Claude Monet: The Angry Years

 

Paris' current talk-of-the-town exhibit – a 200-piece retrospective of the work of Claude Monet – is now in its final days at the Grand Palais.  I managed to score four tickets to this sold-out show and bundle up the Uber-mensch, the Lucky-one-and-only (Loo), and her beau Beau (le BB) for a fun afternoon of French history and culture. 

Though we are already quite familiar with Monet’s work – being semi-regular visitors to Giverny, where we love to bike to the gardens from the train, as well as to our neighborhood Musée Marmottan Monet, where a younger Loo loved to go after school to make small-scale pastels of Monet’s grand Nympheas – the exhibit was well worth the visit.  It was fascinating, for example, to view the artist’s now far-flung multiple studies of a single subject all hanging side by side.  Examples of this include the Rouen Cathedral series; paintings of London’s Houses of Parliament and Charing Cross Bridge; his poplar trees and Normandy haystacks.

From the very start of his artistic career, Monet’s main subject of painterly interest was light and how it danced upon, stroked and gave character to the objects before him.  His multiple studies express precisely how light, illusive and forever changing, offers us a different impression of life at any one moment on any given day due to atmospheric shifts and their effects on our senses of perception. 

Monet worked quickly, applying paint directly to canvas to record his impression of light's fleeting interaction with nature and object.  He is therefore honored as the Founder of French Impressionism.  Indeed, his 1873 series, Impression, Sunrise, gave the style its name.  He captured scenes with immediacy, before the light and his sensation had a chance to change.  He often worked on several canvasses at a time, moving from one to the other as the light softened or darkened with the time of day or become blotted out all together by cloud or fog or rain.

But as our little group wandered through the exhibit, we were struck by a small collection of paintings completed late in the artist's life: the weeping willows and Japanese bridge of 1918-24.  These were different from the majority of Monet’s other works in their use of bold reds, oranges, and yellows applied in thick paint with aggressive strokes and wild, curvy lines.  These paintings, hot and unrelenting, seemed to vibrate with anger in their frames as if wanting to explode off the wall.

We couldn’t help but wonder at the extraordinary difference between these works versus a lifetime of paintings characterized by rich purples, vibrant greens and soothing blues.  Here’s what I’ve managed to piece together by way of explanation:  

In 1911, Monet lost his second wife, Alice.  Not long after, in 1914, he faced the death of his eldest son, Jean.  Already shattered by these personal loses, Monet was plunged further into depression with the start of the First World War and the destruction and dissolution of life as he knew it.  Additionally, a cataract formed over one of his eyes at that time, causing Monet to cease painting, which could not have helped his depression. Finally, his friend Georges Clemenceau encouraged Monet to paint again as a way to express his mourning.  The weeping willows, painted in homage to the fallen soldiers, may well have been part of this period of therapy. 

Another theory is that the cataracts effected how Monet perceived light, resulting in a general reddish tone in his vision and therefore in his painting.  Indeed, in 1923, the artist underwent two operations to remove his cataracts.  After that, his palette returned to purple, green and blue hues once again, as he was able to ascertain ultraviolet wavelengths he could not see with the cataracts.  Then again, the war now over and the worst of his grieving behind him, perhaps he had learned to cope with the loss of loved ones and a world forever transformed.

In all events, Monet lived a long life and left us with an enduring and important legacy of work.  A prolific and dedicated artist, he was a participant and a leader at a watershed moment of both history and art.  The Grand Palais exhibit reminds us most expertly that Claude Monet will continue to be remembered for decades to come. 

All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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