You see water lilies... Monet saw ‘a square of BLUE, an oblong of PINK, a streak of yellow’
We now take Impressionism for granted but in his day Monet was a revolutionary whose great works inspired everyone from Jackson Pollock to Rothko
The winter of 1889 was long in southern France. Even in late April it was still cold, and the heavy rain went on and on. But in May the weather broke – and as the bare oak tree that Claude Monet had spent the past weeks capturing on canvas burst into leaf, he burst into tears. How was he going to finish the picture now? Simple. By handing the tree’s owner 50 francs and hiring a couple of local labourers to strip off every bit of new growth. ‘Isn’t it something,’ Monet joked, ‘to finish a winter landscape at this time?’
Well, yes, it is. Then again, anyone who reads Jackie Wullschläger’s rich and detailed new biography will learn that Monet never did anything by halves. A couple of years after the oak tree incident, he decided to paint a row of poplars near his house outside Paris. Alas, no sooner had he set up his easel than the owner announced that they were for the chop. Once again, Monet reached for his wallet – this time going so far as to buy the trees.
Light was always Monet’s real subject. Hence his love of painting outdoors. ‘Three brush strokes painted from nature,’ his mentor Eugène Boudin told him, ‘are worth
‘Like Einstein, Monet understood that everything in the world was energy ’
more than two days’ in the studio.
Still, Monet wasn’t out just to record what a view looked like at a singular moment. That job, he thought, could now be left to photographers. He wanted to paint what happened to a view as the light changed. He wanted his paintings, Wullschläger says with characteristic elegance, to be ‘about time rather than place’.
But for all that Monet’s pictures were knocked off at speed out in the field, once they were back in the studio he tweaked them like a Photoshop fiend.
Painting his famous sequence of Haystacks, he was forever sending his stepdaughter Blanche to bring him yet another canvas so that he could record every effect of light on those 20ft-high cones of straw.
Having returned home, with the pictures arranged side by side, he set about finetuning them, lightening a colour here, deepening a shadow there, so that the pictures’ infinitesimal differences bounced off and spoke to one another, like the instruments in an orchestra.
Wullschläger is surely right to see the Haystacks as the hinge-point in Monet’s career. They were the first of the great serial paintings he would work on for the rest of his life. After them he moved on to multiple renditions of Rouen Cathedral, Japanese bridges, and, most famously, the water lilies in his garden. He was fascinated by the number of times you could look at something and never quite capture it. In this realisation, Monet was the seed-bed of so much post-war painting. If you want to know where Jackson Pollock or Clyfford Styll, or – especially – Mark Rothko got their ideas, look at Monet’s Water Lilies paintings.
For in many ways the godfather of Impressionism was actually a proto-abstractionist. As he told the American artist Lilla Cabot Perry, ‘When you go out to paint, try to forget what object you have before you – a tree, a house, a field or whatever, merely think: there a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you.’
For a century and more, the Impressionists have been everyone’s favourite painters. But back in their day they were a cultural affront. The critic of Le Figaro, Albert Wolff, spoke for many when he talked about Monet ‘tak[ing] canvas, paint and brushes, throw[ing] some colour on at random, and sign[ing] the result’.
The art critic of the Financial Times, Wullschläger is very good on the theoretical underpinnings of Monet’s work. While she accepts that her man was no thinker, she argues that Monet’s paintings were of a piece with so much of what was going on in science and philosophy as the 19th Century gave way to the 20th. Like Einstein, Monet had somehow intuited that everything in the world – from the flowers in his garden to the stones that built cathedrals – was energy. Like the philosopher Henri Bergson, Monet had somehow grasped that time wasn’t something out there – it was something in here, a facet of human consciousness.
This intellectual backdrop is handy for Wullschläger, because despite the ‘Restless Vision’ of the subtitle, Monet had an almost entirely restful life. Given there are almost 2,000 canvases with his name on them, it’s fair to say that pretty much all he did was paint. True, Monet lost his first wife, Camille, to cancer. But his second marriage was no less blissful, and the closest his life got to something like drama was when he ran short of money and had to fire off a begging letter.
This dearth of action might help explain why Wullschläger’s beautifully illustrated book is the first full-length life of Monet in English. What it means is that her attempts to read the work according to his life are desperately thin. Following the example set by the late John Richardson’s multi-volume biography of Picasso, Wullschläger suggests that Monet’s art changed when the woman in his life did. Certainly his paintings became less and less representational during his second marriage. But next to Picasso’s violent volte-faces in style and imagery as he moved from one young lover to the next, Monet’s turnabouts are so seamless as to be inconsequential.
Cézanne famously called Monet ‘Only an eye – but what an eye!’ Jackie Wullschläger has done Monet the service of turning him back into a rounded human being. But it’s his eye that will go on seducing us.