‘ THIS SATANIC PAINTING TORTURES ME’
A NEW BOOK EXPLORES THE EMOTIONAL TORMENT OF LEGENDARY ARTIST CLAUDE MONET
On Nov. 2, the winner of the $60,000 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction will be announced in Toronto. In anticipation of this award, the National Post presents excerpts from all five nominated books. Today: Ross King’s Mad Enchantment.
Much of Claude Monet’s l ife and work had been a mad striving for the impossible. His goal, which he frankly admitted was unattainable, was to paint his carefully chosen object — the cathedral, cliff or wheatstack before which he raised his easel — under singular and fleeting conditions of weather and light. As he told an English visitor, he wanted “to render my impressions before the most fugitive effects.”
Since objects changed their colour and appearance according to the seasons, the meteorological conditions, and the time of day, Monet hoped to capture their visual impact in these brief, distinctive, ever- changing moments in time. He concentrated not only on the objects themselves but also, critically, on the atmosphere that surrounded them, the erratically shifting phantoms of light and colour. “Everything changes, even stone,” he wrote to his wife Alice while working on his paintings of the façade of Rouen cathedral. But freezing the appearance of objects amid fleeting phantoms of light and air was no easy task. “I am chasing a dream,” he admitted in 1895. “I want the impossible.”
Recording the fugitive effects of colour and light was integral to Monet’s art. Setting up his easel in front of Rouen cathedral, or the wheatstacks in the frozen meadow outside Giverny, or the windswept cliffs at Étretat on the coast of Normandy, he would paint throughout the day, as the light and weather, and finally the seasons, changed. Because lighting effects changed quickly — every seven minutes, he once claimed — he was forced to work on multiple canvases almost simultaneously, placing a different one on his easel every seven minutes or so, rotating them according to the particular visual effect he was trying to capture. In the 1880s the writer Guy de Maupassant had witnessed Monet “in pursuit of impressions” on the Normandy coast. He described how the painter was followed through the fields by his children and stepchildren “carrying his canvases, five or six paintings depicting the same subject at different times and with different effects. He worked on them one by one, following all the changes in the sky.”
This obsession with capturing successive changes in the fall of light or the density of a fogbank could lead to episodes that were both comical (for observers) and infuriating ( for Monet). In 1901, in London, he began painting what he called the “unique atmosphere” of the River Thames — the famous peasouper fogs — from his room in the Savoy Hotel. Here he was visited by the painter John Singer Sargent, who found him surrounded by no fewer than 90 canvases, “each one the record of a momentary effect of light over the Thames. When the effect was repeated and an opportunity occurred for finishing the picture,” Sargent reported, “the effect had generally passed away before the particular canvas could be found.”
One irony of Monet’s approach was that these paintings of fleeting visual effects at single moments in time actually took many months of work. “I paint entirely out of doors,” Monet once airily informed a journalist. “I never touch my work in my studio.” However, virtually all of Monet’s canvases, although begun on the beaches or in the fields, were actually completed back in the studio, often far from the motif and with much teeth- gnashing labour. A friend reported that a single Monet canvas might take 60 sessions of work. Some of the canvases, moreover, were given 15 layers of paint. His London paintings were finished not beside the banks of the Thames but as much as two years later in his studio in Giverny, beside the Seine, with the assistance of photographs.
There was another irony to Monet’s paintings. Many evoked gorgeous visions of rural tranquillity, such as sun- dappled summer afternoons along a riverbank. His pleasingly bucolic scenes were combined with a flickering brushwork that produced delicious vibrations of colour. The overall result was that many observers regarded his paintings as possessing a soothing effect on both the eye and the brain — and Monet himself as le peintre du bonheur (the painter of happiness). Monet himself speculated that his paintings might calm “nerves strained through overwork” and offer the stressed- out viewer “an asylum of peaceful meditation.” The writer Marcel Proust, an ardent admirer, even believed Monet’s paintings could play a spiritually curative role “analogous to that of psychotherapists with certain neurasthenics” — by which he meant those whose weakened nerves had left them at the mercy of fastpaced modern life. Proust was not alone. More than a century later, an Impressionist expert at Sotheby’s in London called Monet “the great anti-depressant.”
This “great anti- depressant” was, however, a neurasthenic who enjoyed anything but peaceful meditation as he worked on his paintings. Monet could be volatile and bad- tempered at the best of times, but when work at his easel did not proceed to his satisfaction — lamentably often — he flew into long and terrible rages. His letters are filled with references to his gloom and anger. Part of his problem was the weather. Painting in the open air left him at the mercy of the ele- ments, at which he raged like King Lear. It was a strange contradiction of Monet’s practice that he wished to work in warm, calm, sunny conditions, and yet for much of his career he chose to paint in Normandy: a part of France that was, as a 19thcentury guidebook glumly affirmed, “generally cold and wet … subject to rapid and frequent changes, and fairly long spells of bad weather that result in unseasonable temperatures.” Working on the windswept coast of Normandy in the spring of 1896 he found conditions exasperating. “Yesterday I thought I would go mad,” he wrote. “The wind blew away my canvases and, when I set down my palette to recover them, the wind blew it away too. I was so furious I almost threw everything away.” Sometimes Monet did in fact throw everything away. On one occasion he hurled his colour-box into the River Epte in a blind rage, then was obliged to telegraph Paris, once he calmed down, to have a new one delivered.
Monet’s canvases likewise felt his wrath. His stepson, Jean- Pierre Hoschedé, witnessed him committing “acts of violence” against them, slashing them with a penknife, stamping them into the ground, or thrusting his foot through them. An American visitor saw a painting of one of his stepdaughters with “a tremendous crisscross rent right through the centre” — the result of an enraged Monet giving it a vicious kick. Sometimes he even set fire to his canvases before he could be stopped. He claimed to find painting an unremitting torment. “This satanic painting tortures me,” he once wrote to a friend, the painter Berthe Morisot. To a journalist he said: “Many people think I paint easily, but it is not an easy thing to be an artist. I often suffer tortures when I paint.”
Some of Monet’s friends regarded his torture and suffering as a necessary condition of his genius. “One must suffer,” one of them explained. “One must not be satisfied … With a painter who slashes his canvases, who weeps, who explodes with rage in front of his painting, there is hope.”