By: Leo Kepler
The Monet exhibition at MoMA, organized in a widely popular “in focus” format (it comprises only six paintings), withstands the bestseller gloss. The selection of works is subtle and astute: the show includes not only darlings, but soft spots as well. Four paintings from the Museum’s holdings - a water lilies triptych, a single panel water lilies, a Japanese bridge and a close-up agapanthus – and two private loans of smaller pond images reveal the irregular cardiogram of late-career Monet’s creative heartbeat. This small show changed my view of the artist whom I had previously perceived as an idyllic painter.
Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1914-26. Photo Leo Kepler.
I never shared the universal lay reverence for Monet, the artist whose work prompted the term Impressionism, originally an expression of disparagement. I understood the historic implications of Monet’s confrontation with the artistic mores of his time, but for me, its acuity was buried under later 20th-century art uprisings, and I did not feel its sting. Nor could I grasp the meaning of the initial indifference at best, scorn at worst, surrounding his last paintings, including his water lilies. The deceptive douceur, gentleness and ethereality of Monet’s work had inveigled me. I had failed to see that the artist lived through two modernities in one life time: he changed the vision of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century changed his. Though the nineteenth century Impressionist revolution was a collective enterprise, Monet’s subsequent endeavor appears to have been a truly solitary journey. Unlike his colleagues, Monet was slowly leaving the radiant, momentous and kaleidoscopic world of Impressionism for a meditation on the nature of it.
In the 1890s, Monet (he was 50 at the time) bought a house at Giverny and married Alice Hoschedé, whom he had been with since 1881. At last, serenity seemed to briefly touch Monet’s life and brush: savor the quiescence of the Morning on the Seine near Giverny, for instance, painted in 1897, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The tranquility was not to last. Monet’s later years were ruptured by the deaths of his wife and son, and his deteriorating eyesight. But independent of personal circumstances, peace is never an artist’s fate.
As his financial stability grew and he was able to expand his property at Giverny, Monet started gardening on the grand scale, and eventually came to employ several assistants. In 1893 he built a Japanese water garden, adding a Japanese bridge two years later. In a way, Monet was creating his Garden of Eden. This garden not only provided the motives for his paintings, but it was a parallel studio in which he addressed the questions of time and being in a manner complementary to his painting practice, with nature as his art supplies. Many of his late works were completed or fully done in the studio. Monet wasn’t portraying his garden, but was attempting to re-create it in a different form. In the studio, he worked in contrast to his seasonal, renascent garden, working towards conclusion and pausing the cycle of time, even if for a moment.
In the catalogue essay recounting the slow assent of the late Monet’s paintings, Ann Temkin remarks that the works’ “power is not of a stroke of inspiration, but of a deeply enduring passion, both for the artist’s subject and for his vocation.” I think this observation misconstrues the nature of this passion. It was not an even burning storge or philia, affection or fondness, but a passion that entailed torment, longing, uncertainty, obsession, hope and solace. Monet’s late paintings hint at the creative dark night in which an artist searches for a new world, because the familiar one has become a jail. Look at the dates of the water lilies in this show: 1914 – 1926! Many of his late pieces span a decade. Such marathons suggest doubt, irresolution, abandonment, contemplation, and return. During his last decade, Monet was engrossed in a handful of motives, revisiting each one dozens of times. Imagine the disparity between Monet’s real garden and the “garden” in his studio. The former was living artlessly while the latter was an embodiment of a quandary. Both gardens were perpetually changing, only the change was a sign of constancy in the first case and uncertainty in the second. Feel the range of intensity in his late work: the guilelessness as in Agapanthus, the hypnosis of the single panel water lilies in this show, and the turmoil of some of his fiery and barbaric Japanese bridges.
Monet’s late works are uneven. The path through the irises (1914-1917), at the Met, baffled me. When I looked at it from a neighboring exhibition hall, it unbuckled instantly in front of my eyes, just as Agapanthus at MoMA does. The frame appears not to hold the painting, and there seems to be no gravity locking the elements together and in relation to each other. I wondered if these paintings were finished. I contemplated the artist’s intention and realized that the same “flaw” made possible the amazing horizontality and limitlessness of the water lilies, or “Nympheas” as Monet called them. In the successful works, the suspended gravity brought the depth of the image and the flatness of the canvas together, creating a double ply, which allowed for a sense of expansiveness that made the frame almost irrelevant. This was unprecedented in painting. The frame does not enclose the late water lilies; they endure it.
Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1914-26. Photo Leo Kepler.
Monet’s real garden and his water lilies create a bridge. The artist conveyed perpetuity of nature in the form of the seemingly boundless canvas (or never-ending “loop” as in the installation at the Musée de l’Orangerie) as he was confronting his own mortality. Paradoxically, Monet’s late works show the difference between ‘unfinished’ and ‘unresolved.’ Works decided by lack of time versus works decided by not-knowing. Very few late Monets are unfinished, but many are not fully resolved. Only several (of over 200) are stand-alone works; most are part of a sequence, each one a continuation of the artist’s inner polemic. Monet’s late paintings are a complex triumph. With them, the artist acquired what Isaac Babel best expressed as the “right to write badly,” which in the artist’s case has become the right to paint badly. I understand it as a freedom from authority, including one’s own, which is a liberty to be won. Doubt, contradiction and failures are the foundation of this victory. Without it, one becomes, in Babel’s words, “a master of the genre of silence,” even if the silence takes the form of prolific production. Monet’s innermost creative ordeal coincided with the drift of two centuries. The contemporaneity of the transformative quest at the dusk of life (Monet was in his seventies), and the ending of one world and the beginning of another, constituted his second encounter with modernity. This time, the artist was not its mastermind, but its accomplice, its survivor and its trustee.
“Monet's Water Lilies” at the Museum of Modern Art runs through April 12th
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. (Between 5th and 6th Avenues)
Take the E or V train to 53rd Street and 5th Avenue, the B or D train to 53rd Street and 7th Avenue or the M1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 buses to 53rd Street
Museum Hours: 10:30am – 5:30 pm Sat, Sun, M, W, Thurs; 10:30am – 8:00 pm F; closed Tues
Museum website: www.moma.org
Great review. Thanks.
Posted by: Luciano Colonna | November 15, 2009 at 10:05 AM