In the years before World War II, as modern art began to reach a broad international audience, a powerful origin story emerged about the 20th-century avant-garde. In this telling, the epochal revolt initiated by Picasso and Matisse had been spurred by a few trailblazing forebears — Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Georges Seurat, mainly. Notably left out was Claude Monet (1840-1926), whose shimmering Impressionist paintings had made the unstable act of seeing an end in itself.
For all the recognition he received during his long life, Monet was essentially ignored after his death. For decades, his wildly abstract late work went unsold; his astonishing, immersive murals of water lilies — a gift to the French nation installed at the Orangerie in Paris — were rarely mentioned. In 1939, the art historian Lionello Venturi dismissed him as the “gravedigger of Impressionism.” Only in the postwar era did Monet begin to be rediscovered as the ur-modernist we know today.
In her lively new biography, “Monet: The Restless Vision,” Jackie Wullschläger offers a provocative explanation for this neglect. Partly, it was the artist’s longevity: At a time when Picasso and Braque were already creating Cubist papiers collés, the old man was still painting Japanese bridges at Giverny. More important, though, was the way his genius was understood. Stunned by Monet’s unerring vision and technical facility, his envious contemporaries tended to discount any deeper emotional or intellectual import. Édouard Manet called him “the Raphael of water”; Edgar Degas claimed that he was just making “beautiful decorations.” And then there was Cézanne, who declared that “Monet is only an eye, but what an eye!” — a judgment that, Wullschläger writes, “has distorted interpretation of Monet ever since.”
Following Cézanne, modern viewers have found it hard not to see Monet’s curling brushstrokes as the product of an almost Apollonian assurance. Every decade of his career, his paintings seem to evolve in brilliant leaps: the already fluidly refracted scenes of La Grenouillère, a day resort on the Seine, in 1869; the steam-filled Gare St.-Lazare paintings in 1877; the windswept rock formations of Étretat in the mid-1880s; the incandescent grain stacks of the early 1890s. But they also convey an unwavering resolve to capture fleeting light effects — what he called “instantaneity” — on a narrowing range of motifs. Even as war rages around him, he is tending his rarefied garden. To the wider world, Monet was a placid voluptuary, not a tormented rebel.
By excavating the artist’s unexpectedly messy inner life, Wullschläger, who is the chief art critic for The Financial Times, sets out to upend this view. Far from self-contained, she argues, Monet’s art was continually spurred, redirected, interrupted and sometimes stymied by “his joys and sorrows, loves and disappointments.” A republican atheist, he fled the Franco-Prussian War and broke with other Impressionists to support Dreyfus. He weathered numerous family tragedies. Above all, in Wullschläger’s view, were his tempestuous relationships with three women: Camille Doncieux, his long-suffering first wife and muse; Alice Hoschedé, the high-strung, devoutly Catholic companion with whom he shared a disreputable blended household; and Alice’s daughter Blanche, who, after Alice’s death, rejuvenated him in his final years. “Three times,” Wullschläger contends, “Monet’s art changed decisively when the woman sharing his life changed.”
It is not an easy case to make. Unlike van Gogh, who poured his private turmoil into searing letters to his brother, or Gauguin, whose scandalous existence could be inferred directly from his half-naked Tahitian subjects, Monet left few psychological traces. Not a single written word survives to or from Camille, who died after a long illness at 32. Alice’s letters to Monet, and parts of her diaries, were burned. Nonetheless, many of his own letters to Alice were spared, and Wullschläger makes artful use of these, along with his continual correspondence with artists, writers, patrons and other friends, to penetrate this carapace.
The basic outlines of Monet’s life are well known. Born in Paris, he grew up in Le Havre, the Norman port, where Eugène Boudin, the French landscapist, discovered him and urged him to paint outdoors. After a brief stint in the military in Algiers, he went to art school in Paris, where he forged crucial friendships with Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Frédéric Bazille, a wealthy acolyte who supported him financially for much of his early career. His big break came in 1874, when, with his painting “Impression, Sunrise” — an insistently sketchy and atmospheric evocation of Le Havre at dawn — he spearheaded the now famous breakaway group show that launched the Impressionists. From there, in conventional accounts, Monet is on a path of accumulating success, culminating in gilded acclaim at Giverny. (One recent study is titled “How Monet Became a Millionaire.”)
But Wullschläger uncovers a far more turbulent story. A man of prodigious appetites and nagging self-doubt, Monet spends much of his career lurching from triumph to crisis. For years after the first Impressionist show, he is still a “painter on the run,” unable to sell and evading unpaid laundry bills. (Even as Monet is ordering a large shipment of Cognac, Wullschläger informs us, Camille is pawning her jewelry.) He vacillates between manic bouts of work and long fallow periods; his “instant” impressions are reworked for months in the studio. At times, he slashes dozens of canvases.
As for his strained attachments, Wullschläger observes, it is actually the theatrical Camille who first rockets him to prominence, in his stage-stealing Salon picture of her in the mid-1860s. She also inspires his ultimately frustrated attempt to best Manet’s “Déjeuner sur l’Herbe,” before her failing health drives him to the brink. When at last she succumbs, he shocks himself by painting, at her deathbed, the disappearing colors of her lifeless face. “Shades of blue, yellow, gray and I don’t know what,” he later recalls.
With Alice, things get only more complicated. The elegant wife of his once wealthy patron Ernest Hoschedé, she and her children move in with the Monets as Camille is dying, while the profligate Hoschedé goes to ruin in Paris. From there, Alice and Claude form an improbable, overstretched ménage — six of her offspring, two of his — which he constantly abandons on monthslong painting jags. It is a rhythm fraught with tension, yet filled with breakthroughs. Alone at Bordighera, an Italian resort with junglelike foliage, Monet discovers an explosive new palette. In Rouen, he paints the facade of the cathedral over and over again at different times of day — cropped into the frame, flickering like a movie, not a religious monument. “Everything changes, even stone,” he tells Alice.
But Monet’s women endure his art far more than they shape it. When her husband dies, Alice can finally formalize her relationship with Monet, but she dies of leukemia in 1911. At this point, Wullschläger wants to attribute the artist’s final resurgence to the company of Blanche — a middle-aged dowager who, in yet another tortuous twist, had married, and been widowed by, Monet’s older son. On the strength of Wullschläger’s own meticulous research, far more decisive was Monet’s steely old friend Georges Clemenceau. At 77, the statesman led France to victory in World War I, and he was with the artist on his deathbed eight years later.
Even as Clemenceau relentlessly drove forward the French Army — he became prime minister in 1917, Wullschläger writes, “with a single policy, to make war” — the “Tiger” was at Giverny, leading the cataract-plagued Monet into his most fearsome campaign yet: the giant, unbounded Orangerie cycle that pushed him to embrace the infinite. It would take all of Monet’s formidable remaining powers to bring the project to ground. Anticipating the Abstract Expressionists who would decades later recognize Monet as one of their own, Clemenceau wrote of the huge paintings, “The action across this battlefield is life itself.”
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