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.” 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”.As an eighteen-year-old backpacking around Europe, I distinctly remember being overwhelmed as I experienced Monet's Water Lilies installation (although before I read this book, I would have sworn this room was an annex attached directly to the Louvre, not a separate museum; yet I can find no evidence to support my false memory), and what overwhelmed me was the fact that I didn't really understand what I was seeing; having had no prior exposure to Impressionism, I found the huge murals to be unsettling and uncanny; wrong somehow, but undeniably genius. It would seem that my own ambivalent reaction was predated by that of the official French art community (at a time when art was considered a public endeavor and tastes were determined and reinforced by “experts”), and throughout his life and to this day, Claude Monet went in and out of fashion, but always pursued his own point of view. In Mad Enchantment, art historian Ross King examines Monet's career – particularly focussing on the last couple of decades of his life in which he created the Water Lilies – and while the historical perspective and biographical details were illuminating, this book was just all right; a little dull, a little repetitive, the parts about Monet himself being not the most interesting.
Much of Claude Monet’s life and work had been a mad striving for the impossible. His goal, which he frankly admitted was unattainable, was to paint his carefully chosen object – the cathedral, cliff, or wheat stack before which he raised his easel – under singular and fleeting conditions of weather and light. As he told an English visitor, he wanted “to render my impressions before the most fugitive effects.” In 1889 a critic had scoffed that Monet’s paintings were nothing more than a matter of “geography and the calendar.” This was, however, to miss the point of Monet’s work. Since objects changed their color and appearance according to the seasons, the meteorological conditions, and the time of day, Monet hoped to capture their visual impact in these brief, distinctive, ever-changing moments in time. He concentrated not only on the objects themselves but also, critically, on the atmosphere that surrounded them, the erratically shifting phantoms of light and color that he called the enveloppe. “Everything changes, even stone,” he wrote to Alice while working on his paintings of the façade of Rouen Cathedral. But freezing the appearance of objects amid fleeting phantoms of light and air was no easy task. “I am chasing a dream,” he admitted in 1895. “I want the impossible.”In 1883, after having suffered the loss of both his wife and one of his sons, Monet moved to the village of Giverny with his mistress, her six children, and his surviving child. He was, by this time, perhaps France's most famous and respected painter – Impressionism having finally gained respectability – and with his great wealth, Monet was soon able to not only buy the largest home in the village, but the adjoining properties in order to expand his gardens. He was able to flood one swampy adjoining lot by diverting the local river (tant pis for the locals and their thirsty cattle) and here create a beautiful lily pond, stocked with the latest dazzling hybrids introduced by the Horticultural Society. Monet was a gourmand and a generous host, always insisting on a hearty wine-soaked lunch for visitors, and a postprandial stroll often involved taking guests through a tunnel beneath the nearby road and emerging on the banks of his Edenic pond (I loved the notion that, although this property was ringed with a stone wall for privacy, Monet had left an opening for curious eyes). Standing on the Japanese bridge and staring down at his prized lilies, and deeper, at their swaying roots, Monet became obsessed with the idea of capturing the totality of everything he was seeing: light and water and atmosphere and matter. Although he did sometimes turn to other subjects, most of the painting Monet did for the rest of his life occurred at the edge of this pond.
Mad Enchantment really takes off when WWI breaks out, and as the battle is fought within twenty miles of his village home (and as four close family members, including his own son, are sent to the front), Monet's art takes on the label of “war effort”. Despite the privations felt by the entire country as the war drags on and on, Monet is able to requisition coal and petrol and cigarettes as a matter of national priority, and it is during these years that he conceives of the Grande Décoration – the massively scaled water lily murals that would undoubtedly require a dedicated space for their display – and he attacked the project with his customary obsessiveness and brutishness: heaping abuse on the beloved stepdaughter who acted as his assistant, destroying canvases by the dozen with knife and bonfire when piqued by fury. I liked the incidental information about how the Great War was impacting French art in general; and especially that it took serving cubists to conceive of (and create) the first camouflage; and that eventually the cubists went out of favour as too “Germanic” a style (which led to the resurgence of Impressionism as the true French art language). And doesn't this all sound so interesting?
The problem I have with Mad Enchantment is that all the best parts are told from the perspective of Monet's old friend Georges Clemenceau – the politician and wartime prime minister whose nickname was “The Tiger” (eventually to be known as “Father Victory”) – and while his letters are famously witty and perceptive, and often the voice of encouragement and reason that continually prompts Monet to pick up his paintbrush again, by comparison, Monet seems a bit dull and spoiled. One man is described driving to the front to rally the troops, negotiating the Treaty of Versailles, travelling the world to ensure support for the reconstruction of France, and the other man stands in his garden painting flowers: I 100% support the notion of art as an important civic endeavor, and without the wartime stories there would be a definite lack of perspective for what Monet was trying to express in his work, but if you cut out everything from this book about and written by Clemenceau, there wouldn't be any book left. (And note: if this book had been called The Tiger and the Hedgehog and marketed as the story of this remarkable friendship, I wouldn't have this issue.)
I also found the prose to be plodding and repetitive: ie, At one point King includes a story about Monet being so focussed on his painting that a barber would need to visit the gardens to trim his hair as he worked. And then near the end of the book, King notes that a writer was granted access to compose a biography of the great painter late in his life, and it was here that Monet first shared the story of summoning the barber. I wasn't trying to collect examples of things that annoyed me in this book, but this kind of repetition (stating something once as “something that was known to happen”, and then again as “this is when it happened”) jarred me a few times. There was also a feeling of the book being padded with too much extraneous information – and I totally understand why an author who did such extensive research would have a hard time not putting in everything he found interesting – but for example: there are a couple of pages on the symbolism of water lilies in classical myth (and especially how they represent “the lost female”; pertinent to an artist, one supposes, who outlived both of his wives), and at the end of this exposition, King concludes that while this is provocative, Monet himself never mentioned being interested in such symbolism.
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 Monet outlived his fellow Impressionists – his friends Rodin and Renoir, Manet and Cezanne – there was a growing urgency to complete his great final work, and a cruel irony to the cataracts that caused him to go nearly blind. The story of Monet's life becomes more pitiable as he arranges to donate the Water Lilies to a postwar France that is harkening back to the stability of classical forms; several smaller water lily paintings go unsold in Paris galleries. Although in the end Monet couldn't bring himself to let go of the murals during his lifetime, the Orangerie des Tuileries was modified to his specifications and the murals installed as per his vision. And the public stayed away in droves; the gallery eventually being used for other exhibitions (at one point a display of tapestries was draped over Monet's work) and even dog shows. It took American Abstract artists after WWII to “rediscover” the Orangerie and Monet.
Obviously, I learned a lot about Monet in Mad Enchantment, and I loved both the integrated photographs (of people and places) and the colour plates in the middle (that depict various paintings), and the historical perspective certainly sheds a new light of my own unsettling experience with the Water Lilies (it would seem that they are intended to be overwhelming, the splashes of colour evoking the impermanence of life, the series of willows bearing down with the burden of wartorn grief); so this wasn't a waste of time by any means. Just not quite my cuppa in execution.
Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction 2016 nominees:
Ian Brown for Sixty: A Diary of My Sixty-first Year: The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning?
Deborah Campbell for A Disappearance in Damascus: A Story of Friendship and Survival in the Shadow of War
Matti Friedman for Pumpkinflowers: An Israeli Soldier’s Story
Ross King for Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies
Sonja Larsen for Red Star Tattoo: My Life as a Girl Revolutionary
*Won by A Disappearance in Damascus (I would have given it to Red Star Tattoo).
*****
I do distinctly remember how amazed I was by the Impressionists at the Louvre, and this wasn't limited to Monet. My favourite was Renoir, and I remember looking at his paintings up close -- seeing the strange strokes of green and purple in a young girl's cheek -- and then stepping back to marvel at the perfect effect these streaks of colour had when seen from a distance. I was a total neophyte when it came to art (I suppose I still am), but I knew what I liked, and I liked this.When Kevin and I got back from Europe, one of the first things we did was go to Michelle's parents' housewarming party. They had just had their basement finished and had a really cool idea: sectioning one long wall into squares with black tape, they invited all of their friends (and their children's friends) to come over, choose a square, and fill it anyway we liked: a drawing, a message, a handprint, whatever. I was so inspired by the Impressionsists that, although I would not consider myself to be "artistic", and despite not trying it out on my own first, when I got to Michelle's house I confidently picked up some wax crayons from the array of materials provided and began drawing the portrait of a girl (it eventually looked just enough like Nancy for me to say that was my intent) in streaks of bizarre colours that, when looked at from a distance, somehow cohesed into an attractive image. I was immediately embarrassed by the effusive compliments from Michelle's parents and their friends -- I totally knew that what I did was derivative and childlike -- but they assumed, I figure, that I was exploring a "naive style"; no one was surprised to learn that I had just returned from a tour of the great museums of Europe.
What was more interesting to me was that Kevin -- who definitely is an artistic person, always quick with a funny cartoon or caricature during boring high school classes -- went more abstract. He had brought two cans of spray paint and first, sprayed his square with a fluorescent pink. He then cut electrical tape into various lengths that he then applied to the pink, sprayed the whole thing with black, and when he peeled off the tape, a rigid line-drawn silhouette was revealed underneath. This was definitely more creative than what I had done, was totally evocative of the 80s aesthetic, and just having such a definite plan had impressed me, but as good as I thought his square looked, people were generally just upset with him for spraying paint in the enclosed basement. I suppose we must all suffer for our art. Looking back now, I wonder which was eventually harder for them to cover up: the spray paint or my sticky layers of wax crayon?