Stroke of genius
Mad Enchantment Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies by Ross King Bloomsbury
THE world teetered on war and France’s elections were nigh — so what did that country’s former prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, do?
He left Paris for Giverny, to urge his elderly, ailing friend Claude Monet to pick up his paint brushes. Or, as Clemenceau put it: “Monet, you ought to hunt out a very rich Jew who would order your water lilies as a decoration for his dining room.”
That April 26, 1914, outing is the starting point for Ross King’s book “Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies.” King vividly evokes those fractured times, and the creation — despite every obstacle — of a masterpiece.
Most of all, it tells us about Monet, a piece of work all his own. Taciturn but brilliant, the father of Impressionism was a chain-smoker, his long beard stained nicotine-yellow. He loved good food and fast cars, and when his paintings displeased him, he’d hurl the offending canvases into the river or slash them. On a single May day in 1908, a newspaper breathlessly re- ported, he destroyed $100,000 worth of paintings. Nor was he above scandal: After the death of the first Madame Monet, he waltzed off with the wife of a financier who bought many a Monet before going broke. It was this second wife, Alice, with whom Monet set up a home in Giverny, the Normandy village in which he created paradise. In the gardens and water-lily ponds he tended, he didn’t find God, exactly — King says he was an atheist — but reveled in “the sanctity of nature.” And it was nature and Monet’s insistence on capturing it in every possible light that sustained him. By the time of Clemenceau’s visit, the artist was 73 and had suffered a series of Job-like sorrows, having just lost Alice and his 46-year-old son, Jean. Cataracts were robbing the sight from his right eye, and he was haunted by the fear of going blind. But it wasn’t a prospective patron, Jewish or not, who propelled him to paint his water lilies — just Clemenceau’s faith and the artist’s dream of rendering what he called his “Grande Décoration,” whose massive canvases would later enthrall museumgoers at MoMA and around the world.
“Mad Enchantment” isn’t an easy read. It darts back and forth in time, and there’s perhaps more about long-dead politicians than the average water-lily lover may care to know. But it captures the feel of the period and the people.
Among those in the book is the writer Emile Zola, who spoke out for Alfred Dreyfus, who was falsely accused of spying for the Germans and whose persecution was part of France’s pervasive anti-Semitism. (Despite Clemenceau’s “rich Jew” remark, both he and Monet defended Dreyfus as well; so appalled was Monet by what he called “this stain on France” that he refused to portray anything vaguely patriotic for years.)
A complicated man, Monet died in 1926, of lung cancer. Happily, the beauty he created, both in Giverny and on canvas, is with us still.
A pep talk from the ex-prime minister of France helped Monet create his most beloved work