REIMAGINING MONET
Ross King traces the turmoil behind artist’s famed Water Lilies
Ross King will appear at the Glenbow Museum Theatre on Monday at 7 p.m. Visit wordfest.com
Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lillies by Ross King Bond Street Books
As a high school student in Estevan, Sask., Ross King was convinced he was going to become a great artist.
This was not because of any particular talents he possessed in the visual arts, but because he was lefthanded.
“I knew that Leonardo da Vinci was left-handed, and I would even practise writing backwards like he did,” says King, in an interview from his home in Oxford. “I thought I could become the next Leonardo da Vinci until I realized I can’t draw, I can’t paint.”
As it turns out, that didn’t really matter. King’s initial interest in art did not come from anything he was seeing on the walls of galleries or from pictures in books. He became interested only after reading about the personalities behind the art. Irving Stone’s 1961 biographical novel The Agony and the Ecstasy, about Michelangelo, or 1934’s Lust for Life, about Vincent Van Gogh, were his gateway into the world of visual art and the tempestuous geniuses who created it.
The bestselling and Governor General’s Literary Award winning author has since become renowned for books that tell the personal stories behind iconic works, whether it be the drama behind Da Vinci’s Last Supper or personal demons the fuelled Michelangelo’s mural on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
His latest book, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies, looks at the historical and personal turmoil that raged in the background as the waning Monet created his most famous paintings. King will be in Calgary on Monday at the Glenbow Museum Theatre for a WordFest event to discuss the book. He took some time to speak to the Calgary Herald.
Q Claude Monet’s Water Lilies are such famous and familiar works of art. When did you realize that there was a bigger story behind them that people didn’t know?
A I read a quote from Claude Monet from Sept. 1, 1914, when war had broken out just a few weeks earlier. He talked about the way in which he wanted to stay in Giverny despite the war, despite the fact that everyone was leaving and that if the Germans invaded they could kill him in front of (his) canvasses. It struck me, maybe for the first time, that he had lived through the First World War and, more importantly, had painted through it. The Water Lilies, which we think of as so iconic, are a product of that time. Despite the fact that, for the most part, they seem very restful, I wanted to reimagine him painting them during a time of both personal stress, when he was fighting his own personal battles and having difficulty with his health, and also as Europe was being torn up by the war.
He went out into his back garden and, starting in the 1890s, began constructing the landscape that he would then paint.
Q War was raging, but the estate where he lived and worked seemed so idyllic ...
A I wouldn’t want to detract from the courage that it took for him to stay there at that particular time. But you’re right. One hundred or 200 miles away, terrible battles were being fought, including by his son Michel who was at the Battle of Verdun in 1916. As all of that was happening, he was sitting beside his pond and, amazingly, keeping the garden going despite at one point losing most of the team of gardeners to the war. As the battles were being fought he did have a very idyllic existence that would have struck his son Michel very forcibly when he returned on furlough from Verdun. He would have gone from the devastated landscape of Verdun and seen the beautiful landscape that his father created and his father was painting.
Q Do you think most people know that the landscapes Monet was painting in that period were man-made?
A I think we’ve lost sight of the fact that he was painting something that he had constructed. The paintings have become so famous that we don’t really think about how odd it was to paint a landscape that you yourself as an artist, or you yourself as a gardener, had constructed. Generally what you did with a landscape is you went out and found a landscape. He went out into his back garden and, starting in the 1890s, began constructing the landscape that he would then paint almost exclusively over the next 25 years. I hope the book makes people look at them differently or look at them anew.
Q What drove him to create such a huge project at this point in his life? He was already wealthy and successful. But he had health problems, he had suffered some tragic losses in his family and Impressionism itself had fallen out of fashion. What do you think drove the obsession he had for the project?
A That is a question I would love to be able to ask him. If I were to answer it, I would point to two things. One, it does begin with the health problems. In 1914, when he resumed painting after not painting for three years, he scaled up his painting so he could see the canvas better as his eyesight was beginning to fail at this point and he had been diagnosed with cataracts.
So he began working on larger canvasses, initially ones about six feet high and five feet wide and ultimately ones that were 6 foot high by however wide he wanted to make the composition, often 14 feet wide and in some cases 40 feet wide. Part of that was the eyesight. The other aspect is that he wanted to have a monument to himself.
Monet, by the time he was in his 70s … wanted to have his own hostage to posterity. I think he realized the way to do it was to have what these days we would call an installation, where he would have this enormous wraparound canvasses that would be glued to the wall so they couldn’t be removed. What I think he did succeed in doing was to make that final definitive statement both about his own place as an artist and the place of impressionism.
Q Mad Enchantment isn’t the first book you have written that explores the stories behind iconic pieces of art. What is it about this idea that intrigues you?
A What I like to do is reverseengineer these works of art that have become iconic and that we recognize as masterpieces. Because we see them as masterpieces we tend to forget there was a moment when the artist first stood in front of the wall of the refectory in Milan where Leonardo painted the Last Supper, or the vault in the Sistine Chapel where Michelangelo did his fresco, or Monet sitting beside the pond with a six-foot-high by five-foot-wide canvas where he was going to start this new campaign of doing water lilies.
From our vantage point, 100 years later in the case of Monet, or 500 years later in the case of the Renaissance artists, we tend to think that of course they were going to be masterpieces and they were always going to work out because of the fact that these are great artistic geniuses and that’s what they did.
But I think when you go back in time, whether it’s April-May of 1914 for Monet or the autumn of 1494 for Leonardo da Vinci, you realize there was absolutely no guarantee that work was going to be finished, much less was going to be a masterpiece because of the way historical events were stacked against the painters and also because the painters were struggling with their own personal demons or personal difficulties.