dark water like decomposing hearts.”
¹⁷