Claude Monet: The Water-Lilies and other writings on art

Georges Clemenceau

Bruce Michelson, translator

Windsor & Downs Press

Urbana, Illinois

Published by Windsor & Downs Press, part of the Illinois Open Publishing Network (IOPN). IOPN is a project of the University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Please cite this book using the identifier doi:10.21900/wd.1

Claude Monet, les Nymphéas, original French by Georges Clemenceau; published by Plon, Paris, 1928.

Appendices, original French by Georges Clemenceau; published in La Justice: “Le Louvre Libre,” March 18, 1894; “Au Louvre,” June 6, 1894; “Musées du Soir,” November 21, 1894.

English translations and preface copyright © 2017 by Bruce Michelson.

Claude Monet: The Water-Lilies and other writings on art by Bruce F. Michelson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

This book was produced using Pressbooks.com.

Contents

- Image Credits

- Translator’s Preface

- Part I. Claude Monet: The Water-Lilies

- 1. Lessons from a Life

- 2. Claude Monet, Painter

- 3. The World, the Self, and the Light

- 4. Monet’s Garden: The Lily Pond

- 5. The Public

- 6. Mortal Combat

- 7. The Cathédrales Revolution

- 8. The Nymphéas of the Water Garden

- 9. Critique of the Critics

- 10. Conclusion

- Part II. Essays on the Arts

- Freeing the Louvre

- At the Louvre

- Evening Museums

Image Credits

Translator’s Preface

Clemenceau and Monet at Giverny by unknown photographer; public domain. Original photograph from the collection of MATSUKATA Kōjirō and his niece KUROKI Takeko; digital version from Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait of Clemenceau published by Bain Media Service. Original negative in the Library of Congress; public domain. Cropped digital version from Wikimedia Commons.

Clemenceau at the front courtesy of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

2. Claude Monet, Painter

Water Lilies (Setting Sun), painting by Claude Monet; public domain. Digital photograph from Google Art Project via Wikimedia Commons.

Camille Monet on Her Deathbed, painting by Claude Monet; public domain. Digital photograph from Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait of Claude Monet, painting by Gilbert de Séverac; public domain. Digital photograph from artmight.com.

Claude Monet at Work, painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir; public domain. Digital photograph from Google Art Project via Wikimedia Commons.

Self-portrait with beret, painting by Claude Monet; public domain. Digital photograph from WikiArt.

Self-portrait, painting by Claude Monet; public domain. Digital photograph from WikiArt.

3. The World, the Self, and the Light

Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, painting by Raphael; public domain. Digital photograph from C2RMF via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait of Isabella d’Este, drawing by Leonardo da Vinci; public domain. Digital photograph from Wikimedia Commons.

Young Woman with a Mandolin by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot; public domain. Digital photograph from Wikimedia Commons.

5. The Public

Vétheuil in the Mist, painting by Claude Monet; public domain. Digital photograph from Wikimedia Commons.

6. Mortal Combat

Burial at Ornans, painting by Gustave Courbet; public domain. Digital photograph from Google Art Project via Wikimedia Commons.

Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera, painting by Antoine Watteau; public domain. Digital photograph from C2RMF via Wikimedia Commons.

7. The Cathédrales Revolution

Stacks of Wheat, paintings by Claude Monet; public domain. Digital photographs from Wikimedia Commons (White Frost, Sunrise; Late Summer; End of Summer).

Rouen Cathedral, paintings by Claude Monet; public domain. Digital photographs from Wikimedia Commons (Facade, Sunset; Facade; The Portal, Sunlight).

8. The Nymphéas of the Water Garden

Water-Lilies, paintings by Claude Monet; public domain. Digital photographs from Wikimedia Commons (1920–1926; 1917–1919; 1916; Setting Sun as per above).

“At the Louvre”

Apollo of Piombino, ancient Greek bronze sculpture; public domain. Black & white photograph public domain; from The rendering of nature in early Greek art (1907) via Wikimedia Commons.

Color photograph, “Apollon de Piombino,” from Wikimedia Commons; by Siren-Com, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Translator’s Preface

Bruce Michelson

From the past four hundred years of cultural history in the West, what texts do we have in which the leader of a powerful nation, someone famous and consequential in statecraft or war or other front-page action—President, Prime Minister, monarch, anyone who might qualify for Hegel’s welthistorische roster—writes thoughtfully and at length about the arts? Plausible candidates can be tallied on one hand. From the legendary salons of Frederick the Great, no substantial documents of the sort survive; though Napoleons I and III raided their treasuries to bankroll painting and sculpture, decking out palaces, theaters, and galleries for national and personal glory, what they actually said about the fine arts was scattered and commonplace. From the past few decades, a case might be made for Václav Havel, the polymath who eventually became President of the Czech Republic, a reluctant leader for a small nation. Beyond these, however, we have to scrounge. With so much discourse coming at us from seats of power since the dawn of printing, this paucity is not only stunning but also grimly eloquent for what it signifies: a chronic disconnect between our political elites and the creative spirit of the nations they oversee.

Georges Clemenceau (L) and Claude Monet at Giverny, June, 1921.

One rare exception is this short book that Georges Clemenceau wrote in the final year of his life, a career of extraordinary action and consequence for France and also for modern Europe. In the middle of May 1928, bothered by bad weather at his seaside cottage in the Vendée, he had come back to his Paris apartment on Rue Benjamin Franklin, across the Seine from Trocadéro; and Jean Martet, his personal secretary and confidant, paid him a visit there in the ground-floor study. Eighty-six years old now, “The Tiger of France,” as he was still being called in the newspapers, was feeling his age, plagued by a stubborn cough and fiery pain in both of his hands. Nonetheless, holding court behind his massive Louis XV desk, he was, as usual, brimming with intentions and resolve. “At present I am writing a kind of monograph on Monet,” he announced. “Yes indeed; does that surprise you? Well, I have felt for a long time it was my duty to write it. And so I am now at it.”[1] He was struggling, he admitted, to fold so many years of his personal experience with Monet into a meditation about his achievement. But two weeks later, Clemenceau sounded playful and buoyant about how things were going; and when he saw in Martet some reservations about precious days and energies getting lost in a book about painting, the old homme d’état offered a tide of confident rationale. “I’m writing this book precisely because it’s different from Au Soir de la Pensée [the two-volume memoir he had finished over the winter]…. With Monet I’m doing something else—something which follows naturally, nevertheless…. I’m taking up a question of which I’ve never spoken but of which I ought to speak—the world’s emotional impulse as expressed in religion or art. Well, I shall take art.” With these lines, as round and sonorous in Clemenceau’s French as they seem in Milton Waldman’s translation, he was only warming up, testing and enjoying prose that would find its way into the new monograph; and keeping quiet, Martet just took it all in. Clemenceau’s Monet book would be about a courageous man’s life-culminating struggle to do the impossible with paint and canvas, to finish one huge and supreme masterpiece before he died: “What I want to tell is the story of that conflict—a conflict which ended in both victory and defeat, a victory because he left behind a vast body of work, including many splendid things, a defeat because in that domain there is no such thing as success. And between us, I shan’t mind giving a lesson to the art critics, whose number is ludicrous.”[2]

Through sixty years of turbulent center-ring public life, Clemenceau was not one to be daunted by anything; and if the spirit moved him now to write about his three decades of intimate friendship with the greatest Impressionist and one of the most famous artists of his time, no phalanx of professional critics would scare him off the track. Jailed at the age of twenty-one as a troublesome hothead by Louis Napoleon, Clemenceau had been Mayor of Montmartre at thirty, struggling to save Parisian lives during the long siege and the bloodbath of the Commune. Thereafter, in the Chamber of Deputies and later in the Senate, as the nation recovered and the belle époque began, he had made himself a standard-bearer for the anti-colonialist radical Left, his polemics bringing him fame as le tombeur des ministères—“the toppler of governments”—and in all seasons, in public office or out, he busied himself with founding, editing, or writing regularly for one combative journal after another. In the dangerous struggle to exonerate Alfred Dreyfus at the end of the century, he and his ally Émile Zola had stood fast at the center of an enormous furor; and throughout those many years in politics and public life there had been scandals and duels, volumes of prose, even a novel and a play. Having skirmished his way up to being a cabinet Minister of this and that, and then Prime Minister of France from 1906 to 1909, he had served again in that post, and as Minister of War at the same time, during the final year of the bloodiest crisis in European history.

Even with all this—and with his “private” life so packed with affairs and dalliances that his biographers have despaired about chasing them all down—Clemenceau’s involvements with the arts in his own time, and also with the mission and operations of France’s great museums, surpass those of any other leader of a Western republic; and books have been written about the scope and impact of his engagement.[3] There is space here for a few examples. As early as the 1880s, he helped lead the campaign to erect Jean Gautherin’s imposing statue of Diderot, the free-thinking Enlightenment hero, at Place St. Germain des Prés on the Left Bank, to gaze with a bemused defiance at the grand and ancient church across the way. A few years after, when Monet and his fellow Impressionists organized to save Édouard Manet’s Olympia from foreign purchase and conserve it in the national collections, Clemenceau’s advocacy and clout did much to get that accomplished; in the fall of 1906, the opening days of his first term as Prime Minister, he personally ordered this painting’s transfer out of its exile at the Musée de Luxembourg and into the galleries of the Louvre. In the autumn of 1891 he led a similar effort to acquire Whistler’s ever-controversial Arrangement in Gray and Black (“Whistler’s Mother”) with public funds and accord it a similar place of honor; in Rodin’s long wrangle with the Societé des Gens des Lettres over the planned monument to Balzac, Clemenceau intervened repeatedly and combatively on the sculptor’s behalf. In his own journal La Justice, with his friend Gustave Geffroy (one of those genuine art critics, who would later write an important book about Monet, and also a book about Clemenceau himself) he called—successfully—for an experiment with musées du soir, galleries kept open late with free admission, so that the working multitudes of Paris, who commonly had to be at their jobs six days every week, could actually come out and see exhibitions. His personal collection of antique kōgō, exquisitely-carved or sculpted incense boxes from Japan, grew to more than three thousand items; recently they have been the focus for special showings and studies. Along with Monet and Geffroy, Clemenceau was also friends with Manet, with Raffaëlli (who painted him giving a speech in a packed hall near Montmartre), and with Degas, the Goncourt brothers, Cézanne, Octave Mirbeau, Renoir, Zola, Sarah Bernhardt, Daudet, Morisot, Huysmans, Mallarmé—the list of his companions and connections in the arts reads like a checklist of the avant garde from his prime. In 21st century America our A-list politicians keep clear of such company. A public liking for the contemporary arts, for any cultural action that might strike some klatch of potential voters as daring or esoteric, is the kind of behavior that makes a handler cringe.

Portrait of Clemenceau, 1925.

As he began writing about Monet in the spring of 1928, Clemenceau was setting out on a final voyage into the heart of his own enthusiasm for painting. Monet, whose work he loved so much, was also one of his favorite human beings, though in temperament the two men often seemed a mismatch. Monet could be reclusive, passive, given to extended bouts of self-pity and despair; Clemenceau was notoriously inexhaustible in his energy, convictions, and perseverance. During the Great War, and especially in the early Twenties, Monet’s fugues of reluctance about finishing the Nymphéas panels, these culminating Grandes Decorations that he had promised the nation, drove his old friend to levels of rage and exasperation that nearly brought their friendship to an end. Nonetheless, the long history they had shared, a mutual admiration reaching back to 1886, did much to pull them both through these troubles. It was Geffroy who had introduced them in that year; and though they had met at least once long before, this was the encounter that took hold, growing in strength in the nineties when Monet joined Clemenceau’s side in the battle to bring Alfred Dreyfus back from Devil’s Island and disgrace. After many visits up to Giverny, where Monet was creating his gardens at his final home, Clemenceau chose the nearby village of Bernouville for his own weekend retreat in 1902, buying an old half-timbered house there in 1908 and keeping it until 1922. The surviving correspondence makes clear that in various ways these men completed one another. This was especially true for Clemenceau, for whom these journeys into aesthetic life, this immersion in nuances of the natural world and the mysterious quiet music of garden sunlight, provided solace from the whirl and brawl of his political doings in Paris, and also from the horrors of the Front, the trenches he visited so often during the protracted slaughter less than fifty miles away.

At Giverny, Monet had begun experimenting with paintings of his water-lily pond around 1899,[4] offering a show of about forty canvases at the gallery of Durand-Ruel (his longtime agent in the city) about ten years later. The subject had evolved into a deep commitment, perhaps beyond the point of obsession. By some accounts the artist worked on more than 150 studies of the lilies, the waters, and the play of light between 1904 and 1908; many of these he subsequently destroyed in outbreaks of frustration.[5] As the catastrophe of the Great War broke upon Europe and soon came unnervingly close—on the plains around Giverny one could hear the mauled boom of heavy artillery along the Marne—the two friends began to dream of a capstone œuvre of Impressionist insight, grand in physical dimensions as well as in ambition: a set of enormous panels for the people of France, to celebrate victory if it ever came, or at least to mark an end to the carnage. For such a project Monet’s studio wasn’t nearly big enough; and after Clemenceau won a place on the Senate’s Army Commission, as well as on its Commission on Foreign Affairs in January 1915, plans went forward for an enormous free-standing building east of the family’s rambling pink house. With more than three thousand square feet of floor space, with big skylights fifty feet above, elaborate sun-screens, and central heating, it now serves as the gift-shop for the Foundation that conserves the home and the gardens. Work began in July of that year, and Monet had moved his easels and panels into it by December.[6] On such a large private building, how could construction proceed so quickly when the national effort to supply the poilus and the trench system was urgent and the needed materials were in high demand? By some accounts Clemenceau himself was responsible[7]—and if so, no surprise: ferociously dedicated to winning, The Tiger regarded the old painter and this promised, ultimate work as national treasures in the struggle for survival. France must come through this ordeal as France, with its culture alive and robust; and with his characteristic conviction, Clemenceau had decided that Monet and these unfinished Nymphéas were to be ranked among the assets that mattered most.

Georges Clemenceau inspects an artillery shell at the front, 1918.

In November of 1917, when he became Prime Minister for the second time as well as Minister of War, Clemenceau was seventy-six years old, and the story of his all-out commitment to victory—the numerous treks, with no fanfare and small escort, into the mud with the troops; the wrangling with Foch, Pétain, Haig, and the other clay-footed generals; the long skein of rousing speeches in arenas of power and to the public in the streets; the personal intervention in countless aspects and levels of the effort to triumph—this part of the Clemenceau story has filled many volumes. In those years and afterward, he was also fighting on a second front, coming to Giverny when he could slip away from Paris or the command center at Bombon, or writing to Monet privately and directly, or to the painter’s step-daughter and guardian Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, all in a quest to keep the artist glued together psychologically, and also physically, and committed to their pact. Fat now and a heavy smoker, often awash with wine and losing his eyesight to cataracts, Monet was susceptible to losing heart, fearing that he could no longer muster the drive and the psychological wherewithal to finish these panels well, yet also complaining at times about the planning by others as to where and how the paintings would be displayed, if he ever did get them done. About those matters Clemenceau applied constant pressure in Paris as well as up at Giverny; and as usual he made things happen. In September of 1920, with Geffroy’s support, he secured a firm commitment from Monet to complete at least a dozen of the Nymphéas panels and donate them as a set to the Republic.[8] About two years after, in response to Clemenceau’s urging and also his interactions on the painter’s behalf with leading ophthalmologists, Monet began a three-step sequence of cataract surgery that improved his vision somewhat, as well as his morale[9]—at least for the time being. Meanwhile there were surprises, disappointments, and showdowns about the site for the art: when Clemenceau’s party was voted out of office in 1920, hopes for a new pavilion on the grounds of the Hôtel Biron faded for lack of clout and funding; an architect had to be found to refit the Orangerie as a recourse[10]—and when that work was completed, Monet slid into an emotional tailspin that nearly brought the whole plan and the friendship to a close. In February of 1926, however, Monet assured Clemenceau that twenty-two Nymphéas panels were finally finished, and that they would be ready for shipment to Paris as soon as the paint was dry.[11] Over the course of the summer and fall, lung cancer and other ailments closed in. On December 5, Monet died at Giverny with Clemenceau at his bedside. There are photographs of him in the front rank of the small group of mourners at the churchyard down the road on the day of the burial; and in photos from a day in the following spring, May 17, 1927, The Tiger is out front once again, aged, solemn, serene, proud, at the inaugural ceremonies for the Nymphéas galleries, the Tuileries home where we find them now.

About the translation

Claude Monet was Clemenceau’s second book for the Plon press in a series called Nobles Vies—Grandes Œuvres. In his earlier work, a short appreciation of the Athenian orator Demosthenes, Clemenceau observes that the craft of holding an audience proves to be “… less a matter of fine and careful arguing—an indulgence for commentators and critics—than of giving a sense of one’s whole self as committed to the fight.”[12] That comment says as much about Clemenceau’s own way with language as it might about Demosthenes: throughout his half-century as a writer and orator, Clemenceau crafted his own sentences to resonate in the ear as well as in the mind. Another of his friends from the arts, Stéphane Mallarmé, was famous for describing poetry as a kind of incantation. We can find that value in play throughout French verse and prose of the fin de siècle, and Clemenceau often exemplified it at the rostrum and on the printed page. This strategy wasn’t empty theatrics; from all accounts he was to the core a man of passions, of high enthusiasm in whatever cause or avocation he took up, whatever line of inquiry or reasoning he plunged into. As a statesman, insurgent, adventurer, connoisseur, amorist, novelist, playwright, he put everything on the line—and not surprisingly, his discourse at times can be opulent and orotund beyond the bounds of modern taste. In Claude Monet he has much to tell us, and he does the telling with astounding zeal.

For an English translation, therefore, a basic challenge is to convey that substance and intensity with no sacrifice in clarity, no loss of meaning or tone in sorting out what can seem at times like a wilderness of embellishment and syntax. The only other English version we have, completed more than eighty years ago, keeps faith with the original in a word-by-word sort of way; consequently, it can lose modern readers in fogbanks with regard to Clemenceau’s intention, voice, and nuanced observation. To hear this formidable man breathing as he comments, reminisces, extrapolates, and grieves; to conserve the vividness and drive in the stories he tells of personal experience with his friend; and most important, to open up this rarest of texts in which a great divide between our cultural and political life is challenged, I’ve worked to make this possible. For the sake of clarity, long ceremonious sentences in the original French are sometimes reworked into two or more shorter ones; when superlatives and other modifiers accumulate in ways that hinder a reader’s journey through insights and appreciations that matter, they have here and there been condensed. Veteran translators have reviewed my work to help me ensure that it sustains a proper faithfulness to the original text; I am especially grateful to Jane Kuntz and Douglas Kibbee at the University of Illinois, Anne D. Hedeman at the University of Kansas, and Pierre Michel at the Université de Liège, whose expertise in the ways of the French language runs very deep, for advising me on many spots where the job needed to be done better.

Included here, to enrich a sense of Clemenceau as a longtime, passionate advocate for the arts, are paragraphs that he excised from “La Revolution des Cathédrales” (published in La Justice on May 20, 1895) when he revised that essay to be the seventh chapter of Claude Monet thirty years later. Not translated into English before, these passages make an open challenge to Félix Faure, who had recently become President of France, to step forward on the Republic’s behalf and purchase as many of the Rouen Cathedral series as could possibly be acquired, so that their sequence, and the shifts and progressions they catch in the play of sunlight on the façade, could be comprehended and enjoyed by the French public. These paragraphs appear in note 6 for the translated text. In the Appendix, also to boost our enjoyment of Clemenceau as knowledgeably embroiled in these matters, there are three lively opinion-pieces from the nineties, each of them also from La Justice, about curating and purchasing at the Louvre, and the conservation and accessibility of France’s great collections. “Le Louvre Libre” appeared on March 18, 1894; “Au Louvre” on June 6 of the same year; and “Musées du Soir” on November 21. Clemenceau gathered these essays into his volume Le Grand Pan (1896); they appear here in English for the first time.

Bruce Michelson
Urbana, Illinois
October 2015.

1. Jean Martet, Georges Clemenceau. Trans. Milton Waldman (New York: Longman’s, 1930), 121. ↵

2. Martet, Georges Clemenceau, 206. ↵

3. A recent wide-ranging collection on this subject: Michel Brousset, Béatrice Bougerie, and Mélanie le Gros, eds., Clemenceau et les Artistes Modernes: Manet, Monet, Rodin… (Paris: SOMOGY Éditions d’Art, 2013). ↵

4. Karin Sagner-Düchting, Monet at Giverny (New York: Pegasus, 1999), 50. ↵

5. In a letter to Paul Durand-Ruel on April 23, 1907, Monet says of the experiment so far: “At the very most I have five or six that are possible; moreover I’ve just destroyed thirty at least and this is entirely to my satisfaction.” See Richard Kendall, ed., Monet by Himself: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Letters (London: Little, Brown, 2000), 198. ↵

6. Paul Hayes Tucker, “Revolution in the Garden: Monet in the Twentieth Century,” in Tucker et al., Monet in the Twentieth Century (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1998), 66–67. ↵

7. See for example Carla Rachman, Monet A&I (Art and Ideas) (New York: Phaidon, 1997), 300. ↵

8. Tucker et al., 75. ↵

9. From the winter and spring of 1923, Clemenceau’s letters to Monet about the surgery, letters of medical substance as well as encouragement, are collected in Georges Clemenceau: Correspondance 1858–1929, ed. Sylvie Brodziak and Jean-Noël Jeanneny (Paris, BNF, 2008), 641–665. ↵

10. Pierre Gorgel, Claude Monet: Waterlilies (Vanves-Cedex: Hazan, 1999), 21. ↵

11. Tucker et al., 83. ↵

12. Clemenceau, Démosthène (Paris: Librarie Plon, 1926), 50. My translation. ↵

I

Claude Monet: The Water-Lilies

1

Lessons from a Life

Though we often hear that biographies of “great men” provide a fine education in the arts of living, it’s not easy to come up with a description for greatness. We could, I suppose, try to measure it by tallying up the official honors—but that’s hardly foolproof. When Claude Monet was asked why he wasn’t a man laden with medals and ribbons, his response was a hearty and innocent laugh.

The fact is, human beings sort each other out, fairly or not, on the basis of what they accomplish in life; and whatever lessons we draw from our acquaintance with others depends on what we see of them, and when. Though chance has a lot to do with that, there is no life, no matter how conspicuous or humble, that can’t teach us something—at the very least, about the compassion we should bring to watching other lives unfold.

To help us find our way, our moralizers often resort to examples from histories of “the famous,” and there’s nothing wrong with that, though for reckoning with modern life, it’s hard to find much inspiration from what we know of some in the usual pantheon, the likes of Themistocles or Epaminondas. Even Plutarch, after all, did not look at them carefully, and his book of exemplary Lives includes several where the personal conduct fell a bit short (were I to write at any length about Plutarch himself, I’d question his fondness for Alcibiades, and also his astounding misjudgment of both Aristotle and Phidias, though these were common errors in his time). For famous men to chronicle and praise, Plutarch had plenty to choose from; though the real triumphs of the Hellenistic world lay in the realms of philosophy and art, our Charonean guide paid scant attention to such pursuits; and for that reason we can lose sight, in his company, of the age’s two best embodiments of the humanist ideal. For splendid condensations of those insights, Aristotle should be our source, despite his adulation for Philip of Macedon, who repaid Aristotle by saddling him with tutoring the prince of the realm. And, in the evolution of Greek sculpture, Phidias—until he slid into excesses with ivory and gold—is still perhaps the only master who can be said to have reached the absolute limits of his art, a level of excellence that may never be surpassed. Even so, our wonderful Stagyrite rates only fleeting mention in Plutarch’s chronicle of Alexander, who went tearing like a madman through the Orient. Plutarch does offer a few more words about the Maestro of Marble in another place, in connection with his friend the great orator Pericles, a relationship that didn’t save Phidias from dying in prison. Neither of these two—Aristotle the philosopher, Phidias the artist—qualifies for the Lives pantheon. It’s easier, after all, to chronicle the exploits of soldiers.

I hope the reader will excuse me if I start by indulging myself like this—in seeking, perhaps in vain, to write sincerely and usefully about what I have felt, what I have seen, and what I have loved, about another great artist, who is with us no more.

It’s likely that in all the variety of human experience, a careful inquiry would turn up many more great lives that we might suppose. The troubles reside in how we make those judgments, the difficulty in deciding what really matters, and what doesn’t.

Even so, no drama moves me more deeply than a human life dedicated completely to the service of some high ideal, a life of unquenchable enthusiasm, tempered and guided by a sustained force of will. When detractors of such people rail about the importance of being “well-rounded,” we should remember how, over a span of centuries, one widely-sanctioned model of temperament has eventually given way to some other, often against the resistance of some prevailing atavism. Through all of that, however, our youthful dream, that all this learning and doing that fills our lives will take us somewhere in the direction of the Infinite, never ceases, never yields, through all the contortions of fate, all the obstructions and the outcomes, all the rude surprises that time and nature can inflict on us—the raw material from which we somehow contrive the “unity” of who we are.

To make up our mind about a painter, perhaps we should do nothing more than gaze at the work. If we find ourselves face to face with a recognition that taste is ultimately an individual matter, that’s as far as we can go. Though we try to be social and civil creatures, we also try to affirm our own personality in the process—by which we usually mean a set of contrarian views to which we unsteadily ascribe. This is a problem par excellence, subtending our joy and misery as we live in the world. In our daily experience we come back to this basic question again and again; and if we have made any progress with it as a nation, it might be only that we no longer hang people for saying “yes” or “no” to some prevailing doctrine.

On matters of art, where sheer feeling matters so much, we cannot dismiss judgments that seem to arise purely from our being human. It’s a fact of life that worldly experience transforms our mood, our temperament; and for comprehending these shifts and changes, the artist can match the savant or even surpass him, lifting us out of mundane and mechanical modes of seeing and knowing, leading us to apogees of insight. To put it another way: great art arises from a rare and dynamic rapport between one special sort of human being, the motions and surprises of daily experience, and the infinite heavens above. The better the art is at evoking and sounding all the nuances of human response, and the more deeply the artist immerses himself in this supreme enterprise—so valuable to others on this worldly journey—the closer we all come to doing something truly beautiful, in this drift through the eternities.

And so, dear reader, I’ll take the risk of offering you these thoughts about Claude Monet. His legacy is a sublime moment for the arts and for life itself, as plenty of good critics have said already. What I am looking for here is the human being behind all the work, the man who, having dedicated himself to following the highest aspirations, dared to face the darkest mysteries of life, to gather them up and shape them into something exquisite and complete, driven by an urgency and a will that nothing could turn aside. As Heaven is my witness, there is nothing ordinary about his achievement. And that is what moves me to add a few touches here to the Monet self-portrait, to make clear, as much as I can, the truth about the man who brought so much honor to his times, to his country, to life on this earth.

It wasn’t an easy decision for me to venture these observations about the play of sunlight that characterizes the Nymphéas paintings in the Jardin d’Eau series. As I am neither a painter nor an art critic nor a poet, the most plausible claim I can make is that I might speak for a broad and anonymous public, the people of France for whom these works were completed, and to whom they were given by Monet himself. Because this is a special honor for us all, I will try to be worthy of it here by bearing in mind how this gift was offered: in other words, to represent an emotional openness to universal energies, to fresh insights that help us join in a better understanding of ourselves and the world. This is not just evolution of an aesthetic sort, but rather something deeper and more general in the development of our species; for every improvement in our faculties has a corresponding effect on the evolution of the whole organism.

So “glorifying” Monet is really not my purpose in troubling anyone who takes a chance on this book. All too well, Monet knew what the incense of adulation smells like; in its heady odor he took no pleasure—and now that he is gone, he is beyond all such worldly fussing about what he accomplished. But because Monet did live, he left us something of himself that we must see clearly for the sake—and also for the dignity—of our own cultural future. That is what I am after. I said before that from every human life some lesson can be drawn; what does Monet’s own life tell us? Much about art, of course; but also much about humanity, for all art, like knowledge itself, leads ultimately to expressions of feeling.

Monet was a great lyric artist, and as such he was a man of action. When conjoined, however, these virtues do not guarantee outpourings of admiration from one’s contemporaries. In fact, nothing does a better job of antagonizing the multitudes today than fresh ideas wholeheartedly carried out. Monet was certainly not a man of doctrines; one could say in fact that he shrouded himself in silence and let his bold, free, and passionate brushwork do his talking for him. Always confident in the rightness of his vision, he held ferociously to painting what he saw, and as he saw it, with no regard for atelier conventions that had governed the arts heretofore.

Assailed for all this with implacable violence, there were times when he doubted his own skills; but he never lost faith in his eye, and through valiant effort and ever-rising perseverance, he took dominion in a way that he himself had never thought possible, dying amid the radiance of incomparable success, a triumph that defies the common fate, oblivion. When centuries of time have drifted past this adventure, its glow will only be the brighter.

For the moment, let’s busy ourselves with preparing the way.

2

Claude Monet, Painter

I cannot pass over the basics about the man himself.

Middling height, well-knit, steady and robust, with a smiling forthright gaze and a firmly sonorous voice—isn’t that enough to suggest “a healthy mind in a healthy body,” a man of good will, with all the energies in harmony to make a human being what he is supposed to become? For stealing the divine fire and concealing it in a hollow rod, the Titan Prometheus suffered on his rock; as a mere mortal, Monet sought the conquest of heavenly light, to give us the wonder of the life around us, to celebrate its changefulness, to open its nuances for us to comprehend.

Demigods, legends, tales of wonders: to tell of one actual human being doing human work, hyperbole and distortion do no good. We need the truth and nothing less than that. Look at the shape of the head, powerful like a fortress by Vauban[1] when he was on the attack, protecting his center while blasting away at a worldly experience that resists us all with secrets and mysteries. The sky, the fields, valleys, mountains, waters, forests—all around, the natural world, scattering, shape-shifting, lies open to us, only to break away again whenever we try to catch it. One astounding moment after another, on our journey to insights which, even in a work of artistic genius, we can never do more than come near.

When I tell you that Claude Monet was born on rue Laffitte in Paris, in the neighborhood where the picture galleries are now—a fact that one might twist into an omen of sorts—I tell you next to nothing. But when I add that he grew up in Le Havre, and that he was intoxicated by the heady brew of light along those shores, spilling down on restless seas from infinite skies, I might come closer to explaining how he came to know the mad exuberance of the air, every shade and shadow and hue in the reckless abandon of wave and wind. From childhood, Monet was enthralled by the vast horizons of that coast. To make a little money in his youth he turned out prosaic sketches, caricatures of people he knew. “I love to draw,” he wrote, though he wasn’t born for that; and when he reached the age of fifteen, his work with a pencil had brought in enough to pay for a trip to Paris.

Closer to home, in the resort town of Sainte-Adresse, he had come to know Boudin,[2] who took him out to paint in the open air, where Monet encountered the palette of nature itself. A flame leaped in his heart; he found his reason for being alive, and he began his quest for the skills to match his dreams. Troyon,[3] whom he had also met, offered him some peculiar advice, to go and train in the atelier of Couture[4]—but staying clear of academe, Monet soon became friends with Camille Pissarro in Paris; and he later reproached himself for spending too much of his time there hanging around in the Brasserie des Martyrs. It was there, however, that he met Albert Glatigny, and the unforgettable Théodore Pelloquet, who fought a duel with swords over Manet’s Olympia;[5] and there was Manet himself, and many others as well: Alphonse Duchêne, Castagnary,[6] Delveaux, Daudet, Courbet—and lasting friendships took shape.

In 1860 a conscription lottery put him into an army regiment, the Chasseurs d’Afrique, for two years of service which, he said later, did him a lot of good. With his skills as an artist he turned out a portrait of his captain and was rewarded with a leave of absence. When he fell ill, he was granted another leave for convalescence, after which his father, convinced now of the depths of his son’s dedication to his calling, resolved to pay for a substitute in the service. And so it was that Claude Monet headed for study in the atelier of Gleyre; but he also resolved to follow Jongkind and Boudin on their forays into the countryside to see the world as it truly is. In 1864, Renoir, Bazille, and Sisley all joined the cause. “In the Salons of 1865 and 1866 my first experiments were favorably received,” wrote Monet. And then came Courbet, to see Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, that great plein air canvas by this young man “who actually paints something besides angels.” They stayed friends—and later in life Monet affirmed that Courbet “had lent me money when times were hard.”

The Africa days were now behind him; as an artist, he said that although the countryside there was spectacular, he could not emulate Delacroix and catch its colors on a palette. Already, however, Monet was feeling something deep within, like a supernatural monster that would take dominion over his flesh, his blood, his life. For him it seemed that the die was cast, that he would always be in pursuit of shafts and dances of light itself, never tiring in his quest for its great secret.

Detail of Les Nymphéas (Water Lilies, Setting Sun).

In the Nymphéas panels, we find him lost in his struggle to realize something impossible. From his restless hand, skyrockets of transparent brilliance streak across the canvas, an impasto that seems to burst into flame. Genius in the daring brushwork, genius also in the alchemies of color on his palette, from which Monet could gather, in a single confident sweep, drops of a luminescent daybreak dew, lasting tribute to a morning where nothing like this can abide. Close up, the canvas looks like a riot of mismatched colors; from a few feet away, at the right viewpoint, they come together, connecting, blending, a delicate construction of natural forms, catching the precision and the poise in the play of sunlight. This is a miracle I will need to come back to, later on.

Les Nymphéas (Water Lilies, Setting Sun).

One day I told Monet: “This is humiliating for me. You and I never see things the same way. When I open my eyes I see shapes and nuances of color that I take for granted as the way the world is, until somebody shows me that I’m wrong. My eye can go no deeper than the reflecting surface. With you it’s all different. The sharp blade of your gaze slices through these outer crusts of appearance; reaching the inner truth you break it down into fundamental colors, and then with your brush you recreate it with subtlety, with all its intensity, as an experience for us all. And when I’m looking at a tree and seeing nothing but a tree, you, with your eyes half-closed, are saying to yourself ‘How many shades of how many colors can we experience in these gradations of light merely upon this trunk?’ With that, you set to work disrupting all of our conventional ways of seeing, to build for us a fresh understanding of the harmony of the whole. And at times you’re vexed, in this struggle to see into the life of things, to come as close as you can to the best possible interpretive synthesis. You’re troubled with self-doubts, not seeing that you have set out on a journey towards the infinite, and that you’ll have to settle for coming close, but never quite getting there.”

Camille sur son lit de mort (Camille on Her Deathbed).

Monet answered me: “You cannot imagine how right you are about that. This is what haunts me, bringing me joy and tormenting me every day. This is how far it can go: one day, finding myself by the open coffin of a woman who was, and still remains, very dear to me, and with my eyes fixed on her tragic visage, I caught myself looking for a sequence there, degradations of tone and color that death was bringing into her motionless face. Shades of blue, yellow, gray—what was I thinking?! That’s how bad it was. The desire was natural enough, to do a final portrait of someone who was leaving us forever; but even before I had that thought, to represent those features that meant so much to me, my immediate and intuitive response was to the shock of the color, letting it pull me into a mindless repetition of what I do every day, like a farm animal tethered to a mill. And that, my friend, is pathetic.”

Monet’s eye—it was nothing less than the entire man. Endowed with exquisite retinal sensitivity, he focused all of his attention on the supreme harmony of the natural world as a portal into the comprehension of universal truth. All masters of painting have this gift; what strikes us about Monet is that his entire life was dedicated to it. Devoted to his family and to his friends—a circle he took joy in expanding, to shower it with his generous friendship—he received, from his loving sons and also from his daughter-in-law Madame Blanche Monet (a painter in her own right when time allows), all the attention he could want in a life so structured and intense. Whenever he put down his brush, he ran to his flower gardens, or settled into his easy-chair to think about his pictures.

With his eyes closed and his arms hanging motionless and limp, he sought for moments of sunlight that had got away; and when he failed (or perhaps only imagined it), he lapsed into sour thoughts about the work. But any quick pleasantry could fetch him back to contentment, at least to a measure of hope, though he would often grumble about the trials of the coming day. And so it went: everything in the man given over to this desire, this endless anticipation of sunlight’s caress. Carried by his dreams so far beyond his own human capacity to respond, his eye was like some triumphal arch, open to every stirring from beyond, to the exaltation of being alive.

I don’t see that Monet ever thought seriously about explaining his own work. Nothing to him could have seemed like a bigger waste of time. Born with a palette in his hand, he couldn’t imagine life anywhere else than in front of a canvas, to catch and hold those moments of vivacious light with which the world arranges itself, as if gazing in a mirror, into illusions of stillness. To feel, to think, to yearn as an artist: in the realms of painting there was nothing to hold him back. Like an archer with a straight arrow and his bow at the ready, he waited only for the right moment to let fly. He watched for it, like anyone driven to express his own perceptions as completely as he possibly can, and knowing that no such quest can ever truly succeed.

As I’ve already said, nothing seems more beautiful to me than this concentration of every human capacity on one exquisite purpose, an ideal whose pursuit brings the whole self into harmony. Obviously this is genius, yet also a mystery, this absolute convergence of everything we are and do for a perfect flowering of grandeur and beauty. Though we collectively venerate the names of artists who dazzle us in pursuit of this dream, we are less sure in our regard for nuance, chance effects, enigmas whose meanings can never come clear.

There is no shortage of painters out there, and many of them have won high honors that they rightly deserve. But among them Monet stands out in this way: once he achieved his own unique style he continued to develop it, beyond the series Les Meules and Les Peupliers,[7] the Rouen Cathedral facades, the Thames at London, all the way to the masterwork of the Nymphéas. To talk about such an adventure is to take a risk: interpretation can collapse into a kind of giddy hyper-sensitivity that shuts other people out rather than shows them something new. Monet himself was trying to say something like that when he said, as he often did, “Sooner or later they’ll understand—but I did come along too early.” Whenever he said this, his steely-black eyes, bedded in their sockets like field-mortars, were engaged with the play of light upon everything in the world, to open spectacular insights, a unified sense of all that is and all that seems to be.

In everything he did as an artist, this was the dedication of Claude Monet.

Portrait of Claude Monet by Gilbert de Séverac.

Looking back at these early years of his career, how shall we imagine him in this struggle for the conquest of light itself? He was largely unknown, for Durand-Ruel, with his expert eye and his skills as a promoter, had not discovered him yet. What did he look like, this young contender, gripped with an ambition that so often leads nowhere? We have little to go on, except for a portrait of him at the age of eighteen by Déodat de Séverac.[8] The face is full of dramatic energy; the forehead, which would stand out so strongly in the rare self-portraits from later years, is already dominant here. Séverac himself was beginning to think like a true painter, deconstructing his subject to recreate it as visual experience, with emphasis on strong and clear transitions. What dominates here is the audacity of the gaze, coming straight at us fearlessly, and also in a sense without hope, sustained by an idea with no concessions to circumstance or fate. All in all, the portrait gives us a sense of power in a moment of taking dominion. Indeed, that was about to happen.

Claude Monet at Work, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

A study from 1875, Renoir’s Claude Monet at Work[9] is every bit as important. Here the body of the young man is left vague; the face seems softer, gentler. Nonetheless, the demeanor of this young artist conveys a feeling of conviction joined with manly energy. The mouth is tight no longer; freely, the nostrils draw in the air. And ablaze with curiosity, the eyes focus inexorably upon the play of light in the room, the abiding mystery. The battle is joined, and these are the first waves of an assault that will never let up.

At the Giverny house, in a self-portrait of Monet at the age of forty, we see the mature artist, full of vitality and stunning simplicity. Nothing could be less conventional, less contrived, less “stylized,” than this image of a man doing his work, entirely caught up in the expression of sensory experience and personal feeling. Seeking nothing less than to understand the natural world through the motions of its tides of light, he cannot let go of his resolve to get everything out of the experience, wherever he chanced to be or positioned himself, seeing it always as the core of the vast drama. Tranquil and self-assured like a skilled clairvoyant, he looks away with a gaze of candor and resolve. A world beyond seems to enrapture him, filling him with holy fire, a world whose inundations of light he must penetrate and subdue. Across his forehead the furrows tell of unwavering élan. Making no gesture at all, the artist is entirely composed, ready to spring into action: he sees, he understands, he decides, he is on his way. Such is our Claude Monet, guileless and balanced as we have not seen him before, all set to pour himself into his art. Trusting in his palette and gathered for a mastering leap when the moment of decision is there, he is present in all of his famous intensity, the innocent ardor of a visionary, to achieve his conquest of light itself, light leading him inexorably onward, light he has resolved to master.

Claude Monet, self-portrait.

At this point in his life the formative years are over, the talents and strengths brought into harmony for this overriding intent. Though his full triumph still lies ahead of him, with sure eyes he has already surveyed where he must go, the great field where the battle must be won. Only at the very end did Augustus recognize that the commedia of his own life had found its form and now was over; Monet, with no comedy in him, and troubled by the kind of self-doubt that can come like a luxury to those who have fulfilled their destiny, could see the handsome shape of his own drama, even as he balked at giving his Nymphéas to the people of France before his death. A final, endearing uncertainty: an honest and gallant completion for this life of selfless exertion.

In the year 1917, before the Nymphéas were completed, Monet painted three additional self-portraits which he spoke of only hesitantly, perhaps because he saw in them the limits of what he could do at that point in his life and did not believe he could surpass them in the days he had left. Two of these canvases show him in full daylight beneath one of his big straw hats. When he showed them to me he seemed to enjoy disparaging them: “I can do better than that,” he cried with scorn, “but I won’t have the time.” When he said that, I could see only too well what would happen next: for years, Monet had been in the habit of destroying canvases that displeased him by slashing them with a paint-scraper and kicking them to pieces.[10] Still in his studio, on studies for panels, we can see the mayhem inflicted in these outbursts of frustration and rage, showing no mercy to himself or his efforts.

Self-portrait by Claude Monet.

Of the final self-portrait, the one that is now in the Louvre, I cannot write without feeling. It catches him at his best, his spirit aglow, with the final triumph in sight, before he was crushed by the unspeakable prospect of going blind. For anyone who knew first-hand the depths to which Monet could plunge when faced by the prospect of ultimate failure, and his ecstasies when he sensed that some great difficulty had been surpassed, there can be no doubt about his response. This final portrait shows his inner life at the moment when Monet began the soaring flight that culminated in the Nymphéas; and complete as they seemed, those two portraits he destroyed must be thought of only as preparation for the marvelous one that survived. Before the battle is joined, victory seems sure; for this warrior, the fanfare sounds before the fight begins.

But the powerful brow we see here once more, unscathed by anything the Philistines of his time could launch at him, also conveys the tragedy at the core of this glorious career. The price he paid is suggested in those wide, high temples of the skull, the center and seat of his poise and self-possession. Eyes half-closed as if to savor a dream, nostrils aquiver, the throat convulsed by energies deep within: the maestro we see here has reached, at this very moment, a thrilling apprehension of ultimate success. His excitement radiates even in this flowing beard, luminous and glorious, like a vexillum of Charlemagne, emperor of a new land.

Like others, I’ve understood that from the physical positions that Monet had to work from, an ordinary observer can see the canvas only as a riot of colors crazily applied. Take a few steps back, however, and natural forms and harmonies come miraculously clear, resolving what had seemed a chaos of dabs and brushstrokes; an astounding symphony of hues emerges from these thickets of intermingled color. Unable to move about like this when he was painting, how could Monet keep clear, in his own imagination, laboring so close to his canvas, all this intricate deconstruction and recomposing to make possible the overall effect? The sensitivity required for this had to be exquisitely delicate, all those responses, so quick and agile, to instants of perception, this headlong sequence of images striking the retina. What a gift, to bear up so well in this long and physical combat with light itself.

It goes without saying that Monet himself never indulged in theorizing about any of this. Nature had given him eyes fit for the challenge, and he trusted them, allowing no doctrines to get in the way—the most basic rule for doing a good day’s work. Settling down in silence before his subject, he began his interrogation, his face twitching as his eyes flashed back and forth: the subject, the palette, the leap of brush to canvas. As this drama unfolded there was no idle conversation. Once in a while, a question to his daughter-in-law Blanche Hochedé, who was always nearby; but often these queries really seemed more to himself than to anyone else. Like an aircraft taking off, he required a concerted effort to get himself effectively aloft. Then the hand with the brush would suddenly and freely lash out, like an épée thrust at the very start of a duel.

This self-portrait in the Louvre strikes me as Monet’s last testament to us all. In moments when he knew that he would make it, when he recognized, in his own best efforts, the realization of his highest hopes, he could be overwhelmed with a feeling of triumphal joy. This final, wonderful portrait catches that exultation. Its historical interest lies in how it shows us Monet in a whirl of excitement, the artist happy in the achievement of his dreams. After a life of labor, triumph radiates upon the face, the banishment of old and abiding fears by the certainty of ultimate success. In the brushwork here, we are shown, by a twist of fate, this culminating flash of exultation.

The Nymphéas idea had enthralled Monet for a long time. In quiet, every morning, along the shores of his pond, he spent hours watching the clouds and the blue skies moving in magical parades above his Jardin d’Eau et de Feu. With furious intensity he studied shape and encounter, variances in luminosity and penetration. Having mastered the art of assimilating so much into himself in the service of his interpretive strategy, what he sought now was to catch the moment in touches and details barely perceptible, in nature’s reflections of light on its infinite journey. From this magnificent effort, chronicled in one vibrant study after another, the Nymphéas of the Tuileries gradually took form. Only in 1916, after such extensive contemplation of his water-garden, a thousand different varieties of aesthetic challenge and critique, did Monet resolve firmly to do this work, and to have the vast new studio built that such an adventure required. When that order was given, the commitment was absolute and complete, requiring this aging painter not only to live up to his own exacting standards, but to see everything to the very end.

Numerous paintings of water lilies preceded the spectacular culmination that we now have in the Tuileries, and when we look back over that sequence, those final panels show levels of imagination and skill far superior to those early experiments that took shape in the grand new atelier. Though some of these were very beautiful, many were destroyed in those passionate and turbulent early days. Inevitably, it happened that some sought-for effect would come up short; and because our friendship allowed it, I would risk voicing my own opinion now and then. When I did so, I’d sometimes hear a growl in response, which meant “Well, we’ll see.” Sometimes I’d hear nothing at all. But from one visit to the next, I observed that from all this stubborn labor with brushes and oils, what was taking shape was marvelously replete with air.

My inchoate response to all this often centered on the clouds in these panels, which often struck me as unduly heavy—but I didn’t dare say anything about that. But one day I was in for a shock: cloudscapes that now seemed like irruptions of the lightest vapor. Again I held my peace; and as I looked closer I saw wisps of vapor on the wind, air alive with unraveling and caprice. Monet engaged with the world so raptly that he didn’t suffer comments from others lightly; but ceaselessly, he reconsidered, corrected, fine-tuning until in his own mind everything rang true. A perfectionist, he would never leave a cloud looking even vaguely like those animal-shapes that Hamlet points out to bedevil Polonius. No one was as careful as Monet.

Never one to give in to a first impulse, Monet revisited his own moments of inspiration again and again, always finding reason to fault himself for some shortcoming or other. There were times when he would vilify himself with reckless abandon, swearing that his life was one big failure and that there was nothing left to do except destroy everything he had done before vanishing himself. Some of his best works fell victim to these outbreaks of self-hatred; but many which are now held in high regard were luckily rescued from these rages thanks to the efforts of Madame Monet. I have already observed that two lovely self-portraits in full sunlight were obliterated on a single occasion; the one in the Louvre was saved by chance. One day, when Monet was saying nasty things about it, he went looking for the canvas just as I was getting ready to depart—and throwing it into my car, he said gruffly “Here! Take it away and don’t mention it again!”

Maybe he was looking for a way to shield himself from some new wave of stupid dismissal. When I told him that on the opening day for Nymphéas we should go arm in arm to see this work in the Louvre as well, he said “If we have to wait that long, then it’s good-bye to it forever.”

That sweet excursion never came about, I’m sorry to say, because Monet refused to release his water-lily panels before he died. So we have these two self-portraits—to mark the beginning and the end of his greatest era: from the wheat-stack series to Nymphéas.

Soon after, the cataracts showed up in both of his eyes, a disaster that beggars description. Thanks to surgery and expert medical care, the catastrophe of complete blindness was averted, at least for the time being. Though I was pushing for a more radical treatment, Monet would not take the chance that everything could go dark. So he settled for having his eyesight half-restored, allowing him to bring Nymphéas to completion.

This was nothing less than a miracle, for all that interplay of light, perceived now with eyes so profoundly changed, was very different from what it had been when the project was first taken on. For myself, I had one abiding fear, that entire panels could be totally lost. But for reasons I cannot explain, the project reached its happy ending, unscathed by this change from one mode of seeing to another. This time at least, blind luck was on our side; and I couldn’t help feeling that Providence had intervened on Monet’s behalf.

Still, he had to perform a miracle of his own, and everyone around him begged him to consider the work done, as there were good reasons to fear that one bad slip of the brush could wreak havoc. He let us talk, shook his head, gave no answer.

Time passed, and one day, leading me by the hand, he set me before one of the great panels: upon the surface of a pool of still water, a spectacular universe of light, broken here and there by reflections in shades of blue, adrift in variegated expanses of rose.

“Well, what about that?” he said playfully. “Though you never dared to critique, I knew well enough that the waters looked solid, like something cut out with a blade. All of that light had to be done over again. I didn’t want to risk that. But I decided to—and this will be my farewell. You were afraid I’d spoil it all. So was I. But despite my troubles, my confidence somehow returned, and despite these scrims over my eyes I could see well enough what I had to do, to keep faith with the idea that had guided me this far…. Anyway, look at it! Better? Worse?”

“I was wrong. As a painter, you are so perfect that even with your eyes in bad shape, you’re guided by all that they showed you when they were right, these exquisite harmonies of color.”

“That was luck.”

“A kind of luck that poor Turner never had.”

“Well, I am all done now. I am blind; I have no reason to go on. Even so, you know very well that I won’t let these pictures leave here as long as I’m alive. I’ve reached the point where my own self-criticism cuts deeper than anything the experts have to say. I’ve probably tried to accomplish here more than I can manage, and I’m willing to die without hearing whatever verdict fate wants to hand down. I have given these pictures to France. She can judge them however she will.”

1. As a Marshal under Louis XIV, Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban oversaw the construction and refurbishing of hundreds of fortresses all over France and outlying dominions. ↵

2. Remembered now for his seascapes, Eugène Boudin, nearing the age of fifty, participated in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1873, though he remained conservative in his style. ↵

3. Thirty years older than Monet, Constant Troyon (1810–1865), much influenced by Dutch landscape painters of the seventeenth century, was associated with the Barbizon school. ↵

4. Though he eventually rebelled against the Académie des Beaux Arts, where he had been trained, and opened his own atelier in Senlis, Thomas Couture is often classified now as “academic” in the tradition of Gros, Ingres, and Gérôme. ↵

5. [Clemenceau’s note] He received a wound in the hollow of his left hand, requiring him to do a lot of explaining. It was Pelloquet who inspired Emile Augier to create the character of Giboyer. ↵

6. A liberal politician and prolific journalist as well as an art critic, Jules-Antoine Castagnary, a close friend of Courbet, was one of the early champions of Impressionism. ↵

7. Variously known in English as “The Wheat Stacks,” “The Haystacks,” or “The Grain-stacks,” the series Les Meules is more often showcased at special exhibitions than Les Peupliers, Monet’s paintings of poplar trees along a shoreline at different hours and seasons. ↵

8. Clemenceau’s memory goes astray here: Déodat de Séverac, a composer of tone poems and operas who achieved considerable renown in Clemenceau’s middle years, was the son of Gilbert de Séverac, the painter who did the portrait of the young Monet. ↵

9. Now commonly cited as Portrait of Claude Monet, in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. ↵

10. Because these two straw-hat portraits from 1917 have not turned up, they may indeed have been destroyed by Monet. ↵

3

The World, the Self, and the Light

Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione by Raphael.

Like knowledge itself, the subject of art must be everything—including us—in all of its manifestations, expressed in sensory response, like the sound of an anvil under the blows of a hammer. For too long the contortions and confinements of religious iconography, refined this way and that, were served up to us to satisfy our desire for learning and for the joys of feeling. Think about the stupefying limitation of subject-matter that shackled painting in the Renaissance. Christianity and classical polytheism provided a trove of myths and legends that were taken as “history”; the natural world was ignored. Only portraiture thrived, because of the impossibility of expunging interest in human beings. The Balthazar of Raphael, Leonardo’s Isabella d’Este—these provide proof. Later on, Rembrandt, with no friends among the princely classes, fell back on dressing himself in exotic costumes and seeking humanity in the mirror.

Now, however, we have reached a stage in our consciousness wherein science and art, though worlds apart as pursuits, have this in common: an intense interest in sensory response. Our scientists scrutinize sensation in search of evidence for broader theories; the artist, for his part, trusts to emotional experience, to intimations of order and harmony, to realize, as completely and as well as he can, the sensory encounter with life.

Portrait of Isabella d’Este by Leonardo da Vinci.

Because these are, after all, the manifold reactions of living creatures, an array of feelings and perceptions triggered by and proportionate to external stimuli, I need to limit my attention here to the dynamics of seeing; in other words, one special order of biological and neurological experience. Everyone knows that the art of painting tries to show us the visible world as a symphony of hues, just as music offers us harmonies of sound. Such basic recognitions, long before there was any theorizing on these subjects, fostered the first cave-wall images in the Stone Age and moved shepherds, ages ago, to launch songs onto the errant winds to call their flocks together. What we celebrate as light is only one form of energy, vibrations of a certain amplitude and speed. The universe appears to us as a tempest of waves, colliding or intensifying for momentary effect, an endless flux of lost hopes and ephemeral illusions; only Lethe, dark stream of eternity and forgetfulness, bears witness to it all. Even so, because so much is going on, immense discords and moments of coherence, it can happen that corresponding wonders can unfold within the seer, even if only for an instant, setting off a process that will eventually draw in all the higher faculties, the entire personality. This is the stuff of legend, tales of the imagination taking dominion over the world beyond the self. We find it as far back as the chants of primitive man, where incantations control what unfolds in the moment of the song. We also see it in real life. Claude Monet, for instance.

Wait—how can I bring Monet into musings like this? Why not Leonardo da Vinci instead, or Michelangelo, or Rembrandt, all of whom would work better here not only because they are long gone, but also because their status as Old Masters is beyond question? The answer is that Monet is someone I knew, an artist whose skills I could size up again and again, in all those first-hand encounters with his passionate innocence; a man that I loved; a man I love still; I man I want to bring back to life, here in this shimmering sunlight, the realm where he became the genius who dreamed and made those dreams come true.

L’Atelier de Corot (Corot’s Studio, or Young Woman with a Mandolin) by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.

We remember Leonardo as an artist who knew everything, understood everything, and also did practically everything. Nonetheless, there is no indication that his experiences with light itself ever moved him all the way to rapture. Like so many others of his time he preferred sunsets and twilights, to help him catch, with subtle brushstrokes, the lovely contours of the Mona Lisa’s face. For us the effect is compounded now by the darkening of the varnish on the canvas; though this face is supposedly out in the air, we see it in penumbra. Years ago, when Monet and I were looking at Corot’s Woman with a Mandolin—one of the most beautiful works we have—he said to me (when he was sure that no one else was listening), “I like this better than La Gioconda.”

His point was that for all of Leonardo’s genius, he could not escape from the traditional indoor lighting of the atelier; the rustic Frenchman Corot, however, working without a theory, without a set of rules, and also (dare I say it) without formal training, gave himself over to representing, faithfully, the light of the skies as it really is. (To be fair to Leonardo: in his fabulous line-drawing of Isabelle d’Este, the illumination does play a fundamental role, though the source of that light is left as a mystery.)

Of course it’s presumptuous for someone like me to generalize about these masters with such abandon. My only excuse for this is my one and only qualification—my many years as a spectator. I am part of the mass audience, after all; and for me, as for countless others, the likes of Phidias, Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Frans Hals, Goya, and other great artists all did their work. Ultimately they are all subject to the judgment of the world. All the greats of every age have had to trust us in giving their best; what greater homage can we give them than our sincerest response?

Engineer, poet, sculptor, painter—Michelangelo was an incomparable genius, taking on great challenges and often meeting them or coming close. His Moses owes nothing to Hellenistic sculpture; the shock one feels upon seeing this “monster” cannot be forgotten. And about the Sistine Chapel, what could we say that wouldn’t be paltry and banal, about this panorama of superhuman figures, swept into the heavens by relentless storms of sublime imagining! Magnificent in every realm he entered, Michelangelo takes dominion everywhere; more than royalty, he was almost divine. Also blessed by some unknown god, Rembrandt could find in a flash the perfect way to express insights of astounding intensity. At the museum in Cassel there is a series of his sketches in which one looks for, and often finds, the kind of shimmering that foreshadows a blast of lightning. Syndics of the Drapers Guild is the work of a giant, a master of the heavenly spectrum, working with the sun indoors as well as out, and finding in his subjects the essence of a thunderbolt.

When there was no one else to paint, Rembrandt would turn to his own reflection in any handy mirror, experimenting with brush or etching tools with every kind of lighting. Our ever-curious Dutchman was never fazed by the endless marvels around him. Like Monet much later, Rembrandt responded all-out to the challenges of light, and in this heroic, physical contest he was able to win. Even so, it doesn’t seem that he ever got as far as he dreamed of going: we sense him battering with his bare fists against shadow and darkness, striking sparks of a heavenly fire whose mysteries he had glimpsed as his own brush cut this way and that, to catch and calm an ecstasy of seeing. In his violent contrasts of light and darkness we feel a heat shoot forth as if from a furnace—all this transparent light, here blended and there distinct, these subtle waves of illumination, producing sensations that painting had never achieved before.

It was miraculous, like Monet’s Nymphéas, mirrored in the water-garden, voluptuously asleep in the bosom of the clouds. An encounter with a world turned upside down, made unfamiliar, inducing the eye to mediate these waves of color, symphonically blended. Drawing us into the most elegant webs of visual experience, this novel adventure for the eyes rewards our effort by enriching our powers of perception.

Rembrandt is an artist who expresses himself in contrasts and oppositions. With his water-lilies, Monet took a different path, a narrow one of close observations, fine distinctions. Having studied the shifting light upon the wheat-stacks and the cathedral facades and the river scenes at Westminster, he came to his day of discovery at Giverny, seeing there, in the still waters of the river Epte, the intricate play of sunlight that brought him to his supreme effort of interpretation. Mortally ill and in his final days, consoling himself with a gathering dusk that his mind was still exploring for hints of hue, did he think about his life’s work and risk some final, personal judgment of it all? I have no idea. I do know that he was too honest to ever let go of the anguish of his doubts, and too great an artist to ever feel entirely satisfied, puzzled as he sometimes was by mindless critique from the public.

I mentioned to him one day that while passing through the town of Vitré I had stopped a nattily-dressed young bourgeois on the sidewalk, to ask him the way to Les Rochers, the château of Madame de Sévigné.

“I am sorry monsieur, but I think you’re mistaken; there is no such place here,” I was surprised to hear him say.

“I beg your pardon, monsieur, but I think it is you who are mistaken. I know there’s a statue of her here in Vitré.”

“Oh, you mean the bronze lady in the Jardin des Plantes? Well, to get to the gardens you make a right turn…”

“Such is fame, eh?” cried Monet.

“That’s it. So tell me, what recompense are you after?”

He burst out laughing; nearby on his cushion, the cat slept through it all—for being a Chinese porcelain cat, it felt no obligation to stir for such nonsense. The brushes were soon picked up again, and the long and difficult ascent resumed.

Having spoken of the immense and painstaking effort to educate the modern consciousness, how can I avoid saying more about the artist at work? Into his paintings Monet put the very best of himself, and in these paintings he comes back to us. For as we chronicle our own passage through the chaos of the spheres—sometimes in action, sometimes only bearing witness—nothing can be more precious to us, in our reckoning with ourselves, than experiences like these, of the thoughts and deeds of companions on this journey, helping us map the rise in our collective capacity to feel.

We experience the world only through whatever our five senses can bring in, and as for our struggles to catch the motions of light itself, they go all the way back, as I’ve said, to the very first paintings in prehistoric times. That was our opening attempt to understand the external, and ever since we have not ceased to reach out, to pursue the endless enticements of space and time. Because the art we encounter is the vibrant source of our negotiation of the world and also of ourselves, we never cease to draw from them subtle hints of some deep and universal order, sanctifying our encounter with an experience of sheer beauty.

But the light of the world will never keep still, the spectrum scattering and recomposing constantly and all around. To engage it, the painter must commit to a life in close combat, expressing what he sees with constructs that have no existence in the natural world, juxtaposing and mixing and layering colors to catch effects of light that can never be more than momentary.

No matter how we look at it, this contingent, relative life of ours will always be in conflict with the monstrous Absolute, and the best we can do is to speak of it, if we cannot truly apprehend it. To go that far we would require much more than words and categories, for too often they fool us into accepting some transient or partial truth as a dogma to be trusted. How much truth, known or hidden, would we need to acquire even to begin a project like that?

I hope you’ll excuse these thoughts along the way, matters that Monet didn’t have to contemplate because they weren’t in his realm. Even so, they lie in the path of anyone who hopes to give the arts their due as a great adventure of mankind.

4

Monet’s Garden: The Lily Pond

As an artist he loved water: the sea, the Seine, the sleepy, glassy surface of his water-garden with the corollas of the water lilies, pink and white, like phosphorescent swarms. In its presence his work came to a stop for a while, a pause in a sequence which we will look at later, the wheat stacks, the poplar trees, the cathedral fronts, the Thames at London, series after series. Today, on the gallery walls, Monet’s first experiments with water lilies, delightful as they are, seem cautious when compared to the apotheosis we see in the Tuileries Museum. When a suggestion was made that he make these early pictures larger, broadening these blossoming waters up to sizes fit for a festival hall, Monet looked at them, said nothing, and thought it over, beset with the temptation.

By that time his garden at Giverny had taken shape, and the key feature of it was the lily pond. The setting was a portion of a large meadow into which a branch of the river Epte had been diverted, and Monet had gone to work there ardently to bring his plan to life. Before long, his ventures in horticulture succeeded beyond his hopes, and even people with no interest in flowers came by to marvel at it, and went away proclaiming, “I have seen the garden of Claude Monet.” It ranks as one of his works of art, a wonderful adaptation of nature itself to the tastes and needs of a painter dedicated to the representation of light. An outdoor expansion of his studio, it offered pageants of color all around to delight his eye, fueling his passion for scintillation and subtle effect, a yearning that could never be assuaged—like a newborn child, fumbling its way towards sustenance that it cannot truly know and can never give up.

In contrivances with lighting, Monet had no interest at all. Even a clear day and bright sun were not too intense for him in his quest for mysteries; as an artist he was plein air in the fullest sense of the phrase. It may not seem like much, to go out under an open sky and open our eyes; but we must go out there innocent, with no innate preconceptions about effects to look for. The eyes and the mind have work to do, breaking visual experience down and building it up again, achieving a coherence that is ours to negotiate and the painter’s to express. To do that, the artist needs to have as much of the world as possible constantly in view. Without knowing why, feckless people travel the earth in vain, looking at the same sights again and again without ever having seen; the job of the artist is to overcome that kind of failure.

Anyone who sets out to express with perfect truth some aspect of the world around us needs to be special in how he is put together. The earth and the stars cannot overwhelm him; of the endless diversity around him he must be immensely aware. The miracle made possible by our eyes is the unending encounter with the world’s vibrant incandescence, an encounter we can withstand only because we distill it all into events and relations, discrete moments in space and time, eddies of the infinite as it rolls onward in patterns we can never truly apprehend.

Because our sensory responses are almost instantaneous, we can adapt quickly and completely to these challenges of subject and object—and for the art of painting, this is a fundamental skill. Harmony and unity in a chance engagement, in the luck of an hour, provide us with pictures that win praise from us as “beautiful landscapes”—in those moments when we are not just passing by without paying attention. Those kinds of insights require a special skill, and one of the breakthroughs of the modern school was this recognition that even a barren plain can move us deeply with the play of light upon its surfaces.

Although he found enchantment in seascapes, Monet was not by nature a rover.

Though he disdained nothing on this earth, the brevity of human life kept him rooted to the ground before his easel. There was hard work aplenty in doing that, physical exertion in one effort after another, all of them taxing to some extent. Even so, where could he find a visual workout in each day’s regimen, a natural or conditioned excitement for the eye, to be caught and transformed by a mind as relentlessly responsive as his own?

“Everywhere,” he said.

In the Renaissance, the teaching went on in the studio rooms of the master, an advantage for empirical learning, but a menace to originality. Enraptured by classical Greece, or rather with Hellenism in a degenerate form, people were still oblivious to the sky overhead, to the world beyond the window, to how the waters reflect and interpret the constant drama of destruction and renewal. To see the natural world and to give it expression, the age had too recently emerged from its cloisters; it was unready to look at life “square in the eye.”

Frankly, I doubt that Monet ever thought about such matters. For the temperament of a true artist he had to have a philosophical streak, but he never had the time or the motive to generalize like this. Joyfully he stationed himself before the enigmas of the natural world and looked deep into them with confidence. Trusting his senses, he gave himself over, as an artist and also as a human being, entirely to his conscience, which never led him astray; for what he sought was only and completely the truth. He loved it all—fields, flowers, woods, meadows and thickets, the sky in any light, mountains in sun or snow, the shores of rivers; and always the face of water, in pools or rivers or the sea, calm or bestirred. He loved every dimension of human existence, joyful or bereaved, every aspect of the turmoil of life.

I think it was Renoir who said that “A brook moving through the grass is as wonderful as the Mona Lisa’s smile.” Sadly, the atelier brings in nothing from outside, and study there amounts to bottling up the vitality that abounds so freely out in nature. Nonetheless, artistic success in the open air requires labor and care, and Monet was no exception to the rule, facing the challenge every time he moved from a sketch or a “study” to producing the finished picture—in other words, out of the mess of the workroom and all the way to the Salon, though the open air was where all the real work was done.

Late in his life, however, we find him bringing his water-garden studies into his studio where the effort went on, to refine and complete impressions so vibrant that this great shed of his was no hindrance. The sheer scale of these canvases required him to do the actual painting in here, with eyes so expert in the ways of light as to protect him from failure. In fact, into that studio Monet brought with him the highest, subtlest refinement of his art.

Though I’ve said that his garden was really an open-air studio, Monet never theorized about that, for his empiricism ran so deep that he never thought of fabricating it into dogma. In his travels through the countryside, absorbing nature everywhere he went, he seemed to have learned only what he needed to in the service of his own eyes, seeking perfection in the art that his inmost voices required him to pursue. Without going into the details of the garden’s construction, we can be sure that he created it from what he imagined and what he saw, taking hints that each day brought him, to satisfy his appetite for color. When you know that a road for automobiles cuts through it, as well as the railroad from Gisors and that branch of the Epte, you might think that coherence cannot be a major quality of the place. What’s it like? Busy-ness, yet also absolute escape: without the road, the rail line, the stream that draws in fishermen, isolation might have been possible. But that is the miracle—that it provides shelter from intrusion.

From Monet’s house out to the road, rainbow sprays of flowers, dreamlike in every imaginable hue, cascade around you like fire from the sky, to be transmogrified by the painter’s eye, when the moment is right, into a play of light upon water. He loved flowers for what they are, for their lightness and their dances in the air, for their guileless expression of the drama of love—for fire-bursts of color, violent and gentle, on his enormous rose bushes, where visitors, besotted with the prose of life, find poetry once more.

A wall topped with a grille, a line of trees, and the embankment along the road block the view of any passerby. Within, on these domestic pathways laid out only for his own promenades, and knowing every tuft of grass and every flashy or modest bloom in the place, Monet never failed to do his matins here, offering the salutation required of him by his own passion for seeing.

The road is traversed by means of a gate; then open a lock with a key and cross the railroad line, concealed from the garden by a great hedge of rhododendrons and climbing roses. Riding through such an immense show of flowers, passengers on the train can have nothing to gripe about; and only a few yards away, entranced by the mirror of his pond, Monet wouldn’t even hear them go by.

About the garden itself: strictly speaking, it was only a quiet flowage, alive with these stunning water-lilies, stretching away towards a Japanese arched bridge, bedecked with wisteria, framing the vista—the one touch of all-out romanticism in this place. Over by the rail line there is a stand of good-sized poplars, and the willows whose cascading branches are seen in the Tuileries panels, and a peninsula of tall, plumed bamboo, a jungle contained by the flowing stream where river-grasses dance. Bordered by trellises of climbing roses, the outer pathway, with its arches of bright color, offers a view of broad green meadows extending all the way down to the banks of the Seine. It’s enough to make any stroll here heavenly; moment by moment, the eyes gather up a matchless experience of earth and sun, a festival of sights, subtle and brazen alike, even when the world around seems still.

Upon the mirror-surface of the pond, on these solid lily-pads that seem to float on the clouds, the blossoms burst up, as if in gestures of prayer to the creeping mist, from which there can come a sudden flash of fire on the waters, or an astounding celestial peace. This is where Monet liked to position himself to bring his senses to a fine edge, staying there for hours, silent and motionless in his armchair, taking it all in, seeking the inner life of things, those glimmers in which mysteries are seen only for an instant, and never spoken. To see is to understand, isn’t that so? And all we need to do is to learn how to look: within, without, all around us, to exalt our apprehension of this dynamic universe. These waters embrace the daylight, transform it, rarefy it, and send it back to the trained eye for new experiences of wonder.

That is, in sum, the miracle of the Nymphéas panels: they bring us into the presence of a natural order we have not seen before. New insights, new varieties of light, the ever-shifting look of a world unaware of itself, yet speaking to us through our own senses. To give us the experience of feelings entirely new: isn’t that a way of exploring the silent infinities, of delving deeper into the obdurate world? When he looked at the skies reflected in the waters of his garden, this was Monet’s voyage of discovery, and what he seeks to bring home to us. Some people may resent that effort; most won’t care at all; one could say that “the public” isn’t much more than a background noise of misunderstanding. In light of that, we can be grateful for a measure of silence—often a primordial sign of admiration.

On the craftsmanship in Monet’s work I’d prefer to say nothing just yet. It is what it had to be, an engagement with worldly truth that provides us with delight. Hasn’t everyone had that feeling, even without being stunned by the splendor of the Nymphéas?

In life, what goes on in the natural world around us is too mixed up in the daily business that moves us; we experience it as a setting for the action that steals our attention, a background too distant for us to take notice of relationships within it. We do need to find them, however, for how and what we see clearly, how this endless succession of visual experiences plays upon our senses, is vital to our understanding of the human condition. When we recognize this, we also see that the variety in this world is more than a match for our moments of awareness, coming upon us in a blended flash, a wave of sensation that we can learn to negotiate only as we grow and learn. Luckily, such encounters, with all their contrails of the unknown, reveal to us deep, timeless relationships between the past and the ever-ramifying present.

So it goes, this unending visual encounter with what has been and what is coming to be, moments of insight into the elusive patterns of the Infinite. Doesn’t it follow that as we look at the sky on the surface of these still waters, this dynamic reality turned upside down, we pursue, in our own imagination, realities that we can never catch, never keep still? This is the action that Monet painted—a world in contest with itself, creating and sustaining itself—a sequence of moments observed on the reflecting surface of his lily pond. In the final panel at the Tuileries, the drama culminates in a show of fire: blinding us, the sun sets among the dry reeds of a winter marsh; in the spring, those magical flowers will be reborn once again, rising from dark mysteries of eternal renewal.

5

The Public

For a good dialogue, for an invigorating contagion of tastes, the arts do require a public, random collisions with “judges,” unevenly qualified as they might be to issue provisional rulings on this and that, matters that would require more schooling before final decisions are handed down. Such is the ungainly empirical process by which human knowledge first took shape; with the rise of experimentation and scientific method, telling truth from fantasy has become the domain of careful observation and the verification of fact. Even for feelings aroused in the presence of nature, or by art that seeks to represent it, the situation isn’t so different: the problem lies not with the feeling itself, but with explaining it to a public exercising its rights to speak out and nay-say at will.

With regard to cultural and emotional growth, every person reaches a limit proportionate to his intelligence. Revelations, myths and legends, teachings with or without a solid footing: all of these things turn up in our disputations. Somebody says “Yes”; “No” says someone else—and those of us who keep quiet for one reason or another are spared punishment, as public book-burnings and the like are now out of favor. Though disagreement is obviously a fact of life, the evolution of our collective taste has depended on our willingness to call a truce here and there, to accept a compromise, an average, as a plausible guess. Our “civilization,” such as it is, is founded on that practice, and for our personal development and our quest for knowledge, each of us has a stake in it. Knowledge is founded in perception, in the experiences of the senses; they lead us into seeing and understanding relationships, and although the bedrock of our intelligence resides there, only after great difficulty and long ages have we reached consensus on a handful of basic ideas. On the other hand, if we didn’t stay committed to this journey, moving so deliberately forward in our search for those deep connections that constitute knowledge, and if we surrendered entirely to spontaneous feeling right or wrong, we might see the multitudes united, one day, in waves of organic emotional intensity—but they certainly wouldn’t stand the test of time. The fires of such feeling don’t last long, no matter how powerful they seem. From their embers we create a trove of commonplace and mediocre opinion, taken by so many among us as infallible authority.

What then are the real differences between the public for the arts and the public for the sciences—except insofar as the latter group is required to think and analyze objectively, while interpreters of feeling can depend entirely upon their own capacity for response? Think of Sainte-Beuve’s famous response to Chateaubriand as an apologist for faith: “The question isn’t whether something is beautiful; the question is whether it is true.”

Ancient history, which hangs on so stubbornly in our theology, keeps us supplied even today with antiquated constructs of mankind and the world, ideas which most of our contemporaries hold more dear than the firmest of scientific observations. The self-styled critic might be a person of sound judgment; then again, he might not. He might actually know something, or he might be completely ignorant. A gut-feeling judgment can be dead-on; it can also go astray; and in turn it can bring down additional random critiques, which as they heap up high enough can begin to look like consensus or truth. To achieve an “authoritative” view of anything, how much outright ignorance, misinformation, and actual knowledge must go into the recipe?

Throughout Monet’s life as a painter, his public was essentially romantic in its sensibilities, exemplified by that cadre of aesthetes who won’t accept a view of nature that isn’t conspicuously crafted. Of course a human presence is immanent in any effort to interpret experience, reducing the infinite to human scale, transforming the absolute into the relative. Even so, that doesn’t justify all these flourishes of mannerism: reshaping the natural world according to doctrine and personal whim is the stuff of madness; I prefer the old, wise recourse of accepting things as they are.

The public of Monet’s time valued great painters whose handling of light seems far removed from what we see around us every day. Though he needed that public he didn’t bother thinking about it, dedicated as he was to keeping faith with the élan of his own inspiration. Recalling those early sketches of the port at Le Havre, I remember fondly the surprise I felt when I saw sunlight interpreted in a new way, creating a feeling of vibrant truth. There was no way to know as yet what the future would hold for such an eye as this, interrogating the world with an intensity that seemed uncomfortable, even dolorous. So powerful in achieving synthesis, Monet paid the price, analyzing and assembling all the components for these achievements in incandescence. We see this as well in the sketches from his Havrais boyhood, which we will see again soon when they are auctioned off.

I first met Monet in the Quartier Latin. My medical adventures at the Mazas hospital were keeping me busy; he was painting someplace or other, and though we didn’t see each other often, we soon became friends. Mutual acquaintances brought us together from time to time: Paul Dubois, a doctor from Nantes, would be setting up his practice in the Rue de Maubeuge as soon as he graduated; from Castelsarrasin, Antonin Lafont was in the Chamber of Deputies. To these two friends Monet had given some of his seascapes, and already they were saying with a touch of pride, “Ah, that’s a Monet.” Those words meant something, for they caught the surprise, even the wonder, at the courage in the brushwork, still naïve and inexperienced, but sincere in execution, and quick as an expression of will.

When our dear friend Paul Dubois died, a passing I deeply regret, his worldly goods were shipped to the Hotel des Ventes to be auctioned off; and I recall a ripple of astonishment in the audience when some stylish little man, with eyes like black diamonds and a smirk of intense satisfaction, walked away with two Monet sketches for three hundred francs apiece, a bid he had made on the spot even before the auctioneer had called for an opening; the competition, had there been one, would have started at a much lower price. Everyone stared with lively interest at this peculiar-looking Croesus, who left the hall as soon as he had settled his bill, toting off the two pictures he had won without a single bid against him.

Soon, however, we found out who it was: Monsieur Durand-Ruel himself, famous as one of our sharpest experts about painting; his behavior at the auction could be understood only as a resolve to establish, from that day forward, a floor-price beneath which he would not allow an artist he believed in to fall. Durand-Ruel had met Monet in London in 1870; Daubigny had introduced them.

Passionately conservative as he was about nearly everything else, Durand-Ruel was firmly on the side of innovation when it came to painting. In the intrepid skill that made the red smokestacks seem to dance upon the tides at the harbor’s mouth, he had recognized, with his own special awareness for light, the talent from which those ever-changing Meules would eventually come. Swept along by his own infallible taste, Durand-Ruel, as bold in his own way as the artist himself, assumed the role of marketing the young man who would become the most famous member of the school known as “Impressionist,” after a painting of his called Impression, Sunrise.[1] Monet at that time was thirty. The artist and this critic-promoter became close friends, allowing Monet to throw himself entirely into his work and allow inspiration to take him to the heights. Who knows—perhaps it was the hand of Fate that brought this stubborn, dedicated artist into the company of an admirer with such admirable judgment. Without that, perhaps Monet would have seen himself as doomed, heaping up works that would be hailed as masterpieces only after his death. Self-confidence in a genius doesn’t always eliminate, as one might think, a need for approval from others. It’s a matter of degree: though public opinion never figured into Monet’s judgment of his own art, even the greatest painter doesn’t paint for himself alone. And because how we see the world evolves, like all of our other senses, in response to more-or-less intelligent people around us, inevitably some degree of consensus will connect an artist to his time.

The key point is that time for us is life pouring unheeded through the hourglass of constant change, that what is past can never be recovered, that time is the joy we recognize as it flees us in the very moment it appears; and that it is sorrow too, perhaps evaded for now, only to return when we don’t expect it. A man who commits to living according to his own rules is thought of as doing some kind of harm to everyone else. Such loners usually need others to sustain for them a bland and normal life, causing no bother to decent, conventional, harmless people around them. For saving Monet from all those torments, those machinations of coalesced mediocrity, and allowing him to be himself, to stay himself, through thick and thin, Durand-Ruel deserves our lasting thanks. As a dealer he not only helped to keep Monet solvent; he also provided moral support when the struggle for this idealist was at its height, by his side and firmly confident in the future. That consolation was profound, bolstering Monet’s courage in the lifelong project that could sustain itself only by a constant heightening of the risk, and by an understanding that no perfect end was ever possible. The most beautiful success is often hidden in a scrim of reverses; a warrior slowed by his own wounds cannot experience the sweetest triumph—over one’s own self at the end of the day.

When Durand-Ruel bid his three hundred francs for one sketch at the auction, that counted as a true “success” for Monet, for in those early years we saw his paintings on the market for fifty francs apiece. Because a price like that couldn’t include any profit for a dealer, Monet was offering his wares direct to potential buyers. Were there any? Oh, sure: Paris is the city of miracles, and with noisy enemies and credulous disciples, every new movement in thinking finds a welcome there, a chance to classify itself pretentiously as avant garde. Édouard Manet’s name was already making a stir.[2] Others were soon to follow, a wonderful corps of artists who would be the pride of our country: Manet, Boudin, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Jongkind, Caillebotte, Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt. It’s worth remembering that Cézanne encountered some skepticism from Monet himself, though eventually he honored Cézanne by displaying his work at the Giverny house, where important paintings of fellow crusaders were showcased. It can safely be said that the thinking of the Impressionist school, with Monet in the lead, came into prominence in the artistic output of that time.

Nobody could have foreseen that outcome when Monet was going door-to-door hawking his daring work to fans of painting. You could get yourself a genuine Monet for fifty francs, but still there were geniuses out there who refused to buy into this adventure. Some of these hasty works from his youth have survived—and when they turn up on the market, museums compete for them at prices no one could have imagined. In the front rank of the gentry who supported this new school was the famous baritone Faure, cultivating his renown as a connoisseur of painting, a reputation he had worked to build among famous and fashionable coteries associated with L’Opéra. This fine fellow had reached a level where he could indulge himself without risk, and naturally he enjoyed standing out as unconventional in this way or that. Fixing on the Impressionist school as an object for his enthusiasm, he became a defender, and even a “friend” of some of its stars. Having bought some fine Manets without going bankrupt, he bid from time to time on modest works by Monet, as a way of displaying his munificence. Understanding how this worked, Monet, as the pal, would show up from time to time at the home of his celebrity client to offer him paintings at the fifty franc price, which the great man bought when he was in a genial mood. One day Monet came to the door with a single picture under his arm, and Faure was kind and gracious in his greeting. “Glad to see you, dear friend—especially if you’re bringing me a masterpiece.”

“I don’t know about that. I’ve done my best with it.”

“Well, let’s see here. Oh-ho! Well, that won’t do at all, my dear boy. If I buy your work without haggling for it, I expect it to be painted. There’s no paint on this one. You must have forgotten it. The canvas is blank—that’s not good. Take it back and put some paint on it, and I’ll think about buying it… fair enough? … Now just between you and me, what do you suppose this canvas represents?”

“I don’t suppose, I know that it shows the fog rising from the Seine at Vétheuil. I was out in my rowboat in the early morning waiting for that effect. The sun came up, and—sorry, but I painted what I saw. Maybe that’s why you don’t like it.”

“Oh, right, I get it now. But you have to know it’s the Seine. And when the morning light hits the mist it muddles the view. We can’t see much, but that’s because of the fog, right? … Even so, there’s not enough paint on this canvas. Dab on some more paint and I just might buy it from you.”

Monet took it in stride, headed home, and set the picture in a corner, face to the wall.

Six years after that, in 1879, Monet had a studio where “art lovers” came on visits to buy works for profitable resale in due course. One day Faure himself turned up, looking for something to catch his fancy. Le Lever du Soleil sur Vétheuil was there on an easel.

“Ah, now that’s a lovely work you’ve got there, my friend. Fog in sunlight. The church, turrets, sheds, gleaming cornices breaking through the mist… the village, which we don’t see here, reflected in the stream…. Well, do you want six hundred francs for it?”

Bristling, Monet drew himself up. “So you’ve forgotten that you wouldn’t give fifty francs for that painting six years ago. So now I’ll tell you something: not only will I not let you have it for fifty francs, or six hundred; if you offered me fifty thousand, you still wouldn’t get it.”

Vétheuil dans le Brouillard (Vétheuil in the Mist) by Claude Monet.

Deflated, our baritone went away. What’s lovely about this story is that Le Lever du Soleil sur Vétheuil is still there, for Monet never agreed to part with it.[3] At Giverny, in the ground-floor studio, it’s on the wall for any visitor to see, reminding us of this wonderful story of a rejected canvas.[4] Monet at the time was thirty-three years old: the painting signifies one moment on a hard journey from nothingness to apotheosis, with cruel episodes along the way, thanks to the incomprehension of an oblivious public fancying itself an ultimate judge. This most precious document we have about the growth of this artist, his meticulous study of the subtleties of dispersed light: Le Lever du Soleil sur Vétheuil, with these misty reflections and the brilliance of the sun upon the Seine, heralded the coming of Nymphéas, the curtain-rise at the lily pond.

1. Clemenceau remembers the title of this painting only as Impression, and recalls it as a sunset, rather than a sunrise. ↵

2. [Clemenceau’s note] Oddly enough, when the Impressionists as a new school were assumed to include Édouard Manet, at first he objected a bit. Having a sharp tongue, he wasn’t a man to hold back with wisecracks: when he learned about the splash that Monet was making, he said, “I don’t know if that fellow will steal my style; but right now he’s trying to steal my name.” ↵

3. The painting whose history Clemenceau describes here is Vétheuil dans le Brouillard. Though it remained at Giverny for forty years after Monet’s death, it is now in the Musée Marmottan, Paris. ↵

4. Monet’s Vétheuil dans le Brouillard (1879) is now in the collection of the Musée Marmottan, Paris. ↵

6

Mortal Combat

Un Enterrement à Ornans (A Burial at Ornans) by Gustave Courbet.

Even now, after the half-century of struggle from which Nymphéas ultimately emerged, a few critics may still gather here and there to raise objections about the triumph of that work. That might seem surprising. Because I had the luck to play a small part in all this, as a spectator at a few skirmishes, I can recall the fierce struggles in which Monet, Degas, and others were engaged for their very survival, under withering fire from cohorts that seemed both blind and hostile to the light of day.

Consider that Faure, who turned down Le Lever du Soleil sur Vétheuil for fifty francs, was regaled with insults for buying other heretical canvases before. It’s easy to forget how savage this fight was, and how long it seemed that the opposition would win out over this band of innovators, who were insulted, scorned, treated with the utmost contempt by the recognized authorities, who also controlled the purse-strings for our absurd subventions of the arts. Only by a fluke, a set of weird circumstances, did Manet’s L’Olympia find its way into the Louvre.[1] It’s worth remembering that Courbet’s Un Enterrement à Ornans was for a long time hidden in an obscure corner where visitors to our great museum wouldn’t be able to find it. One day, passing with Monet in front of this immortal work, I said to him, “Well, after everything we’ve seen here, if I could walk out with one canvas, this would be it.”

“As for me,” he replied without hesitation, “I’d take L’Embarquement pour Cythère.”[2]

Pélerinage à l’Île de Cythère (Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera), also called L’Embarquement pour Cythère (The Embarkation for Cythera), by Jean-Antoine Watteau.

So it was that the key figure of the Impressionist school, attacked with such virulence by the critical establishment as an iconoclast in art, went on record as an enthusiast for the ethereal skies of Watteau, taking sides with him in this storm of disparagement. Only now are we realizing the deep grounds of that affinity.

To review quickly a few aspects of the controversy: in his well-documented book on Claude Monet, Gustave Geffroy offers a concise summary; and urging the reader to look at that, I will borrow just a few short quotations to suggest what Monet’s predicament was at this time. The outlandishness of these polemics requires firm documentation; because the new mode of painting has now triumphed, we might forget too quickly the invective that these young men were greeted with, when their only crime was seeking a heightened truthfulness in the representation of the natural world. At the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, followed by a sale of their work at the Hotel Drouot, Le Charivari, with no malicious intent, said “Both blurry and brutish, this kind of painting strikes us as both a celebration of ignorance and a denial of beauty and truth. We have had enough of faux eccentricity, as it is too easy to draw attention to oneself by being worse than anyone else has yet dared to be.”

That was just an opening shot. Prices had to be set ridiculously low; the review in Le Figaro also didn’t help to boost them: “We have here in color an indistinctness of the sort that Wagner puts in his music. The impression which these ‘Impressionists’ produce is like a cat walking on a piano keyboard, or a monkey on the loose with a paint-box.” Also from Le Figaro, here is Monsieur Albert Wolff’s critique of the final Impressionist show, in 1876:

“Rue Le Peletier is on a losing streak: after the fire at L’Opéra, the neighborhood has been hit with another disaster. At Durand-Ruel’s gallery a new exhibition has opened that is supposedly a show of paintings. Intrigued by the banners outside, clueless pedestrians drift in, where they come face to face with something awful. Five or six Bedlamites (one of them is a woman), poor devils crazed with ambition, have come together here to show their works…. With canvases, paint-tubes, and brushes, they slop a few colors together at random and put a signature on it. It’s like what we see at Ville-Evrard,[3] where local lunatics gather pebbles along the road and dream they’re finding diamonds.”

After explaining that it’s pointless to try to discuss “either drawing or color” with Degas, this same Albert Wolff continues: “And this pile of vulgarity is shown to the public with no regard for the inevitable consequences: yesterday some sad sack who had just left the exhibition was arrested on Rue Le Peletier for biting passers-by…. The members of this club, knowing full well that their complete lack of any artistic training stops them from ever crossing the abyss between themselves and art,” and so on. I’m sorry to say that I have to count Monsieur Huysmans among this embarrassing crew, for in 1880 he advised Monet and his friends to consult one Dr. Charcot, “noted for experiments on color-perception among the insane at the Salpétière[4] and people suffering from diseases of the nervous system.” By this time Monet had already done some of his best work. Huysmans eventually redeemed himself, however, by supporting the fund-drive to bring L’Olympia into the Louvre.

And finally, here are some choice words from Monsieur Roger Ballu, who in 1877 held the post of Inspecteur des Beaux-Arts[5]: “Monsieurs Claude Monet and Cézanne, pleased to show us what they can do, are exhibiting thirty paintings by the former, fourteen by the latter. These are both laughable and lamentable. They reveal basic ignorance about drawing, composition, and color. When children play with paper and paint, they do better work than this.”

After such eruptions as these, a few people did rally for the defense; but it took time for them to meld into a phalanx with which Philistines in the realms of contemporary culture would have to reckon. Castagnary[6] joined up as early as 1876, though his words were guarded: “I saw the dawn break for this return to simple honesty,” he wrote in Le Siècle, “but I did not believe that things would progress so quickly. It is unmistakable, however, bursting upon us this year. Youth is on the move; and the multitudes, perhaps unaware of what they are doing, are taking their side. These are pictures of the natural world, done with the sole purpose of being true, pictures which allure…. Certainly the Impressionists have played a part in this movement…. For these painters the open air is a godsend; their rediscovery of bright color and their rejection of darkness is a veritable act of faith.”

No less qualified, Burty[7] did excellent work in writing the Salon catalogue of 1875, but did express “reservations about the coarseness of the brush-work, the summary execution of the drawing, the preciousness in some of the details.” You couldn’t defend the Impressionists—or rather, you didn’t dare to—without discriminations like these, to keep readers calm.

All of this helped to lead these fine young artists into a mess of financial trouble, so sadly clear in this letter from Édouard Manet to Théodore Duret[8] in 1875:

My dear Duret:

I went to see Monet yesterday. I found him dejected, truly at rock bottom. He asked me to help him find someone who would take any ten or twenty pictures he liked at a hundred francs apiece. Do you want to join me in helping him—say, five hundred francs each?

Of course we need to assure that nobody—himself above all—knows that we are the ones doing this. I tried to think of a dealer, or some collector or other, but I see a prospect of being turned down.

It’s sad for us to know this situation, and to come away with a real bargain despite our distaste for doing so; nonetheless, we would be helping a man with talent.

Please let me know as soon as possible, or tell me when I should visit you.

As ever,

E. Manet

A credit to everyone concerned, this letter needs no further comment. Besides, with regard to friendship there is no shortage of evidence, precious to Monet in times of self-doubt, and also in times of success. Consider this letter from Octave Mirbeau,[9] which probably dates from between 1885 and 1890:

Look, let’s think a little about this. You feel lost because the snow has melted instead of lingering on the ground as you would have liked. That’s childish. You should have only one thing on your mind: your art. Are you moving ahead with that, or are you letting yourself slide? Those are the only two questions that you should be asking yourself. And I’ll tell you the answers, my friend, and believe me: for the past three years you’ve made gigantic strides. You have made discoveries; your art has expanded, taking on everything imaginable. You are the only artist in our time who has given painting dimensions that it has never had before. And your vision is broadening still. You are at the height of your powers, stronger and subtler than you have ever been, the one whose legacy will last longest after he is gone. And you tell me that you’re foutu? When you were telling me just the other day, about that figure you were doing in full sunlight: “That’s something I’ve never done before, a thrill that my work hasn’t achieved before.” And now you’re foutu? You’re talking nonsense, my dear Monet; and it’s sad that a man of your age, extraordinary as you are and unique in your gifts, is driveling out such stupidities. And I am not alone in thinking this. It’s the view of everyone who follows your work and loves you. “With every landscape,” they say, “this devil of a Monet gives us something new. Even more depth, more insight, finer execution.” And that’s the simple truth. It’s also true that you’re experiencing, without being aware of it, a problem that’s basically physical and a matter of self-perception, for most physical illnesses have their impact on the mind. Get beyond this malady and the rest will take care of itself. Every man of your age has passed through it; it happens to us all.

Because he died too soon, Édouard Manet died poor; Monet, as he lived on, grew rich. When he offered those five hundred francs to help his friend, Manet was probably contributing everything he had on hand. Later, when Monet was finally able to sell his works, he lavished his own help in every direction. Two generous hearts, each worthy of the other.

“And what did you get out of it?” Durand-Ruel was eventually asked. His reply: “It turned out perfectly. One painting that I recall having bought for one hundred and ten francs later went for seventy thousand at a public sale. Another one that I bought for fifty francs was resold I don’t know how many times, each of its owners eventually giving up on it; it went for more than one hundred and ten thousand francs not long ago.”

To me such an increase in value seems significant—but I’ll admit that it would have mattered little to Monet himself, if the market price wasn’t matched by sincere enthusiasm for the work he had done. I don’t forget that the public can be wrong—even the “enlightened” people who inflict on us, in the Grand Salle of the Louvre, the Apothéose d’Homère, the Jeanne d’Arc and La Sultane[10], there beside the Monet self-portrait, L’Olympia, L’Enterrement à Ornans, and so many other true masterpieces. But we can wait for public tastes to catch up, to develop, naturally and inevitably, a new way of seeing, an openness to the spectacle of change and nuance in the natural world. For reality is governed by laws, not by fantasies that have held sway in our minds for much too long; and the greatest of these laws is this constant motion, stage by stage, towards order and unity—and in this process, every insight into these deep harmonies, if only for a moment, is to be cherished.

1. Actually it was Clemenceau himself, when he became Prime Minister in 1906, who ordered the transfer of Manet’s Olympia into the Louvre from its place of relative exile (with other modern works) in the Palais de Luxembourg, overcoming strong objections from the Institut de France. In 1890, representing Var in the Chamber of Deputies, Clemenceau had been a conspicuous figure in the subscription campaign, led by Monet, to acquire the painting as a national treasure. ↵

2. In the Louvre, a work by Jean-Antoine Watteau from 1717. ↵

3. In 1875, an asylum at Ville Evrard à Neuilly-sur-Marne, east of Paris, was established for mentally-ill patients classified as harmless. ↵

4. A famous teaching hospital in Paris, dating back to the 17th century. ↵

5. Clemenceau has his recollections scrambled here: Roger Ballu was only 25 years old in 1877; he became Inspecteur Général des Beaux-Arts in 1883. The son of a famous architect, he spent most of his career as a mid-level politician. ↵

6. A liberal politician and prolific journalist as well as an art critic, Jules-Antoine Castagnary, a close friend of Courbet, was one of the early champions of Impressionism. ↵

7. Philippe Burty (1830–1890), a friend and champion of Delacroix and Courbet, was a frequent contributor to the influential Gazette des Beaux-Arts. ↵

8. Like Clemenceau himself, Duret was a fiercely combative politician, as well as an internationally-known art critic who strongly supported the Impressionists. ↵

9. Largely unknown in the United States, Mirbeau remains famous in France as a novelist, dramatist, passionate political commentator, and champion of many innovative artists in Monet’s lifetime. ↵

10. Apothéose d’Homère and Jeanne d’Arc au Sacre du Roi Charles VII are both by Ingres, whose work represented for Clemenceau an established high-Romantic pomposity that Impressionism resisted. La Sultane could allude to a more modest painting by Barbault, also in the Louvre—but Clemenceau might be thinking here of some other Oriental-themed work by Ingres, a harem scene or Odalisque showcased and still popular at that time in the museum’s galleries. ↵

7

The Cathédrales Revolution

Translator’s note: Without the elegiac opening and with several additional paragraphs, much of this chapter appeared as an essay in La Justice (founded by Clemenceau and Stephen Pichon) on May 20, 1895. This was Clemenceau’s first published venture into commentary on the arts. Paragraphs subsequently dropped by Clemenceau, when he redeveloped this article to be Chapter VII of Claude Monet, are translated and included here at note 6.

I am not going to follow Monet’s path from one exhibition to the next; nor will I tell the story of a wonderful array of his paintings, some of which I came upon in America, notably in the beautiful Potter Palmer collection. Here it is enough to recall the major steps in Monet’s journey—from Vétheuil to Les Meules, and then to the poplar trees, and the River Thames, to the self-portrait in the Louvre, and finally to the Nymphéas. I would have liked to talk about all of Monet’s headlong action and aspiration with his brush; I would have enjoyed sorting out the major works according to how they engage with light itself. But I do understand that a project like that is beyond my strength. Besides, my idea here is to produce not even a monograph on him. In these my final and difficult hours on earth, I feel an imperative to talk about Monet. Not to promulgate some doctrine or prove anything at all, I yield to this temptation only because our two lives, so different as they were, grew so close at the end of our respective careers; and also because, now that my friend’s great quest is over, I feel a special pleasure in praising him, in remembering his hard fight for the kind of truth that I cannot separate from beauty.

This little work is of a sort that writers in earlier times liked to try under vague titles like “Meditations.” This is why I need no plan other than a starting-point and a finish line, letting the “series” themselves—wheat-stacks, poplars, cathedral facades, provide us, in their glory, all the connections we need. With sojourns like that on this pilgrimage to those magical waters where the Nymphéas took shape as an apotheosis, we have no need to embellish with this or that discrete masterpiece, laid out like milestones, leading to the inevitable moment when the great fire of the extraordinary life went out. What could I have to say about so many works, vibrantly alive in galleries abroad? Isn’t it enough to note the key features of such a brilliant career? Is it my place to discuss, for example, why Monet turned his attention away from the human figure and towards the landscape? His canvases offer plenty of proof that the human visage didn’t daunt him; his self-portrait in the Louvre, just as dazzling as the Nymphéas, was painted around the same time as the panels in the Tuileries. There is no painter before now that Monet has not matched. Who wouldn’t be happy to join in celebrating his triumph, when doing so only honors oneself?

If our appreciation of art inexorably improves as we engage it, if our artistic sensibilities are heightened to the point where they enhance our awareness of truth itself, and if a commingling of art and science advances our understanding of the world, then all this is merely because, by some law of universal interdependence, insights gleaned amid so much misunderstanding assist in making us human. All of that only increases our gratitude for an artist of true integrity, an artist who guilelessly cultivates his powers of apprehension—and in the process our own—enriches and embellishes our experience of the world and of ourselves. And after all, what experience could be more fruitful than seeing a man stand tall, sustained only by the strength of his passions and the virtue of his character, silencing all the yelps from those packs of ignorance, and finally, after a life of trials, experiencing a triumph born of selflessness and refusal to compromise?

Often I’ve told about finding Monet working with four easels at once in a field of poppies, moving quickly from one canvas to the next to catch the light as it shifted with the movement of the sun. From his younger days we have those white walls at Vétheuil, visible through the fog and mists of the river, a blending of air, land, and water in a run of reflections that we see again, forty years later—and more thoughtful this time, if not more innocent—in the spectacular Nymphéas. Here we see the opening of a drama of development, achievements with light that come clear in the sequence—Les Meules, Les Peupliers, Les Cathédrales, the Thames, at hours of change, when the light does something new under the flaming sun. Behold an artist in pursuit of change itself, those ever-ramifying transformations that show us nature, alive, in perpetual motion.

These are the intentions that prevailed when Les Meules were begun. To create a set of ateliers in the open air, handcarts were loaded up, and in one instance even a small farm-wagon; and out in the fields Monet’s easels were deployed for combat with sunshine. It was a wonderfully simple plan that no painter before had been tempted to try: the credit for the breakthrough is Monet’s. On the canvases of this series we see his highest aspirations unfold, to catch the luminous air that brings such dazzle to ordinary life. Without this, would we have been left to seek the charms of visual experience in the barren precision of line-drawing with nothing real before it, and the joys of light as replicated in a glum indoor studio? The outlined figure was already losing out to these sunlight insurrections, and Monet’s intention was to push still further, taking his analysis and reconstruction of color to new levels of subtlety and refinement. For what the art of painting achieved from all this, the Nymphéas speak for themselves.

Effet de Gelée Blanche (White Frost, Sunrise)

Fin de l’Été (Late Summer)

Fin de l’Été (End of Summer)

Les Meules (Stacks of Wheat) by Claude Monet.

In the month of May 1891, Monet put fifteen canvases on exhibit: the series of the wheat-stacks, in every time of day and every season. This proved to be a sensational moment, affirming that a revolution in painting had achieved total victory. Before the poppy-fields edged by poplar trees, the four paintings of the shores of the Epte had been a first foray into light caught unawares, as it were, and changing with the passing hours. After Les Meules, Les Peupliers soon followed; and then Les Cathédrales and the scenes at Westminster. And then Nymphéas—what more can one say: an Austerlitz, and no Waterloo. The war was over because no adversaries were left, though some grumbling does go on here and there. But the low level of that benefits us all.

For the critics to catch up with Monet’s success, some cogent theorizing about light in painting was in order, in line somehow with this surge of feeling evoked by his new approach to it. In his excellent study Impressionisme, Monsieur Camille Mauclair has done precisely that, noting along the way that the experiments with light by the Impressionist painters have coincided with important modern discoveries in the physical sciences, revealing to us the dynamics of light as a form of energy. For myself, I can see here only a remarkable parallel: human knowledge and our emotional life evolving simultaneously. Within the self and throughout the universe, everything connects. The emotion redolent in the natural world and its interpretation in the arts will not be in our life what they should be, unless we can imagine and engage the world in accord with the harmony we find in works of imagination.

With regard to perception founded in scientific principles, as with emotional life tempered by learning, ingrained habits do not easily give way to new possibilities, challenging the consciousness imbued with obsolete traditions. It is no surprise then that someone like Monet, who could paint nothing except what he saw, could scandalize anyone in the thrall of entrenched atavism, resisting the advent of a new sort of personality. The world around us is everywhere in motion; for too long we have been content with seeing only superficial constants. What a crisis we suddenly faced when Monet, with four canvases done in the open air to witness the motions of the sun, triggered the worst scandal imaginable—the revelation of truth!

So I find myself now at the heart of my subject: key moments in an artist’s career that offer to enfold us in a more and more faithful experience of reality. To achieve that requires nothing less than the most sustained attention possible, to comprehend as much of the dance of light as a human being can grasp.

Two questions, then: Is it right that a modern painter break with tradition in such a quest? And was Monet, as confident as he was in his own eyes, the right artist for such a challenge?

This is the theme of an essay called “Révolution des Cathédrales” that I published in La Justice on May 20, 1895, and which was reprinted in Le Grand Pan in 1896. After Les Meules and before Les Peupliers, it was Les Cathédrales (1895) that caused me to take up my pen. That was thirty years ago; but because I have no reason to take back what I said at that time, I will take the liberty of including it here, as it confirms that my views now are not off the cuff. Here is the greater part of it:

Façade, Soleil Couchant (Facade, Sunset)

Façade

Le Portail au Soleil (Portal in Sunlight)

La Cathédrale de Rouen (Rouen Cathedral) by Claude Monet.

With apologies to the professionals, I cannot resist a desire to play “art critic” for a moment. It’s Claude Monet’s fault: for fun, I went over to the Durand-Ruel gallery to take a look at the Rouen Cathedral studies, which I’d had the pleasure of seeing in the studio at Giverny—and I don’t know how, but those facades have taken hold of me and I cannot shake them off. They’re obsessing me; and I have to say something about them, competently or not.

I am here simply as another two-legged creature wandering around with a pair of eyes ready to enjoy every festival that earthly light provides. About that I have a couple of things to say at the outset: how is it that so many people buy so many paintings, good or bad—and more often the latter—paying their weight in gold, and probably winding up “liking” them, when these same people are incapable of spending five honest minutes contemplating the actual landscape or figure upon which that evocative representation was based? Yes, I know very well the explanation that in a painting the artist puts something of himself. Still, nothing stops the viewer of a work from doing much the same thing: a painting like L’Embarquement pour Cythère[1] can intrigue us only insofar as it gives us a feeling of something real.

In worldly experience, what really ought to hold our attention is the endless vibrant life that animates earth, sea, and sky, everything that moves and everything that supposedly stays “inert.” All of this marvelous motion of life on Earth, surging before our eyes at every instant, this endless miracle that pauses only to spawn others, this intensity immanent in man and beast, but also in flora, wood, and stone, lavished upon us without cessation or slackening. No need to be a millionaire to acquire some level of art connoisseurship, superior to those hapless multitudes condemned to say the same barren things about the same old pictures.

While these unfortunates retreat into themselves, losing their ability to see and to feel, and ossifying their emotional life, I rove the world asking questions, hoping to catch the ephemeral moment, to open myself to its music, to look into dark mysteries, to enjoy the whole show with a joyful attention as the world goes about its endless process of self-renewal.

Yes, as human beings we live our lives in the heart of a miracle, a true miracle from which incredible delights can be had; but we do not even see them—or to put it better, we are only beginning to conceive of them. For many thousands of years our eyes have received upon this planet endless waves of solar fire. Every artistic milestone we have, from the stone-age ax, shapely and powerfully hewn, from the profiles of bear and mammoth that some prehistoric Leonardo scratched on the bones we see in the Musée St. Germain, to these cathedral facades by Monet, provides a glimpse of all the eras of seeing through which our race has passed.

We know that what first caught the eye of our forebears was life in full-tilt motion: the whole form vaguely perceived, in color nondescript, represented in a blur with scant regard for tone or nuance, not unlike the way that small children see the world now when they draw or paint. We know that the Ancients—the Asians, Egyptians, even the Greeks (though their mythology demonstrates a keen sense of the world as a place of motion and change) did not feel as strongly as we do the imperative to express the sensations we feel in the presence of actual life.

Consider the Greek vases where we find some of the most famous images from antiquity. But try to find on any of them a landscape, a tree, rock, ocean, even a hint of quiet or flowing water. For a long time, no doubt, their poets had been moved by dimensions of what we now sum up with the word “Nature”—but those insights were not clear enough to persuade Zeuxis to stop limiting himself to the still-life.[2] In any case, that is the subject for which he is rightly celebrated now. In the lesche[3] at Delphi, Polygnotus painted scenes of the Trojan War with scant attention to historical fact; if Pausanias has it right, he had little to go on, and labels were required to tell what these works were about. But why think only about the earliest painters, their trees, rocks, meadows? Think of the bizarre landscape that the great Leonardo, at the very height of the Renaissance, gives us as the setting for his Gioconda.

La compagne à présent n’est pas beaucoup fleurie. [4]

According to Théophile Gautier, this is the only comment that the great Molière gives us as a thought about nature. It wasn’t until La Fontaine and Rousseau that our poets fell in love with the world around us; how can anyone take pleasure today in those contrived landscapes of Poussin?

I am not out to write a history of landscape painting; it is enough to affirm, with Gustave Geffroy, that for ages the sun that shines for us all scarcely did so in painting: “Ruysdaël, Hobbema: working your way down the checklist of great landscape painters, you’ll find yourself looking at foliage the color of ink, spotty and tinny; the sun is extinguished, and everything is lit by the somber light of the studio.” Yet sunlight did move Corot—among artists, the eye was beginning its education. From Geffroy’s fine study of Impressionism, a book[5] that has had such an impact on us: “An understanding of light could not be manifest in works of art until it became a subject of scientific inquiry…. Painting, like every other variety of human expression, had to mirror the laborious discovery of the self and the world which is the very essence of the human condition.”

With the Impressionist school we finally see light in ascendancy. It burst upon us, permeates creation, conquers all; glorious and triumphant, it rules the world. Does anyone still not see that today the human eye sees in a new way? After so much effort it no longer sees through a glass darkly, but face to face. But that is not the end of it: who can imagine what joys lie ahead, as our powers to see into the life of things continue to evolve?

When I first saw Monet out in that poppy-field with four canvases underway at once, changing his palette with the track of the sun, I felt I was witnessing a study more faithful to natural light precisely because it emphasized metamorphosis rather than the immutable. This was an evolutionary moment in our perception of the world, our expression of it, our feeling of it—truly a revolution. In that poppy-field, edged with three poplar trees, a new era began in our collective sensibility and our representation of the world.

Les Meules came after that, and Les Peupliers—the same wheat stacks, the same poplar trees, at sunset, sunrise and noon; in fog and sunshine; in rain, wind, and snow. Then came the studies at Vernon, dazzling with light and melting into the mist. The artist had come to know that there is no escape from careful attention to things as they are, and that if, in the course of one single day, morning conjoins with evening through a sequence of infinitely subtle transitions, every new instant of each ever-changing day becomes, under these inundations of light, a new state of being that has never existed before and shall never shall be so again. Such conditions the expert eye must be as ready to take in as the hand is ready to catch. Isn’t this in truth a new kind of seeing, and a new mode of artistic expression?

Dark in itself, the object draws all of its life from the sun, all of its power to hold our gaze. But these waves of light which envelop it and penetrate it, which give it radiance in our world, are in endless turmoil, stunning bursts of lightning, tempests of wonder. What can lie at the heart of this fury of dancing particles and waves through which it swims into our sight and becomes, for us, truly there? This is the mystery we now must solve, the mystery that painting must express, deconstructed by the eye and recreated with skill.

This is essentially what Monet boldly undertook to accomplish with these twenty pictures of the cathedral at Rouen, organized into four series which could be called the gray, the white, the iridescent, the blue. With twenty canvases, each for a carefully-chosen effect, the artist has conveyed the sense that one might experience from fifty, from a hundred or a thousand, or as many seconds as one has in a lifetime—if life could last as long as this monument of stone, and if with each heartbeat one could catch the corresponding instant in the life of the subject. For as long as the sun shines, there will be as many incarnations of Rouen Cathedral as there are moments of time in any human reckoning. A truly sublime eye might see them all, as they are all immanent in the experience of the retina. But here again Monet is in the vanguard, guiding us in the evolution of our seeing, helping us look with new penetration and subtlety into the life of the world.

Thus it is that the arts, in their quest to represent nature with ever finer discrimination, teach the rest of us to be aware, to perceive, to feel. And from this constant development of expression our own awareness unceasingly improves as well. The wonder of Monet’s sensibility is not only that he can discern vital energies in stone, but also that he can catch them and give them to us, these waves of incandescence, clashing and bursting into a shower of sparks. We have now, at last, seen the end of lifeless painting; the very stones are now alive, and one can feel their transition from one state of being to the next and the next. For the witness they no longer keep still. They change, and now one can see that changing unfold.

About technique with color I can say nothing; it’s not my line of work. From ancient times comes a story of a painter struggling to represent the foam around the mouth of a mad horse. Frustrated, he threw down his brush, which slapped against the panel and achieved by sheer luck what his skills could not accomplish. From the annals of antiquity this legend sheds light on the despair that people have always felt when confronted with stubborn challenges. Looking closely at these cathedrals of Monet, one gets a feeling that they were made from some multi-hued mortar rubbed into the canvas in a burst of insanity. But though passion lies at the heart of this furious process, it is passion conjoined to science. Working only a few centimeters away, how could an artist perceive an effect which can be comprehended only at a distance? One more stunning mystery of Monet’s eye.

What matters is that we see this monolithic facade rising in powerful unity and majestic authority. Clean, mathematically precise, the outline reconciles this prevailing order with all the sharp delineations and sculptural intricacies where the statuary is positioned. Floating in the sunlight, the stone also seems hard and unyielding against the pressure of centuries. The whole mass is robust, solid amid the blurring mist, yet softened under the changeful skies, stunning like some powdery blossom of rock under this burning sun. A bouquet of vibrant stone, suffused with a life open to the embrace of heaven, these vexing volutes of joy, making all the sensuality of life leap forth, from a touch of golden rays upon surfaces of dust.

So skillfully selected, these twenty moments of daylight, these twenty panels arrange and classify and complete themselves in one achieved sequence. As a chronicle of the sun, the monument launches skyward, its magisterial form soaring into these turbulent skies. Depths and heights, in powerful convolutions and knifelike edges: a vast solar tide pours in from infinite space, its luminous waves shattering over the stone with every color in the spectrum or lapsing into quiet amid pure shadow. From such encounters our days are created, days of life and metamorphosis, black, gray, white, blue, crimson, the entire range of light. For Duranty tells us that all colors converge into whiteness, parched, “reduced,” he says, “to that luminous unity where the seven rays of the prism subsume into that single, colorless beam which we know as light.”

Presented as they are, these twenty panels amount to twenty marvelous revelations, though the strong connections among them could be lost on the casual visitor. Sequenced for a purpose, they can show us a perfect correspondence between art and phenomenal experience: this is their miracle. Think of them, grouped as a series on these four walls, as a study of daylight transition: a great black presence at the start of the série grise leading us on a path to increasing brightness, the série blanche moving from diffused light into an immersive and stunning brilliance, giving way in turn to the fire of the série irisée, to be quenched in the calm of the série bleue, and fading into a supernatural mist, a dying into brightness.

Letting the eyes move all around the gallery, you will be dazzled by this look into the abyss, this encounter with something prodigious. And these gray facades, seen here as crimson or azure with outbreaks of gold, and these white facades, with their portals of fire, redolent with flames of green or red or blue; and these facades all aglow as if seen through a spinning prism; and these blue forms which prove to be rose, can provide a lasting insight, not of just twenty paintings but of a hundred, a thousand, a billion states of this one eternal cathedral in the endless cycles of the sun. That would be tantamount to life itself—for the experience here is of the real world supremely alive. This is art at its best, art as we have never encountered it before.[6]

This is why, in a postscript to the piece, I regretted that no art-lover had stepped forward to purchase the entire series of Les Meules, for example, in order to understand what is at stake here, for nobody looking at one painting from this set can comprehend the great insight that calls out so urgently for our attention. The truth is this, that all the vitality of Impressionism lies in how it educates our own understanding of light. This is what Gustave Geffroy explains so skillfully in his study of Claude Monet. “Mankind,” he writes, “has not only lived under a delusion that he lives at the center of a world that is special, unique, made knowable only by revelations from On High, and that the answers to all the mysteries must emanate from some will superior to his own; he has also imagined that as a creature he exists apart from this world. He never dreamed of anything beyond, any greater reality to which this planet where he dwells is connected. Nor did he comprehend any relationship between himself and the natural context in which he was born. For ages that was the gist of human philosophy, and great numbers of people still ascribe to it. Nonetheless there are others, in numbers that are steadily rising, who understand that their life is inextricably part of a natural environment, that earthly existence is always contingent upon the life of the sun; and accordingly, sensing within themselves some particle of this universal vitality, they commit themselves to expressing that relationship, how they feel themselves sustained and carried forward into eternity.

“Like all human expression, painting must reflect this slow process of discovery of the world around us, and also of the self as the foundation of human destiny. Playing its part, Impressionism signifies a heightened awareness, bringing us closer to understanding the poetry of light. Space acquires meaning; human thought ranges far; the relationship of sun and earth seems stronger and clearer than ever before. We contemplate our own condition as children of sunlight…. For the sun, the life-giving caress from afar, has been the essence of painting as long as painting has existed. The poetry of the sun is the life-force, the energy of the universe, rushing headlong to expire on the bounded field of the canvas.”

In his famous pamphlet, La Nouvelle Peinture (1876), Duranty says this about the Impressionists: “With regard to color they have scored a true breakthrough, the sources of which can be found nowhere else, not among the Dutch painters, the bright hues of frescos, the tonal lightness of the Eighteenth Century. Nor have they confined their interest to this fine and subtle play of color, their awareness of these delicate nuances in tone and how they mingle and contrast. The heart of their discovery lies in a recognition of how full sunlight can diminish the experience of color, that sunlight reflected from subjects comes away reduced, an incandescent blend that turns the whole spectrum into the undifferentiated brilliance that we call light. Moving from one insight to another, they have achieved a deconstruction of sunlight into its rays and components, on the canvas a harmony reified as spreads of these flashes of hue. For the discerning eye, made aware of these subtle interplays of color, the effect is extraordinary. For the study of light itself, these paintings should please the best natural philosophers of our time.”

So—everything that needed saying had been said, and there was nothing more to do, except do. And that was the quest of Monet.

1. The Watteau painting mentioned by Clemenceau earlier as a formidable presence in the Louvre. ↵

2. Zeuxis, a painter of the Greek Golden Age, is referred to in the writings of Pliny the Younger and Quintilian. Though none of his works have survived, extant Roman murals are believed to provide copies. ↵

3. A Greek term, signifying a place set apart for councils or conversation—a kind of refuge. ↵

4. “The countryside as yet has not reached full bloom.” Molière, Le Tartuffe, Act I, Scene 5. ↵

5. First published in La Justice in 1892, Geffroy’s “Histoire de L’Impressionnisme” appeared later that same year as a substantial portion of Volume I of La Vie Artistique (Paris: E. Dentu). ↵

6. At this point in the original essay, Clemenceau makes a truculent plea to Félix Faure, President of France from 1895 until his sudden death in office in 1899, to intervene and purchase the whole set of Cathédrales panels as a gift to the Republic. The Poincaré referenced here is Raymond Poincaré, at that time Minister of Education and in the closing years of WWI President of France when Clemenceau was both Prime Minister and Minister of War; “Roujon” refers to Henry Roujon, Director of Fine Arts in the Faure administration. The paragraphs from the La Justice essay, reprinted in his collection Le Grand Pan (Paris: Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1896) but dropped from Claude Monet, are translated below:

Such was my experience with these cathedral studies by Monet, arranged as they are in sequence by Durand-Ruel, allowing us to engage and understand them amid the harmony that they create together. From the catalogue, I see that any admirer can buy this or that individual panel that might strike his fancy; somebody else can come and buy another. What?! Can’t we find just one millionaire who can grasp, even vaguely, the effect of these twenty works together and say “I’ll buy the lot!” as he might do in one of his business deals? What’s going on here is a disgrace to the Rothschild class.

And as for you, Félix Faure—oh thou king-for-a-day, ruling so graciously from the palace of Madame de Pompadour, with Roujon and Poincaré at your side to guide you in your appreciation for Art—I’ve read that you’ve made countless buys for yourself in any number of picture galleries. This is a job for you.

But you’re not just Félix Faure; you are also President of the Republic, President of France. Apparently you pilfered this title from the bedside table of Napoleon I, as if the great man himself had bestowed his blessing upon you. Why hasn’t the notion entered your head to go and see the work of one of your contemporaries, for which France will be famous long after your own name has tumbled into oblivion? And where are Poincaré and Roujon? Are they overwhelmed with the blessed sleep of warriors? But don’t wake those good people up; and if somewhere in yourself there’s an atom of imagination, go and see this series of Cathédrales as the sensible bourgeois that you are, without seeking the advice of anyone else.

It’s just possible that you understand me; and dreaming that you actually represent France, perhaps the idea will come to you to endow us all with these twenty canvases which, as a set, represent one moment for art—in other words, one moment for mankind itself, a revolution without a single shot fired.

Know that History will remember such paintings as these; and if you have some genuine ambition to live on in the memory of others, try to catch up with Claude Monet, this peasant out at Vernon. It’s a surer thing than any vote by the Congrès at Versailles, or any business in the Ministries.

↵

8

The Nymphéas of the Water Garden

To say straight off what I’m thinking: now in the Tuileries, the Nymphéas panels are still a mystery to most Parisians. I am not so naïve as to find that surprising: the public will gravitate first to whatever they can easily understand. It has taken quite a while to attract them into our museums to see masterworks; and even now, if you ask a taxi driver to take you to the Louvre, you’ll be driven instead to the department store with that name.[1] We need to remember that the Orangerie museum wasn’t built to impress the masses; but I fail to see why the tastes of discount-store magnates are won by the kind of art featured at our big auction houses, while ordinary French citizens ignore Monet.

In fact, a conspiracy of silence has been at work here, unintentionally bolstered by administrative neglect. On a low wall of the Tuileries terrace, when I visited not long ago, there was one small gray signboard, about as big as my hat-brim, telling visitors that there is something here to see; a few paces farther on there was a gigantic sign advertising a dog show. Passersby had no problem taking the hint. Is this really how we want to acknowledge such a display of art, the likes of which have not been seen in the civilized world for so long a time?

The Beaux-Arts leadership and Monsieur Camille Lefèvre, an excellent architect, have done a masterful job of presenting these panels, befitting the work itself and also the nation that it was meant to honor. What we need to do now is tell our routine-besotted public that they will find here an experience to thrill them. In my own wanderings there I have seen that visitors who come once will come back again without hesitation. Parisians have to know that there is more to be looked at, in the heart of their city, than an answer to a technical problem in painting; for the whole world is here to be seen afresh, scrutinized, apprehended. We need a guidebook for this, a user’s manual, and I am glad to hear that such a document is being created.

But through this doorway we have now passed already, and with our first steps into the gallery the enchantment begins. Where do we go now? How should we pass along these walls, which seem like portals to Neverland?

Les Nymphéas (The Water-Lilies) by Claude Monet.

Well, at the outset, what greets us? An expanse of water, alive with blooms and foliage amid a tempest of fiery sunshine, with the vault of the sky and the mirror of the pond reverberating together, giving rise to those delicate perceptions by which one comes closer, step by step, to knowing the natural world as it truly is. All the radiant energy of sky and earth overwhelm us at once, an intoxication beyond the reach of words, the ecstasy of dream commingled with sensuous encounter, primordial and fresh. A yearning for the Infinite, subtended by an experience of tangible truth, from one reflection to the next and the next on a journey to the last nuance of discrimination.

Such is the essence of these panels, made possible by a twofold miracle, an eye so refined as to see in this way, and the artistic skill to achieve this translation of light, this adventure in color. A valiant brush is so important, aquiver in motion yet steady in purpose, as this artist reveals, working as if guided by some incredible microscope, elemental depths which we would never see without his help. Doesn’t such work come close to representing “Brownian motion”?[2] Well, science is one thing and art another, after all; yet even so, this art brings us face to face with the essential unity of the cosmos, interpreted by our guide and culminating in a rapturous experience of sheer beauty, a supreme awareness achieved in a lifetime of hard observation.

As the Nymphéas sweep us up from watery surfaces into these clouds that seem to wander in infinite space, we leave earth behind and even the sky as well, to revel in harmonies far beyond our own little planet of ordinary emotional experience. Science has not only revealed the eternal motions that subtend the universe; it has taught us to apprehend this knowledge, assimilate it, and act upon it, to live in a new kind of “Nature,” leaving to us the challenge of reifying it in art, provided the tools can be found to evoke and express that awareness. We don’t have to choose between the scientist and the artist; to be completely human we need them both.

Les Nymphéas (The Water-Lilies) by Claude Monet.

Upon the surface of the waters, these lilies, each borne upon a firm palette of leaves, seem to wait in peace for the coming of their own destiny. A fitting subject for deep thought: with no boundaries here, no beginning or end, we encounter this sight in one instant of presentation, on the way to metamorphosis in one panel after another. We need to know at the outset that the sequence of these pictures was stipulated by Monet himself; but what the thinking was that guided him in this arrangement he never told me. So I walk from the main door along the route that any visitor would likely follow, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Monet’s plan was simply to condition our eyes, in this sudden encounter with these tides of light, direct from the sun and also in reflection.

This jardin d’eau which we come upon first is seen quite clearly in the panel that Monet has set up as the start of the series. We can think of it as a tableau témoin, a strictly conventional exposition of a subject, with no special effort required from ordinary visitors accustomed to art museums. No sky, no clouds, no complications—lots of tranquil sunlight with not much reflected from anything we see, heavy limpid water illuminated in a classic sort of way—it’s late afternoon, around five o’clock, and benign Providence has laid out these flower-beds very nicely, with lots of big greenery providing contrast with these lovely blooms like little flames of rose and white. Monet knew how to present the tranquility of such ordinary light, enfolding these flowers like a rich offering to heaven from the earth. What we see here couldn’t be any easier to understand. The poetry is so simple and clear, though also so lofty, than anyone with an ordinary education can be readily enthralled by it.

I have called this a tableau témoin: a conventional experience of gallery-style light, our baseline for visual experience in museums, as this is the kind of interpretation we have grown up with. Yet here the sky is overcast. Two big masses of darkness—one of them a mix of night with day—roll into the scene, perhaps to collide in a few minutes and unleash a rainstorm. But for this moment the sun still dominates, enlivening the waters, throwing thick slivers of cloud through a portal of blue sky; hints of an unseen and distant combat, while as if in response to danger, a stricken water lily trembles, as a portent of some catastrophe to come.

But these turn out to be only the usual conflict of light with dark, the inevitable contrasts of a day in a garden. If there are hints here of an impending storm, the panels that follow take us into a magnificent pageant of light, a celebration of solar fire. Like dazzling symphonic variations, four additional panels explore this theme. In peaceful sunshine, the water lilies are arrayed beneath a companion willow through whose fronds bolts of sun-fire are allowed to pass, arrows of light whose vitality seems to spread over sky and water alike, reflected again and again and again, an indescribable ecstasy for the human observer. The lilies themselves, encompassed by a cloudscape mirrored on the pond surface, seem carried into the air by the power of the water; they shimmer as if in a surf, where fluid, commingled energies of earth and sky respond to the will of these great blossoms, heady with sensual life.

Les Nymphéas (The Water-Lilies) by Claude Monet.

So it is that art reveals to us the joyful energy in an expanse of water, the vault of the sky, the clouds, the flowers, all with so much to say to us, yet powerless to do so without Monet. Ethereal moments in a timeless drama, the natural world in performance for itself, with mankind as participant and observer.

Now and then I have gone to sit for a while on the bench where Monet observed so much in his jardin d’eau. With my untrained eyes, I had to work hard to follow, from that distance, Monet’s artistic journey to the limits of his own insights. The antithesis of that monkey in Florian’s fable,[3] Monet pours torrents of light into his own “magic lantern”—too much, one might say, if it were possible to complain about this abundance of luminous energy, like a Milky Way in layer upon layer, beguiling us with visions of the Infinite.

For its own place in all this—whatever that place might be—the water-lily only bears witness to the motions of the universe, these spectacles of sheer color that carry us away in our own thoughts and imaginings. Also, to finish the story: here in sanctuaries of foliage we encounter spent passions in pools of still water, presented to emphasize this water-garden as a place of contrasts, as storms of light from the blinding sky seem to set this world ablaze, and as the sky itself draws light from the glowing earth.

Whether it be for life or death, in a contest between flower and sun, eternal fire will always overwhelm the tender foliage. Protected by the willows, these sprays of water-lilies can savor a moment of triumphant bloom; but the clouds, like an exquisite coverlet burned through by the brilliance of the sky, overspread the flowers in the mirror of the pond, sweeping them away like rare prizes into the heights of the blazing sky, while touches of darker greenery, perceived through melodies of mist, mauve, blue, and rose, tell of the combat between ephemeral life and incandescent space. And all across this field the struggle is life itself, a primordial struggle for each successive instant of being, translated here into a contest of luminescence. The drama of Nymphéas thus becomes a universal truth, apprehended by human beings whose own lifelong struggles with mastery and submission are the plot at the core of this unending story. In these oceans of space and time, where torrents of light overwhelm our capacity to see, rainbows collide and converge, shatter into softness like fireworks, melt, disperse, and take shape again, all heightening the intensity which we feel within. Words fail in the presence; it takes an artist’s magic to open our bewildered eyes to the shock of the universe, the inexpressible enigma of the world. Even those with no awareness will take a step here towards comprehension. Over time, it will happen.

Something more: an entirely new experience in seeing. This triumph of sunlight throws us into a quandary of response, this iridescent transparency, this soft light with no definite hue, where sky and earth gently embrace amid scattering flowers and joyous clouds. A fragile, irresistible masterpiece, a moment of complete ecstasy transcending all harsh experience, the sublime omega-point in the artistic quest to which Monet abandoned himself happily, the sensual peace in the final stroke of the brush. And because we have learned recently that there truly is a “music of the spheres,” we have clearance to dream of new concerts, of hearing and of seeing alike, conjoined in a universal music.[4]

Yet as we return to the panels, we find here a somber blue evening, where ghostly greenery stands in now for all the triumphant, climactic flourishing we saw earlier. And finally, as we come to the close of the series, a culminating sight: through a forest of reeds, fading water lilies, spectral in a brilliant sunset, embody a provisional end to one more cycle in a vast and interlinked array.

Les Nymphéas (Water Lilies, Setting Sun) by Claude Monet.

So it is that Monet, at the height of his powers, brings us into a world seen afresh, an experience that fosters a natural maturing of our own capacity to see, so that we too can partake of this broader awareness. This succession of images teaches us to see the world as through a glass brightly, in diffusions of transmogrified light, in reflection upon reflection: deeper harmonies encountered in adventures of disorientation. An incomparable light-show contest between sky and earth, culminating in exultation, a communion with the world that also fulfills and completes our own capacity to feel.

I wish I could still hear that friendly voice, gentle and magisterial, as we stood together amid the natural wonders of his jardin d’eau. “While you chase after the world in itself, as philosophically as you can” he said with his genial smile, “I put my own work into seeing every sight possible in connection with hidden realities. When we reach the level of deep relationships among the things that we see, we cannot be far from truth, or at least not far from what we can know of it. I have looked only at what the world can reveal to us, trying to bear witness through my painting. Does that count for nothing? Your problem is that you try to reduce the world down to your own scale; but by broadening your awareness of nature you will learn more about yourself. Let’s join hands, and help each other see things better.”

1. As one of the massive “arcades” structures erected in the Haussmann era, Les Grands Magasins du Louvre opened in the Rue de Rivoli in 1855 and remained in business until 1974. ↵

2. Though the discovery of Brownian motion dates from 1827, it came into mainstream news in the early 20th century, thanks to work by Einstein and the French physicist Jean Perrin. In 1926, shortly before the Nymphéas were installed in the Orangerie, Perrin had received a Nobel Prize for his work with this phenomenon. ↵

3. An author of fables in the tradition of Aesop and La Fontaine, Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian was active in the later decades of the 18th century. Of noble lineage, he died in prison during the Revolution. ↵

4. [Clemenceau’s note] Monsieur George Grappe has written that “Claude Monet treats waves of light as musicians treat waves of sound. These two sorts of vibration correspond: their harmonies answer to the same ineluctable laws, and in painting hues are juxtaposed according to rules as firm as those governing two notes in musical harmony. Even more: in a single series, different episodes link together like different movements in a symphony. Pictorial drama unfolds according to the same principles as musical drama.” ↵

9

Critique of the Critics

Before I finish, allow me to bring into this conversation a famous professional art critic, an admirer of Monet but also a rigorous metaphysician, who insists that in the Nymphéas the artist leads us down primrose paths into an abyss of Nothing.

The proposition that modern painting’s special interest in light begins with Corot, I will happily concede to Monsieur Louis Gillet, whose lovely short book Trois Variations sur Claude Monet[1] praises his eye as “the finest with regard to nuance,” and lauds him for his “prodigious skill as a colorist.” Fair enough: so where do we go from there?

First, Monsieur Gillet takes us back to fundamentals about Monet’s technique, reviewing the well-known “theory of color classification:”

“Simple colors are more intense than compound colors. Therefore, because violet is a combination of red and blue, do not mix the components on the palette or the canvas if you want the color to be strong with no loss of radiance. Instead place dabs of pure red and pure blue beside one another, allowing the mixture to be perceived as violet by the retina. This is ‘mélange optique.’”

Having covered that, our writer freely acknowledges that this ostensible secret is now in the ABC’s of every colorist, though he concedes that Monet deserves the credit for having brought it into practice. He holds that it opened for Monet a unique “poétique” that led him into “the deconstruction of light and color, to transform even shadows into colored locales, to see everything as suffused, as afloat on floods of air, showing us the world as a kind of dream play. Shapes grow indistinct; boundaries seem to waver in a pale and glimmering aura. Everything transforms into dazzle and glow. The reality we know seems to deliquesce, a dance of atoms” weaving “fabrics of illusion in the void. No painter has ever worked harder to deny the material world.” Isn’t that a lot to read into the strokes of an artist’s brush?

I hope Monsieur Gillet will allow me to play heretic here and look at things a bit more simply. First, anyone who knew Monet can attest that as an artist he never harbored a poétique or any other kind of theory that might dictate or constrict his style. What was revealed to his sight he took for truth, and he dedicated himself tirelessly to painting what he saw. Nothing less; nothing more; that was enough. Monet would never have accepted that any doctrine should make a difference in how he looked at the world and how he worked. That was his one rule, and I don’t think anyone ever knew him to have any other. To put it bluntly: it seems to me that this is the secret of all great painters. Each of them saw reality in his own way. This is what makes them individual talents, and when we look to their interpretation of nature, let’s not get off on the wrong foot by interpreting them with formulations they themselves wouldn’t have believed.

Though the point might seem trivial, I am stressing it here because Monet’s deconstruction of sunlight is by no means obtained as Monsieur Gillet would have us think, by mélange optique, juxtaposed dabs of color. I have looked as closely at the Nymphéas panels as anyone else; I have often observed in them strokes of almost pure color, applied here and there for vivid effect, passionately at times, yet never profligate. The rest comes entirely from Monet’s palette, and if Monsieur Gillet doesn’t believe me, I encourage him to go and look for himself.

So what is the problem here? It is simply the fact that no two people see the world in exactly the same way, and that all we can ask of an artist worthy of the name is an interpretation of the world accessible to human eyes with an average sort of training. Monet’s genius as an observer is that from less than one meter away from his own work, a mass of different colors and mingled tones, juxtaposing, superimposing, all in an expanse of hopeless complication, he could see and represent his subject as if he were much farther away. I cannot account for this, other than to imagine that his eye could shift in a flash from one viewpoint to the other. Without daring to explain how that happens, I’ll simply note the obvious: that these delicate, errant streaks of color, puzzling to us at first, take on form and significance as we step back, showing us movement and nuance in the most surprising ways. Somewhere down the line our children may have an explanation for this phenomenon; for the moment, why not relax and admire it?

For to enjoy Monet’s art in its fullness, we needn’t pause too long before this miraculous chaos of color, these bursting rockets thrown so boldly skyward, these arabesques that confound our notions about form and design amid the play of sunlight. As a coinage to describe all this, Monsieur Gillet’s poétique tells us nothing; surmiracle is what we have here, the revelation of our world as a place of spectacular enchantment, more beautiful and more knowable than any vision of reality we have seen before.[2]

In fact, at this point the marvels ramify, and the world opened to us by these brush-strokes becomes so much more than a fantasia; revealed to us emotionally, these alternative truths correspond to dimensions that we also encounter in the adventure of modern science. Referring to the “dance of the atoms” creating their “fabrics of illusion in the void,” Monsieur Gillet concludes that Monet’s art amounts to a “negation of materiality.” He has it backward: on a visit to Jean Perrin’s laboratory, he would see Brownian motion first-hand, as well as the contrails of atoms and electrons recorded on glass plates. Then, perhaps, he might be less doubtful about what he disparagingly calls the “atomic dance” and the “storm of jangled nerves that constitute visual experience,” allowing him to favor illusion over physical truth. Then he would understand the poudroiement, this all-out deconstruction that he admires in Monet’s work—but that moves him to doubt the existence of subjects so thoroughly scrutinized.

We can get beyond that. When we see Monet’s brush-tip breaking the natural world down to such elemental particles, it is enough to delight in these transfigurations, so much like those revealed in the modern sciences. I won’t pretend that Monet is showing us “the dance of the atoms”; I affirm only that he has helped us take a great step towards an emotional comprehension of reality through heightened awareness of the dispersions of natural light—in line with what physics has discovered about oscillations, frequencies, waves. If our scientific understanding of the universe changes again, Monet’s achievement, this progress for us all in our intuitive response to nature, will always merit our respect, no matter what the future brings.

Having taken issue with Monsieur Gillet on such matters of epistemology, I hasten to pay homage to him for his appreciation of Monet’s art, a commentary well suited to the achievement of Nymphéas. In a sense they belong together, representing marvelous possibilities in the act of seeing, the variety that meant so much to Monet. There is no point thinking of the water-lily panels as “mirages unrelated to anything beyond themselves.” Yes, I understand that mirage means a subjective experience, a trick of the light or the mind. But what business do we have inflicting the term on representations like these, that meet true standards of objectivity? Without batting an eye, this writer tells us that Monet “indulges in festivals of subjectivity showcasing the impoverishment of the real.” Should we say this about Creation itself? Jehovah, any thoughts on that?

As an outsider, I truly am disconcerted by heresies that Monsieur Gillet’s argument seems to lead to—out beyond what he intends—when he says that “there is not enough life in Monet’s subject matter.” I’d like to hold him for a few minutes in front of that self-portrait in the Louvre. Subsequently he says that “this hymn of Monet’s is one of the most beautiful we have to the omnipresent Nothingness.” So now we have Monet as the ultimate adventurer, making Something out of Nothing, like the Creator in Genesis? Monet is also reproached along the way for not being a pastoralist in the tradition of Virgil. I can accept that; I like Virgil, in the same way as I like Raphael and Leonardo. In other words I live in my own moment, not in theirs; and the insights that Monet gives to us are appropriate to what we have now learned about seeing, and also about how to see. I am not interested in the pointless business of sorting out the great poets. It is enough to rank them according to the values of their own age, and Monet is no more Homeric than he is Virgilian or Dante-esque; and any such likening we would soon come to regret. I’ll go so far as to say that the Nymphéas make me think of Shakespearean settings in A Midsummer Night’s Dream—but a thought like that does not really connect Monet to Shakespeare or vice versa. What they share at most is their evocation of realms somewhere between the dream and the waking world, taking us as far as we can go in experiencing both at once.

So my disagreement with Monsieur Gillet is about philosophy, not art. I very much admire his thoughts about the Nymphéas and his genial eloquence as a writer. But to this brutally reductive observation there can be no assent: “To admire the enchantment produced by sunlight and these veil-dances of the weather, to gaze at these skeins of deception, to overspread natural forms with marvels of façade—Monet never grew tired of this.” There is no valid way to connect Monet’s spontaneous and intuitive art with some kind of systematic inquiry into the metaphysics of the Unknown, and he would have rejected that suggestion outright. To the limits of his ability he dedicated himself representing things as they are.

Even so, I am happy to encourage readers to consult Monsieur Gillet’s skillful descriptions of Monet’s paintings. As an interpreter he is conscientious, describing what he can see—and he would have done better by thinking more about physics than metaphysics. But for him the revelation of hidden truths by the brushwork of Nymphéas can be only a set of surfaces concealing some “X” of which he can speak only as negation. I see that as insulting to Monet, when he can no longer speak for himself.

With those reservations aside, I can be grateful to Monsieur Gillet for his lyricism in describing L’Étang des Nymphéas, and his charming appreciations will help people understand these pictures. Sincere, forthright, and knowledgeable in his respect for Monet, he blends admiration and intellectual engagement with these paintings as thoroughly as he knows how. Of course I am doing the same thing here, with no concern for any disagreement with me that might be afoot. His conclusion is appealing, as he sums things up with reference to the Asian traditions of Tao—left a bit vague here, perhaps, but summarized as a search for the path, a Chinese conception of evolutionary process. Also I am delighted to close this chapter with his beautiful description of the Nymphéas as we encounter them on exhibition: “Stunning paintings free of border and form, like a wordless canticle… where without benefit of structure, without embellishment, story, fable or allegory, bodiless and faceless, and with only the powers of color, this is pure lyricism, an outpouring, a human heart open and innocent, a song of emotion.”

These lovely words, I dare say, would have pleased Monet, though once more I need to add that Monet neither expressed nor needed any theory to explain himself or his art. He was who he was, and couldn’t imagine being otherwise. With his strong and confirmed temperament, he felt alive only in his dedication to his values and his work. His commitment was organic, physical; there was no turning aside. As the most victorious of our vanquished heroes, Brutus said to his legions: “All of us must face the enemy; there is no saying who shall return.” Such calls for complete sacrifice Monet had no need to tell himself, or to hear. Pouring his energy into his art, his will, and his daily work, he lived that principle, with nothing less than everything he had.

1. Paris: Librarie Plon, 1927. ↵

2. …again, with the exception of Watteau’s L’Embarquement pour Cythère [Clemenceau’s parenthesis]. ↵

10

Conclusion

Perhaps I don’t really need to conclude?

The life of Claude Monet bears irrefutable witness to the nature of the man. I have said that every sort of worldly existence has lessons to teach; however, the more sublime it is, the less understood it will be by those multitudes who think and feel and express themselves in commonplace ways. For more cultivated minds the lessons can also be difficult to see, due to differences in temperament. Which is why I want to focus here on one simple philosophical premise.

I have been warned that merely as a word, “philosophy” can turn readers off. Perhaps that’s so—but why shouldn’t a reader, much like an art lover, accept the truth that being alive means learning to change? Philosophy, after all, can be thought of as generalizing based on verified generalizations. In our worldly experience there is nothing that cannot and should not contribute to our quest for a coherent description of reality, or of humanity in search of it.

In the case of Monet, who never wavered from his calling as an artist, what stands out for me is how the natural development of his consciousness translates into his style as a painter, and how that style resonates so wonderfully with the evolution of scientific knowledge, our understanding of the characteristics and dynamics of light as a form of energy. To put it crudely but accurately, “he was in the game.” His personal vision and his consequent aesthetic growth paralleled remarkably the confirmed facts that science was acquiring by means of experiment.

Such a coincidence is probably unique; in any case, it constitutes the most “theoretical” dimension of Monet’s career. His destiny, it seems, was to be artist and scientist at the same time. This wasn’t his agenda, for he had none except to be himself. Because the all-out labor of his life unfolded from no preconceived plan, he became one of the greatest masters of an art in which so many had achieved fame and distinction before. Nonetheless, in his self-awareness as an observer of nature he ventured into new territory, though it was perfectly possible for him to keep safely to ways of the past. He therefore broadened our emotional range; in other words, he benefited us all by taking a fresh leap in our heady and marvelous journey into the Infinite.

Therefore Monet was the kind of creative genius that we call a “poet”—a poet of lyric simplicity, and also a poet of action. I understand that such terms pulled from a lexicon seem more apt to clash than to conjoin in summarizing his personality. A “lyrical” temperament, which is to say a “super-imaginative” temperament, does not catch the fact that in his personal life he was a man of perfect simplicity. Among our great poets in verse and prose, neither Bossuet nor Victor Hugo are remembered as being simple in any real way, and neither of them was. And were they men of action? Not really: when Bossuet attacked Protestantism he wound up on the wrong side of the argument; and when Hugo joined the December 2 resistance against the coup d’état of Louis Bonaparte, that too was little more than a gesture. Men of constructive action? Perhaps they thought so—but I’ll venture that posterity will say otherwise.

I once heard Victor Hugo proclaim with a straight face that when he died he would rise up into the sun, and at Madame Drouet’s request he promised to take her with him.[1] Holding his peace, Monet milled the sunlight mirrored in his jardin d’eau and recomposed it for the benefit of us all, for the enhancement of the human condition, in our humble and sublime place in the universe. And in so doing, this great craftsman—in his labor, his interpretive skill, and the conduct of his life, with unfailing energy and will, richly deserved to be called a poet of action when he went to his grave, heavy with years, his life’s work complete.

When our species had evolved to the point where human beings were able to think, the bard became an honored public role. Singing of man and the world from nothing but his own ignorance, he contrived what systematic study would later set right. Monet never concerned himself with pronouncements about the Absolute. He knew that art could never be more beautiful than the truth itself, because art cannot venture beyond the subjective. But to achieve a closer approximation of the truth, as risky as that might be, to intensify his own understanding and affirm his own life and will, he gave everything he had—and died thinking that he had not given enough.

It should be easy to see that this excursion into “philosophy” I propose to my readers is within the reach of everyone. To connect different aspects of one exemplary human being requires no excess of abstract thought. In fact, these final thoughts I am jotting down lead me to relive precious hours in the presence of inspiration, provided by a true paragon of noble effort. But once more I must keep in view the human drama at the heart of this phenomenal achievement. I am not peddling another theory of painting as an art. Monet’s style was a direct relationship between eye and brush, with no dogmas, no pretensions in the mix. He was a born painter, compelled by an irresistible drive to look ever deeper into the essence of the natural world, finding his way to insights that no one had paused to countenance before.

From beginning to end, Monet’s life can be understood as an ever-evolving, relentless performance of a sublime drama, a drama of human ingenuity. Wandering through the abundant mediocrity in the streets and stoas of his day, Diogenes was looking for one genuine and complete man, paying no heed even when Alexander came strutting into view. This rare exemplar whom the consummate Cynic sought in vain: have we at long last come close to finding him?

A human being in the fullest sense—why should such people be so scarce that when we encounter such a marvel we are expected to go limp with ecstasy? The higher a species has evolved, the more we should expect of it—isn’t that reasonable? But no—we collapse under piles of mindless eulogy, this constant give-and-take of ritualized praising. But nothing is more important than clear-headed, private thought about the adventure of one’s own life, to see everything, whether grand or petty, in its true proportions. Perhaps the Übermensch was only a madman’s fantasy; perhaps we can see his Untermenschen anywhere we look. But it is also possible that in spite of mankind’s inherent mediocrity in the cosmic scheme of things, ordinary people, by virtue of hard work, can come to exemplify some truly higher level of human existence. Why not begin by believing in the worth of that effort? Modern society can give us the wherewithal to become better than we are; it can also lure us into self-indulgence and sloth. It’s a safe bet that pandering to ignorant multitudes is an easier and more tempting recourse than keeping faith with what we know to be true, or with convictions rising firmly from within. What matters most in life can come only from ourselves, and it comes only with self-control.

With Monet the facts speak for themselves: his temperament was even enough to keep him centered on his extraordinary purpose—yet with madness enough to plunge him into it with all his intensity. Thus we see Monet as the man of action in the true sense, resolving to pour the best of himself into lives of his contemporaries, launching into this perilous adventure with fire in his heart, unrelenting even in times of self-doubt. His life does credit to us all. Nonetheless, where do these dullards come from, chiding him for being so sure of himself, so firm in his convictions, in the face of opposition? Why is it that so often in all this crazy scrambling, even those with iron resolve can feel so tormented about themselves and public opinion? Human beings are what they are, a chaos of good and bad moments in self-understanding, letting us think too well of ourselves and risk thinking too ill of others. From all of that comes a lot of talk, to very little effect. For any chance at success, the one surest thing one can do is try, personally and at all costs, to rid one’s own mind of causes for failure.

Intoxicated with ocean vistas along the quays at Le Havre, the young Monet surely wasn’t giving himself pep-talks; but we have only to look at his work from those early years to see that in his gaze at the world, with his eyes piercing and alive like vibrant arrows, the chimes of his own future were already sounding, and that anything short of complete success would bring him no peace. Very soon, even the lines of his face would firm into the visage of an active and daring soul. Never at rest, his eyes sought for challenge, and always they found it, giddy in a hope that everything in him could be rallied to the cause, even if the effort shattered him.

But that shattering never happened. Moreover, what hasn’t been understood—what Monet himself never dreamed, and what only a few people can now recognize about him—is that in such an adventure there is no “defeat” that isn’t part of the success. First-hand I saw marvelous episodes of this drama unfold—and if readers don’t find them interesting, I hope they’ll grant me the pleasure of telling them to myself on the pretense of telling others. Graceful deeds, rewarding in themselves, gain nothing from ceremonies of adulation; and because for true idealists life is a struggle, victories festooned with triumph and vainglory can sometimes lead to decadence. Monet went to his grave doubting himself—doesn’t that tell us something about how he himself conceived of success?

I see him as an example of the simplest, finest sort of human life; and in writing about him I have wanted to showcase the matchless importance of the plainest truth. The man had no use for publicity; he never sought the cheap thrills of fame. Devoted to sunlight, he gave himself abjectly to the joy of throwing open his windows and seeing—to catch and transmogrify the excitement in the outside world, to ravish his canvases, as it were, with the sheer ecstasy of color.

The world goes on its way in spite of human pronouncements. As creatures on this planet, we respond and grow in accordance with the ebb and flow of natural forces and harmonies all around us. As an artist, Monet understood that fact intuitively, and that such knowledge kept him aloof from the conventions and sophistries of this école and that, in their labor to make the world play by rules commensurate with our own limited understanding, to fit better with our capacity to say things in words, as if the eye weren’t obedient to laws and powers beyond our own. As the cultivation of emotional life, art engages with the enhancement of perception. That was Monet’s project, leading him into his search for new strategies, an intensity pushed further and further in representing the phenomena of light—and in consequence, a heightened awareness for us all as creatures of feeling and thought.

From those very first experiments at Le Havre, this artist, haunted by the dynamics of color, was reaching for the intangible, which we can never apprehend as more than a trace of the endless motions of the universe. If that intent was beyond his reach, it was certainly his right to keep trying; and because he resolved never to accept defeat, we shouldn’t wonder that in excruciating times when self-doubt could not be kept in check, when the fair winds of safe passage seemed to die or shift away, his fears of inadequacy brought from him cries of rage, causing him to tear up canvases that his hard work had brought so far. Indeed Monet knew what it was to lose faith in himself; but in the face of each crisis he soon gathered himself again and pressed on, without pause, on his journey beyond the horizon.

Do we really know what to say of such a man, who feels so compelled to give all to keep alive, in the depths of his heart, his own capacity for hope? In a life or death struggle to realize the fairest of his dreams, he translated onto his palette his very heartbeat, the restlessness of his eye. This is what our ideals demand of us, raising us up, setting us on dangerous pathways in a headlong race into the unknown.

Where then can we find a valid way to compare the aspirations of such great imaginative people, and their quarrels with convention? Sooner or later it all comes down to a few ephemeral acts, when we try to catch and showcase such moments in our lives, amid these storms of eternal change. When and how did such questions occur to Monet? I have said that theories played no part in his work. By his very nature he was intoxicated with the light of every day, every circuit of the sun around the earth. With no care for convention he sought to paint what he saw. Thus he found his way to innovations in style, to breakthroughs in technique that could have wrecked his career and that proved to be his salvation. He became the master of a mode in which his own experiments with oil and brush matched the enchantments of color in the world before his eyes. Culminating so happily with the Nymphéas, this triumphant rising of his own capacity to see owed everything to the ceaseless struggle within him: to keep at bay that abiding fear, the uncertainty as to whether his calling was mere madness or a genuine gift.

“They will call me crazy,” he used to say. Despite those remarks he never let go of his purpose—still, he didn’t dare to release the Nymphéas while he was alive, and there is a lesson in that, about him. And also about us.

This dazzling conquest of light, the sublime music in these landscapes of the Nymphéas, can seem abrupt, sudden in their creation and their effect, though many long years of work went into their making. They required of Monet nothing less than complete accord between his masterful eye and his supremely able hand. As if scorched by fires of sunlit truth, his bold and brilliant eye, so roused by the miracle of the world that every single brush-stroke was tantamount to putting one’s whole career on the line as death came nearer; the hand, in full possession of its artistic skill and responsive to each impulse, yet also mollifying, ordering, connecting, transforming it all into natural sequence and forms. For every stroke of Monet’s brush, “final” as each might seem, is also an experience in time, an instant of transition, guiding us from the moment just now ended into the moment to come.

Days of dizzying fury; days of calm, days of unshakeable resolve. And above all, the unceasing anxiety of a man obsessed with one purpose, fearing nothing so much as falling short in its realization; the kind of fear that comes with the highest hopes. Our wary fellow citizens pursue dreams of their own, of course; but those dreams never soar so high.

Every one of Monet’s paintings bears clear witness to what he tried to achieve, and sometimes his own lively and genial commentary has been a help. But criticism never caught him without a comeback, and a gruff tone or a trenchant mot showed well enough that this man of kindness and laughter had put too much of himself into his art to speak of it with an air of detachment. His intent was to study nature wherever the chase led him, in every aspect and as closely as he could—easy to sum up in this way, though ambitious in the extreme. Neolithic artists in caves had the same purpose, and we should remember that some of them, working with primitive media, were remarkably good at it. On the masters we know and celebrate in the history of painting we have critiques aplenty. They all dedicated themselves valiantly to their work, and in their legacy we see moments of super-human energy and spirit. Thank heavens for that; to recognize the genius of Monet there is no need to demean anyone else. Coming at the right moment, he took us farther along a path where so many other great artists had ventured before.

Luckily there is no need to belabor this point. Fixated on the movement of the human form, Greece in its Golden Age fulfilled its destiny with generations of sculptors whose work will probably never be surpassed, though what we know of Hellenic and Hellenistic painting, from what we can see of it in extant work from Egypt and the frescoes of Pompeii, never surpasses the middling. The advent of religious painting in our Middle Ages, bolstered by the upheavals in Renaissance art, centering on mankind and oblivious or hostile to nature, opened the arts to polytheistic subjects and to Christian mythology, a thematic revolution and a landmark in the history of the West. The story is right there in our museums; one has only to pay them a visit.

As for Monet, I try to accept him as he offers himself, as an artist of his time and in this country. About the bygone masters of his art he felt no envy and offered no critique—they enthralled him, but he didn’t squander his time and energy raving about them. They found in the world what he saw himself, but at a different moment in the history of our ability to perceive. They worked in accord with their own times, respecting traditions and conventions from which they felt no need to detach. In a sense, Monet set out to follow their example closely—but also to risk doing better.

Burdened by preconceptions essential to the rise of human intelligence, artists in ancient times were late in recognizing the role of nature in the cultivation of consciousness. Monet sought mastery of our capacity to feel because feeling had mastered him; it was win or lose, and fate would decide. And because the outcome of any such struggle benefits the vanquished along with the victor, we can take pride in this one man’s mighty struggle won for the good of us all. Honneur aux hommes de bon volonté!

1. A famous actress and courtesan, Juliette Drouet had a long and tempestuous relationship with Victor Hugo, commencing in 1833 and ending with her death fifty years later. ↵

II

Essays on the Arts

Freeing the Louvre

La Justice, 18 March 1894

Every change isn’t necessarily reform,[1] said old Grévy[2]—who presiding over his Republic, made himself at home there like Renan[3] at the Academy, and took a dim view of anything that disturbed his slumber.

If reform is out of fashion at the moment, I ask that we at least abstain from changing something sensible and good that the monarchy left behind.

All of our ranking Philistines are busy now with gathering public support for this grand reform, which amounts to charging entrance fees for our national museums. It’s been known for a long time that our collections of fine art have remained static, while those in other nations have continued to grow and improve. Our budget for this is miserly; and the use to which it has been put hasn’t always been heartening. The matter of a certain Italian bronze is still fresh in mind.[4]

It is sad, of course, to see how the museums of Berlin, of London, of Antwerp, are all improving with acquisitions of the highest quality, while the Louvre, short on cash, won’t even risk showing up at the major art auctions. In 1874, the Berlin Museum bought a part of the Suermondt collection for 1,250,000 francs, including the Van Eyck Man with the Pinks; in 1890 it was Dürer’s portrait of Holzuer, for which they paid 450,000 francs; in 1892, at the Dudley sale, they came away with the Virgin of Crivelli (186,000 francs), an exquisite Rembrandt (66,000 francs), and Botticelli’s illustrations for The Divine Comedy—1,500,000 francs.

During this entire period, our own most important purchase was a fresco falsely attributed to Raphaël, which cost Monsieur Thiers 600,000 francs and which isn’t worth a tenth of that sum. Cleverly concealed now in the entry to the Primitives Gallery, it is labeled “School of Raphaël,” out of consideration for those unspeakable petit bourgeois who, not content with murdering Parisians when they were alive, presume to entertain them forever, now that they are dead, with these displays of crockery, these chamber pots—a disgrace to the Louvre where masterpieces molder in obscurity.

This isn’t just a matter of fixing the cash-flow for our museums. We need to know how the money will be used. Our museums need funding? We have a budget of three million francs, encumbered by useless outlays and entitlements. Nothing would be easier than making the needed allocation, if we cancelled the newly-created job of Architect for the Saharan Monuments. In Tonkin[5] we have spent several hundred million francs to assure a thriving trade for Britain and Germany; it shouldn’t be too difficult to find the few hundred thousand needed to save our incomparable Louvre from degradation.

And so, as you’d expect, such a move is exactly what they don’t want to do. Earmarking certain revenues for specific purposes smacks of Byzantine bureaucracy. Our financial experts are unanimous in condemning this practice—which is why they insist on applying it to our Paris museums.

There are plenty of reasons for that: first among them is the difficulty of getting money out of our legislature. The Députés don’t like Paris. This city is envied by other districts. Our population comes here from all over France, however, with no questions asked about where anyone is from. Even so, things are done here, and written here, that are hard to grasp in the regional capitals. To some geniuses out there, Paris seems like a huge, haphazard stew of wonderful and awful ideas, sublime and crazy dreams, heroic and despicable action, messes and free-for-alls, a chaos. All of that provokes resistance, and even hatred, manifest in a hundred different ways.

Moreover, the Louvre is not a place where our representatives like to go for a day out. This assemblage of old canvases and broken stonework doesn’t speak to many of them. After toiling on commerce commissions or local interests, they seek gratifications that are simpler and less cerebral. It’s not that their minds are more closed to the world of art than most other people’s; rather, the grim sterility of their parliamentary travails often leaves them too worn out for any effort on their own, other than caring for themselves.

And so: stud farms, irrigation schemes, secondary roads, and countless other projects that are insufficiently funded and that I don’t want to disparage, are rightfully called for by people who will never come to the Louvre, or who go there and understand nothing they see. And giving in to such pressure, the poor Député again and again leaves the arts to stagnate, rather than risk any complaints, no matter how inane, from the crowd of small-time country squires whose backing he must have to be elected.

Our ministers therefore don’t like advocating for Paris. Though some of them might feel the urge, they know that no one would support them except a small elite. So they don’t even try.

This is why there are dreams of using, for the benefit of our museums, the proceeds to be had from selling off the Crown Jewels. Several million francs could be made available that way, and Benjamin Raspail has voiced the inspired idea of using some of them to create a fund for workmen’s compensation. The building-blocks are in place, ready for the legislative branch to resolve, as sooner or later it must, to go ahead and do something. Naturally, some of our younger reformers have called for us to make headway; but the allocations our museums would receive would still be inadequate. We need something more.

In this search, proposals have been worked up to install turnstiles at the portals of the Louvre. In the push for this plan we are being told that this is going on in other countries. That doesn’t make it any better; and considering how we forbid ourselves to copy anything good that goes on elsewhere, why should we choose to import something that does harm? Besides, the revenues collected would be minimal,[6] for we certainly wouldn’t dare to close the Louvre to poor people every day of the week.

It is said that some poor wretches come in simply to warm themselves in the royal palace. This is a fact—I have often seen such unfortunates huddled quietly in front of a heat outlet. Humiliated and timid, they do no harm; and in a sad stupor they gaze at whatever canvases happen to be in front of them. Drowsily calmed by the warm air that hits their faces, they dream of Heaven knows what; they forget. That is the least we can do for them. Moreover, if it’s agreed that in our Christian society we cannot provide necessities to such victims of misfortune, we can get drunk on our luxuries: these people will always be with us. Since we have still not resolved to assure the basic necessities of human life, we can at least not refuse an hour of refuge to anyone who comes in.

I am glad that people down on their luck find welcome in this palace, that we treat them honorably there, and that before their eyes, these masterworks of human artistic achievement speak to them of something other than the harsh life beyond those doors, to which they will so soon return. The lucky folk of the world, caught up in their business—and alas, what business!—have no time to spare for imaginative life. Let the poor among us do some dreaming.

But then it’s not just the poor. On Sundays the Louvre is so jammed that one can hardly turn around; people of every social class can be found there, especially from newer ranks that have risen up with such great fanfare. Everybody. Children in wide-eyed astonishment; they will come back again for another look. Who knows what might blossom in these young minds, giddy with impressions, who having taken in so much, might want someday to give back something of themselves, when their chance arises?

On weekdays, working people in their coveralls often gather in the Salon Carré, or in the Grande Galerie. Young people arrive in small groups, alert, laughing, a bit overawed nonetheless, but glad to be out on their own, to see what has been accomplished by their forebears. Their cheeky Parisian skepticism crumbles as they encounter the legacy of all these masters; right there in front of them, these works tell the story of what they believed, what they wanted, what they did. Is there any better lesson for anyone—and would you shut the portals to people who come in search of this education? Besides, in the history of mankind the true geniuses have labored for the good of us all. Anyone who presumes to sort us out, no matter who they are, is the real barbarian.

But alas, there’s no shortage of barbarians in the halls of the Louvre. You can see them parading by in herds: green tartans, gilded lorgnettes, dispensing thoughts like this in front of a Rembrandt self-portrait: “If I had a big nose like that, I wouldn’t paint my own picture so often!” “Look at that lovely floor!” says another voice. Baedekers in hand, the caravan passes by. This is what the Louvre will be left to, when we’ve emptied it of everyone who thinks or feels.

Instead of planning to close the portals, let’s open them wider if we can. Within these ancient walls there will be barbarism enough either way, if only because it’s the home of that brilliant Curator, who piles up our works of art so chaotically that the only comparable mess is the mishmash of politics.

Even Monsieur Richtenberger,[7] who zealously defends the administration of the Louvre, is obliged to concede that “our own installations are no match for those in museums abroad.” In other words, the layout plans are to blame for the horrendous crowding of the Flemish paintings, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Italian—to put it bluntly, it is not the placement that matters; it is the lack of understanding about art.

1. Clemenceau’s essay is not only about a plan to charge admission at the Louvre, but also about freeing the museum from tight budgets and complacent leadership. ↵

2. Jules Grévy (1807–1891), President of France from 1879 to the end of 1887, is remembered as an exemplar of stability, moderation, and bourgeois values. His administration was ultimately forced out by a scandal about taking secret payments for the conferring of high honors. ↵

3. Ernest Renan, who had died in 1892, had received numerous honors in his later years for his volumes of history and philosophy; he had been elected to a chair in the Académie Française in 1878. ↵

4. “It will be remembered that in 1892 the Louvre bought a fine Venetian statuette of a male nude figure. The work had been refused by the British Museum, and was bought by the Louvre for £1,600. When it was declared to be forgery, the State took action and forced the seller to refund the money.” M.H. Spielmann, “Art Forgeries and Counterfeits: A General Survey (Continued),” The Magazine of Art, Volume I, ed. Marion Harry Spielmann (London: Cassell, Peter, and Gilpin, 1903), p.50. ↵

5. The northern territory of modern Vietnam, brought under French colonial control in 1885. ↵

6. [Clemenceau’s note] In London, 26,000 francs per year; in Madrid, 5,000 francs; in Florence, 80,000 francs. ↵

7. Eugène Richtenberger (1856–1920), who with Georges Lafenestre, the Louvre’s Curator of Paintings, co-edited La Peinture du Musée du Louvre, the first volume of which appeared in 1893. ↵

At the Louvre

La Justice, 6 June 1894

To run our museums, our Republic has chosen an excellent fellow—one could almost say distinguished—who used to turn out clever little reviews that did no harm to anyone. A while back, when he was no longer fit for that kind of work, he was given the job of developing our national collections.[1] He became famous for showing a moderated taste—with immoderate zeal, as everyone knows—in all of his public duties.

So here he is now, installed in his Louvre, chiefly preoccupied with not overworking himself, and with continuing the nice routines of Monsieur van Nieuwerkerke.[2] At these two jobs he has done as well as one could possibly hope. For in his Louvre, everybody is in charge except him. It’s like the court of King Pétaud: His Majesty snoozes, and the courtiers do as they please.[3] The problem is that they do so at the expense of the paintings and the statues. The paintings seem to move around randomly, a crazy dance where no one knows what’s going on. It’s as if all the canvases come down off the walls at the stroke of midnight, joining in a rumpus; and when the cock crows they climb back up again, wherever chance or the night’s madness might have taken them.

When the art isn’t being moved around indiscriminately, it’s being “restored.” We haven’t forgotten what happened with The Pilgrims at Emmaus;[4] Van Dyck’s Duke of Richmond is also lost to us now. Thanks to complaint from the press, some paintings have been saved from this mischief. But as the objections continue to roll in, these same people, brandishing their trusty scrapers and paint-pots, are rubbing and sanding and re-lacquering other canvases, until they’re all polished up like pretty pieces of porcelain.

This obsession with preening is a hazard now in every museum in Europe, for these carpet-beaters have absolutely no interest in confining themselves to conservation. Instead, they fancy themselves the likes of Rembrandt, Rubens, and Holbein. In Basel recently, they had a go at Holbein’s marvelous portrait of the humanist Amerbach.[5] Packed off to Munich, it came back “restored”—gleaming, garish, and dotted with little reddish spots, supposedly to repair what had previously been a subtle play of light.

Perhaps what we need here is an all-out reform, to fire these “experts” at the Louvre, and replace these brilliant bureaucrats with a few hacks to go hunting for spiders.

Is this the ominous prospect that now tumbles our Monsieur Kaempfen out of his hammock? Hard to say: in any case, it has dawned on this supposedly-intelligent person that paintings in these galleries might possibly be arranged in accordance with an actual idea. This is what he has said—has he lost his mind? One way or another, as a delectable novelty, a foggy effort of this sort is underway. They have decided it give it a try.

They started with the German paintings. They are all together now, replacing those Le Sueurs[6] to which we bid a fond farewell. The lighting in this room is lamentable, and the Holbein masterworks are not displayed to best advantage. The pictures are haphazardly positioned: a Denner portrait that requires strong light is parked in shadow; the loveliest of the Cranachs is now up by the ceiling.

After these exploits, they fooled around with the pre-Renaissance works; “experimentation” is their excuse for putting things up and taking them down as the spirit moves them.

Meanwhile, bright ideas from somebody else have turned up: rearrangements in the hall displaying the ancient bronzes. That gallery was like all the other ones—a mess beyond description. The Roman platter, the gladiatorial helmet, and the Corinthian mirror were all sitting there peacefully next to each other, beneath the puzzled gaze of the Didymaean Apollo.[7] So someone decided to sort all this out, to make improvements; and so the public was excluded from this hallowed site for two months. Walking past the barricades, I could see the walls bare and the display-cases empty. There were paint crews in there doing touch-ups, and carpenters scraping away with planes. The grand reorganization was underway. A few weeks ago, the portals were finally opened; and oh, have there been changes. With a quick look-in we can savor the “improvements.”

Apollo of Piombino, ancient Greek bronze.

What strikes one right away is that the most important work here, the Greek Apollo discovered at Piombino, has been shifted out of position. One used to see it in profile, bathed in soft light, upon entering the room; and the god seemed radiant with youth and charm. Right in front of a window is where you’ll find him now, a placement oblivious to the harsh daylight that emphasizes the imperfections in the metal and wrecks the surface texture of this wonderful object. The powerful stance of the torso is roughly thwarted by the sheer impossibility of stepping back far enough to appreciate it, and the back of the statue can no longer be seen at all. When you come in, you observe it only as a formless black hulk blocking the window. It’s a fact that this work can be rotated on its base; I even found an accommodating guard who as a favor agreed to reposition the statue. But that accomplished nothing, as the modulated light was no longer there. Instead, a pattern of bright squares and black holes made for a shocking effect. Nonetheless, I did finally hit upon a vantage point: to see the work now you have to look at it from the other side of the window to its right. There, through an interstice among all the statuettes and mirrors, the marvel of this Apollo comes clear again. The two windows together reduce the harshness of the illumination, and the god rises for us as a vision of youth, power, and beauty. How odd—that two months of labor should have succeeded in forcing visitors to shift around in search of this single bizarre spot, to appreciate one of the consummate works in the Louvre.

Closer view of the head of Apollo of Piombino.

For this statue that you have before you is an archaic bronze by one of the old masters of the Peloponnese, a copy or replica of the famous Didymaean Apollo, a colossal statue from the temple at Miletus where the god delivered his oracles. Monsieur Collignon[8] sees it as a free sort of replica, because the hair, instead of falling in curls upon the shoulders—as we see on the coinage—is gathered in a ponytail. If I can risk an opinion: I prefer to think that it’s the coins that are at fault—not a remote possibility, considering the range of variations we see on those coins, beginning with the ones showing the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Moreover, the Apollo of Ptoös,[9] which is a reproduction of the Didymaean, has no cascading curls at all. Moreover, my best reason is that this Sicyon[10] bronze of ours is simply too beautiful not to be the work of a very great artist, and a direct result of his most intense inspiration.

I know of no more perfect example of the deified human figure as imagined and realized in the Hellenic world. The body is lithe, vital, powerful, harmonious, endowed with infinite grace. The broad chest and the strong neck bespeak a capacity for superhuman action; and devoid of any bathos, the whole figure shows exquisite delicacy. The head is incredibly youthful. The flicker of a smile, lifting the corners of the sensuous mouth, the eyes alive still, despite the loss of their crystal inserts, the noble purity of the profile which, though thoroughly idealized, remains human nonetheless—together, they carry us away, beyond the enigmas of the Classical conception of beauty.

“Votive to Athena,” says an inscription edged in silver on the statue’s base. Never was a goddess honored with a more marvelous offering. So why do they persist in commending to us, as faithful replicas of the work of Kharnakos,[11] that bad Payne Knight bronze in the British Museum,[12] and that vulgar statuette now in our coin room, the one discovered near Miletus,[13] when we have before our eyes a work that cannot be inferior to the original masterpiece? We know its extraordinary history. When Darius seized Miletus and burned the temple of the Branchidae,[14] he transported the god to Ecbatana,[15] from which, two centuries later, Seleucus Nicator returned it to the Milesians.[16] How then did this Sicyon bronze now in the Louvre find its way to Piombino? That odyssey would have no historian to tell the tale.

Is it absolutely necessary to organize works of art according to what they are made of? That’s open to debate. Wouldn’t it be better to position the Didymaean Apollo in the gallery where we see the magnificent fragments from its own temple, brought back from Asia Minor by Monsieur Rayet?[17] If Rayet had found it in his own excavations, the statue today would be next to those marbles from the necropolis. Because a Greek bronze turns up in Italy, is that a good reason to exhibit it with Roman lamps and scales, on the excuse that they are all made from the same metal? So now I come back to the subject from which the Didymaean Apollo caused me to stray so egregiously.

But one more word about that. On the base you see an item number, 3012. Open the catalog: it contains 1022 numbers, and the Didymaean Apollo is there as number 69. From this one fact, concerning the most important piece in the gallery, you can see the whole problem. Greek and Roman divinities all mixed up, thrown together haphazardly, and catalogued only under general headings—Venus, Mars, etc.—this is what passes for a major reorganization. Fully a third of the pieces, including some of the most important ones, aren’t numbered at all. Others are assigned the wrong numbers, as with the Didymaean Apollo. This is true for most of the collection. For the armaments there is nothing about provenance. Numbers from 6000 to 7000 abound: one mirror has the number 7182, and the catalog still won’t go above 1022. I could fill two pages with a list of works devoid of any description.

As for the mixing-up of everything, judge for yourself. In the main showcase: Etruscan cistae[18] bronzes from Dodona, “antique” keys (from which country? What era?), surgical instruments (provenance?), Byzantine bronzes, and two Greek mirrors, separated here from the others for no evident reason. In a display window, an inscription, a fragment from the Narbonese forum. Below that, two strips of decoration from the temple of Apollo at Epidauros Limera. In the other embrasure, two slingshot balls (origin?) some Greek weights (what period?), some Byzantine weights, and some tubular fragments with this enlightening label: “lead pipes with inscriptions”(?). Farther along, a big display case marked this way: “animals.” I look up, and I see a couple of helmets.

I’ll stop here to avoid being wearisome; but I could go on and on. About art, nothing. Wait, there’s one notice: catalogue number 75 has this comment, “This figure is one of the final monuments of polytheistic art.” From that moment on I’ve been wandering around asking everyone I meet, “What is polytheistic art?”

Would somebody out there bring me news about the catalog for antique sculpture? My colleague and friend Guinaudeau,[19] surprised by the absence of any catalogue in the galleries, took the matter to Monsieur Kaempfen himself, who responded via one of secretaries, the “Accountant for the National Museums,” in a letter as confused as it was polite, the gist of which came to this: “For Greek and foreign sculpture there is no catalogue.”

A supremely beautiful collection of fine art finds itself in such shameful disarray; and this is after a program of reorganization. Monsieur Nieuwerkerke had started a catalogue; the index cards are asleep in piles up in the attic. And the Minister had the nerve, after a visit, to congratulate Kaempfen and his acolytes on their marvelous work. Who shall now congratulate this Minister?

Do you remember, Spuller,[20] when you were Minister for the Louvre a few months ago? I wrote to you then: “This is a real job for you. Don’t screw it up!”

Yesterday, in the Salon Carré, looking for some trace of your time here, I stopped before that marvelous self-portrait of Rembrandt in old age, where this great poet of light itself has enshrouded his joys, his dreams, his mad and stubborn pursuit of the ideal, with all the disappointments, all the despair, all the ravages of his life. No gilded chains on him now, no velvet beret. Nothing but a knotted cloth around his head.

Compare this powerful visage, already beginning to fade away, to the young, eager face of the man at the start of his career. Your staff has hauled that luminous portrait far away, hanging it with others in a dimly-lit room. For my part, I’d prefer, for the sake of comparison, and also for the story of this great soul, to bring together these moments from one incomparable inner journey.

In these two studies we have the whole human being. And between the two an entire life unfolds. Look at the steady eyes, the firmness of the lips, the tempest upon the brow, the resolve of the mind. Everything here cries out to you: “I’ve struggled, I’ve lived, I’ve been unshakeable, I’m still here.” And what kind of life has he lived? To die penniless, abandoned, overcome with misery—and yet, in spite of all that, the gaze always fixed on the unchanging goal.

We see mankind here, in his glory. As a fighter he lived and died. Look at him, punched in the face by life. The firm line of the mouth is always there; the will has not weakened. We see less audacity perhaps, and more resolution. The look is more tranquil, certainly, but the hand is gripped on the palette like a last resort. It doesn’t tremble, this brave hand that shall paint the Syndics of the Draper’s Guild. It seems to clutch at action itself, at life. What strength could we find in ourselves if we could grasp it! Does this mean nothing to you, Spuller? Do you reminisce about our own gilded neck-chains, our velvet berets? That was back in our youth. As Durranc[21] once said, “How lovely the Republic used to be—when it was under the Empire.”

Spuller, let’s get a grip on that palette; and since no one will say of us that we brought order to the Republic, let them say at least that we made a proper catalogue for the Louvre. We will not have lived in vain.

1. Albert Kaempfen (1826–1907) had been appointed Director of the Louvre in 1887. ↵

2. Émilien O’Hara van Nieuwerkerke (1811–1892) had become Superintendent of the Imperial Museums under Napoleon III. ↵

3. According to an old French fable, a deluded farmer turned his lands into an anarchic kingdom where everybody was equal and no one listened to anyone else. Daumier did a cartoon of the story; it is also mentioned in Finnegans Wake. ↵

4. On May 31, 1894, La Justice had published a heated editorial about a recent botched restoration of Rembrandt’s painting, undertaken by Claude Chapuis under the direction of Kaempfen, who was complaining about being victimized in the press for this effort. ↵

5. Holbein’s portrait of Bonifacius Amerbach, in the Kunstmuseum Basel, dates from 1519. ↵

6. Eustache Le Sueur (1617–1655), a prolific artist, was one of the founders of the French Academy of Painting. ↵

7. Clemenceau is referring here to the Apollo of Piombino, a bronze figure discovered in 1832 and believed for a while to be one of the few surviving bronzes from Classical Greece; more recent evaluations classify it as a Roman-era copy of a famous statue from the sanctuary at Didyma. ↵

8. By 1894, Maxime Collignon (1849–1917), a Classical archaeologist, was already famous for several monographs on Greek ceramics, mythology, and sculpture. ↵

9. An archaic image discovered in 1886 by a French-led expedition at a temple site in Boeotia. ↵

10. An ancient city near Corinth. ↵

11. The modern English name for this Archaic period sculptor is Canachus, active in Sicyon in the sixth century BCE. ↵

12. Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824) donated a large number of bronze works from the Classical period to the British Museum in 1824. Clemenceau is referring here to a statuette of a young man, identified by historians at the end of the nineteenth century as a small replica of a Canachus Apollo. See Ernest Arthur Gardner, A Handbook to Greek Sculpture (London: Macmillan, 1896), vol. I, p.194. ↵

13. Clemenceau may be referring here to a funerary statuette of a woman, discovered at Miletus and brought to the Louvre by Olivier Rayet (see note 17) in 1873. ↵

14. The Branchidae were priests of Apollo, supposedly descended from the god. In the campaign to suppress the Ionian Revolt, the armies of Darius I besieged and destroyed Miletus and the temple in 494 BCE. ↵

15. Described by Herodotus as a Persian fortress and capital city. ↵

16. An infantry general with Alexander the Great, Seleucus founded a dynasty that ruled over most of the Asian territories of the former Persian Empire. ↵

17. In a brief and productive career, Olivier Rayet (1847–1887) had done excavations at Miletus and Didyma in1873. ↵

18. Funerary boxes, often elaborately decorated. ↵

19. Bernard Guinaudeau wrote about arts and letters for both La Justice and L’Aurore. ↵

20. Eugène Spuller, Minister of Education and Fine Arts in 1893–94. ↵

21. Édouard Durranc was a contributing writer for La Justice. Actually, the line Clemenceau quotes here may belong to the historian Alphonse Aulard, who said this to Durrac in the summer of 1885. ↵

Evening Museums

La Justice, 21 November 1894

In Le Journal, Geffroy[1] calls for the creation of a musée du soir, somewhere in the Saint Antoine suburbs or the Quartier du Temple, for the benefit of furniture-makers and craftsmen. Clearly, the operations of our museums are not at all responsive to the needs of the society in which we live.

The Louvre is an accumulation of things from all over: the crude stele of Tanit,[2] works of Michelangelo, Madame Thiers’s gravy-boat.[3] There’s no order to all this, no classification system, no catalogues—only fragments of catalogues with the item numbers wrong. For visitors with little time to spare, it’s impossible to come away with any benefit from a trot through all those galleries, stuffed as they are with masterpieces.

And then there’s the Luxembourg,[4] which is truly awful, with no space, no order, a haphazard gathering of acquisitions with no general concept. When one considers that of all the nations in the world, France can claim to be the most brilliant in the fine arts, we have to recognize that the Luxembourg Museum provides only a ridiculously feeble idea of the imagination and achievement that constitute our pride and joy.

While all other countries have given high priority to organizing their own collections, to sorting them out and completing them to exploit every opportunity for education, we have shown ourselves woefully incapable of bringing order and clarity to what we have.

In that respect, it’s worth noting the weakness, really the bankruptcy, of top-down administration. Keeping the individual under its thumb, centralized authority, accomplished by the usurpation of local prerogatives, is all-powerful. It rides herd; it watches; and day and night it controls every dimension of social life. Even so, when it comes to defending and assisting the individual, and to enriching his engagement with the arts, it is clueless and can do no good.

The Beaux Arts administration, so skillful in impeding progress, has proudly kept to its practice of doing nothing. No initiative there; not a flicker of responsible conduct. It has turned our national galleries into little fiefdoms whose overlords, benign and lazy, doze peacefully out of sight. The museums are their private property, and nothing seems crazier to them than disturbing their slumber for the common good. The idea of displaying competently the masterpieces under their care, of adducing from them some snippet of their capacity to enlighten the multitudes, strikes them as exquisitely absurd. And should some Minister ever dream of consulting the Director of the Louvre about the possibility of musées du soir, our Monsieur Kaempfen would reply, with astonishment, that Geffroy should be hauled off to a loony-bin.

Well, why doesn’t the Minister take matter in hand himself, since in our country, individual initiative comes down to demanding that the government do something? To make this happen, nothing extravagant need be done right away. In truth, this would run contrary to the culture of the institution, that instead of waiting for visitors to come in, the museum actually reaches out to people in their own districts. One or two big rooms with easy access, a handful of attendants, a decent security system, a few warehouse workers to set things up, a couple of policemen, some insurance, fire protection, a few electric lights—that’s all it would take.

What is stopping us from opening up, simultaneously, two or three sites of this kind in Paris? The effort would be minimal, requiring no significant capital outlays and no bureaucratic fuss. At Batignolles, at Montmartre, and out in the Antoine district, a small evening museum would draw in crowds of working people like moths to a flame, as wholesome recreation for the eye and the mind.

For my part, I would very much like this activity to be a pleasure; and it will prove so if we can just put some life into it. To me, it isn’t enough that the administration gather paintings, position statuary, and exhibit works of art. That’s only half the job. Paintings can resonate in the mind; statues can speak to us—but their language requires compassionate interpretation for people with only a scattered experience in the arts. This is why I’m putting out a call for good-hearted experts—critics, artists, artisans—who would impart this knowledge as teachers.

No lecterns with water-pitchers, no orations. Imagine an association of people familiar with the arts as practitioners or writers, sending one of them every evening to a small district museum. Our fellow shows up in his street clothes, and with his hands in his pockets he wanders around in front of the masterpieces. He inspires confidence; visitors are drawn to him. “What is this painting?” “Tell us about the painter.” “When did he live?” “In what period of the arts?” “What did he do?” “Why did he take on this subject?” “What was he trying to say?” “What connections are there between his time and ours?” “What about his technique? His skills? His thinking?” All of this comes at a rising tempo, because we want the whole crowd to be asking. This is essential for the success of a musée du soir. People are normally timid; official spokesmen scare them off. So, nothing stiff here. No official get-ups. If the questions don’t come—since nobody likes to show ignorance—let’s encourage them. And once the tongues loosen up, you’ll see the ice break.

So it’s fearless conversation among equals, with explanations asked for and provided as they all stroll around the pedestals, moving from painting to painting, showcase to showcase: edification in the company of experts—a wonderful sharing in the sublime joy of the beautiful. What artist, no matter how great, wouldn’t be pleased by such a fate? Though I prefer not to name names, I know many people who think themselves incapable of speaking formally, and who would be completely surprised to find themselves talking at length in such amiable company. Everyone comes away happy, with the public hungry for new experience, and the artist obliged to sharpen his own thinking as he gives it voice. And all of that achieved through conversation, roving instruction; without the affectations of academe, the boredom of didactic monologue.

It is this sense of life that must spring from the contemplation, the lively interpretation, of great masters who have bequeathed to us, across the ages, the timeless experiences of living. The musée du soir has to be a delightful adventure, where every visitor feels like an active participant in the great drama of being alive, inspired by these evocative portrayals of human emotion.

How can we be sure that some ordinary worker, with no arcane expertise, won’t ask the artist an awkward question? In that case, what a delight for the latter, obliged thereby to deepen his own perceptions, to see from new viewpoints; and when he comes home, to go back to the drawing-board, perhaps. People learning from encounters with one another—this is the best way of all. At night, in the homes of the workers, reflections will circulate naturally. After their first visit to the museum, they will want to come back. In the shop they will encourage their colleagues, their friends, to go for the fun of it. After an encounter with Bracquemond,[5] they will want to know what Degas or Rodin can say to them as well. If the fine art on view can be rotated now and then, to maintain the interest of visitors who not only look but also actively engage, this can be an endless pleasure.

To say it in full: this isn’t really about creating “artists” in the strict sense, people who design and model and paint and chisel and sculpt; but more about creating an audience, “artists” in their own way, who pay attention, who understand, acquiring a blessed feeling, a contagious delight. Artists make themselves; all they need is the usual kit. What we must do is create men and women as complete human beings. People are truly deprived when they go through life oblivious to the truth that such powerful emotional experience can bestow, like a princely tribute laid before us all. We have created a France that reads, and writes, and counts, and knows, and yearns to know even more.[6] Now we must lift our nation up to a new and higher plane, fostering a populace that can feel. We must create a constituency for our artists, just as we try to sustain one for our intellectuals. And in doing this, we shall cause more artists to rise up from obscurity, from the multitudes, much as we have seen with men of science.[7]

When we recognize that the genius of our race has emerged without any deliberate effort to promote intellectual life among the lower orders, we can justly expect so much more, a flourishing even more beautiful, when we cultivate minds that are now lying fallow. Schools are places where one merely learns how to learn. We have rebuilt their walls, but not their mentality, that dogged dedication to abstract, stultifying pedagogy. The real culture, the culture that can prepare souls for a life of creative engagement, comes from within the self, assisted by schooling and encouraged by daily experience. This is why we must offer every opportunity to learn, on every street-corner, so to speak; every inducement to venture further into the mysteries of the universe.

I will add that by elevating the public in this way, we will improve the artist as well, that his own schooling will become more complete. Responding to Geffroy, Monsieur Arthur Maillet[8] has justly observed that a problem for many artists is that “they cannot keep faith with themselves because everything truly original that they do, when they try selling it to our well-heeled industrialists, has been roundly refused.” Who is to blame for that, if not the general public? Let us transform that public, raising it up from the bourgeois “art” that disgraces so many of our Paris homes, and our artists won’t find themselves rejected when they plunge into uncharted territory.

For we should not assume that only working people will benefit from the musée du soir. Middle-class folk will turn up there first; and when they go home, they will reconsider that wall-clock they bought on the Boulevard Saint-Denis. The moneyed bourgeois—yes, even he—will also want to learn. Contrary to the predictions of Monsieur Arthur Maillet, the musée du soir, as a museum that speaks to us all, a museum that changes, will actually create, little by little, the artist, either by helping him in direct ways or by fostering a populace that responds with enthusiasm. And when our multitudes have finally tasted the fruit of the sacred tree, when everyone has understood that every encounter with art heightens our condition as human beings, their powerful thirst for aesthetic experience will in turn call for more.

Oh, the squandered potential out there! That other half-baked minds should busy themselves with blocking those who would support the full development of mankind! To become, isn’t it our duty to try everything we can? “What I propose,” says Geffroy in his essay in Le Journal, “is to bring the fine arts and the world of ideas into daily life, awakening this great, instinctive yearning among the multitudes to become fully alive, a yearning that never slackens, that constantly renews.” Truly, that is the goal.

As for the result, it would quickly surpass our hopes. Read what Ledrain[9] says about two of his students, one of them a baker, the other a gilder: “… two fresh minds where everything germinates with incredible force. Today they are two distinguished experts who are going to publish a volume on Assyrian—” Such are the untapped resources of French genius, while our luckless bourgeois youth collapse from exhaustion and boredom, under the burden of study-guides and exams.

Alas! Here, as everywhere else, we need a revolution. Not some raucous upheaval with gunfire and proclamations, but a revolution with regard to intellect and purpose—the only kind that our fair land has never experienced. Who will take the first step to make things better?

Musées du soir have been proposed; let’s give them a try. Every foray against the lethargy of the Old Disorder is a step towards a New Order. Certainly we need to keep our efforts within bounds, lest we wear ourselves out with grandiose plans and impossible dreams.

Rather than try to budge the Winged Victory of Samothrace, what could be easier than to copy what’s going on in England, where they are moving works from their museums not just from one neighborhood of London to another, but also from city to city? Doesn’t our great artistic heritage belong to the entire nation? Why can’t it venture out to those who cannot come to Paris? In England, private collectors take pleasure in displaying, at big public shows, some of the loveliest works they own. What a fine practice to adopt here, among those who keep masterpieces perpetually hidden from the eyes of others!

Wouldn’t these fine folks like to connect with the people? What a lovely way for them to build a rapport with the masses they so stupidly fear, and who ask nothing more, after all, than to participate in life, in the wholeness of human existence.

Come on, aristocrats, come on, democrats! Let’s all meet up at the first musée du soir.

1. The prolific and influential art critic Gustave Geffroy, who later wrote Clemenceau (1916) and also Claude Monet (1920), was inspired by the late visiting hours being offered at the museum complex in South Kensington; in 1895 he published a manifesto pamphlet, Musée du Soir aux Quartiers Ouvriers (Paris: Marty, 1895), and campaigned for the project beyond the turn of the century, against allegations that the proposal was a subterfuge to corrupt the tastes of the nation. After a few early experiments, the idea has gained traction in recent decades, with musées nocturnes, museums open late in cities and towns across France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. ↵

2. A small ancient votive to Baal, discovered in Algeria in 1877. ↵

3. Élise Thiers, wife of Adolph Thiers, President of France in the tumultuous years after the collapse of the Second Empire. Because Thiers had led the nation during the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, Clemenceau regarded him as an embodiment of reactionary middle-class values. ↵

4. The smaller museum in the Palais de Luxembourg, to which Manet’s Olympia was consigned before Clemenceau, as Prime Minister, ordered its transfer to the Louvre. ↵

5. Félix Bracquemond (1833–1914), prolific engraver and influential public figure in the arts of his time, was a close friend of Geffroy, Rodin, Degas, and the Goncourts. His wife Marie Bracquemond (1840–1916), a gifted Impressionist painter, eventually abandoned her art after years of discouragement and indifference from her husband. It’s likely, therefore, that Clemenceau is referring here to Félix, as a conspicuous presence in the salons and a recent winner of the Legion of Honor. ↵

6. Clemenceau may be alluding here to the école républicaine laws of 1881–1882, passed during the administration of Jules Ferry, establishing free, compulsory, secular education everywhere in France. ↵

7. Louis Pasteur (1822–1895), for example, was from a poor family in a small country town. ↵

8. Arthur Maillet had recently published L’Art Décoratif Moderne. Réponse à Deux Lettres de M. Georges Berger. Président de l’Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs (Paris: Librarie des Arts du Métal, 1894). ↵

9. Eugène Ledrain (1844–1910), prolific Egyptologist and Bible scholar, was for a time Curator of Oriental Antiquities at the Louvre. ↵