Monet and the case of the disappearing Agapanthus

Associated media

Claude Monet settled in Giverny in 1883 and died there in 1926. By stages, he created a famous garden with an enormous waterlily pond in order specifically to paint it, and he produced 251 canvases of his water lilies during that period, not counting those destroyed by the artist. Eight of these works, which Monet called his ‘Grand Decorations’, were finally installed in 1927 (just after Monet’s death) in the Orangerie in Paris, where today there are regular long queues to see them, while another batch of single-canvas and multiple-canvas large-scale works associated with that project are today scattered across the world in various collections.

The May 2011 issue of Cassone includes a survey of the different sorts of books available on Monet’s later Water Lilies paintings. As I showed, it is standard fare now in such texts to find Monet’s late work presented as presaging post-war abstraction. (Typically, the St Louis catalogue refers to Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman and Joan Mitchell, whose gestural painting is illustrated alongside Monet’s work.) There is the underlying assumption that, in their ‘all-over’ compositions, Monet’s paintings provide some sense of continuity with and validation of post-war American abstraction, while simultaneously allowing American art in its forthright abstraction to trump such still-naturalistic work. Thus a discontinuity with late Monet is also constructed in order to assert ‘the triumph of American painting’. The Cincinnati catalogue even misleadingly describes Monet’s late vision as ‘cinematographic’ and then presents that as presaging today’s video art!

That I should be now considering three more recent publications, all American exhibition catalogues, testifies to their current popularity and the museum interest in tapping into this popularity to enhance exhibition attendance. This is made easy by the presence of so many late Monets in American collections (itself underscoring a story of American economic success in terms of collectors’ and museums’ purchasing power). It also  offers curators the kudos of publishing on a highly validated art. There is clearly plenty riding on this plethora of late Monet exhibitions.

In 1925 the art-loving novelist Anne Parrish used the wealth of her American industrialist husband Charles Corliss to purchase from the artist’s dealer a 1907 Water Lilies. It was bequeathed in 1957 to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. This work was the starting-point for that museum in organizing its modest show of nine Monets, entitled ‘Monet’s Water Lilies: An Artist’s Obsession’ and including one example of the ‘grand decorations’, the Museum of Modern Art’s Water Lilies Pond, Cloud Reflections.

Eric Zafran’s catalogue essay tells how Monet created his wonderful garden at Giverny from 1883 onwards and looks at how writers and photographers recorded what Monet was up to. He tries to get to grips with Monet’s sources for the Japanese look of his lilypond bridge, such as the photographs of Japanese gardens and diagrams of various Japanese bridge types in Josiah Conder’s 1893 book Landscape Gardening in Japan. Zafran’s is the best account to date of Nickolas Muray’s 1926 photographic session with Monet in the gardens of Giverny.

James Rubin’s essay, though it explores the aesthetic character and range of Monet’s various Water Lilies extremely well, ventures a social historical approach to art. Its rather complicated thrust is to find in Monet’s position a significant tension between near (Giverny, home and garden as subject-matter) and far (Paris, focus of the art market where the works were sold). He also explores the apparent gap between Monet’s modern artistic values and his withdrawal from modern experience (urban conditions, industrial work, world war). It is possible to mend that gap if we look at the way Monet used his work to focus on his own nature, in terms of contemporary Radical values (see Background info box, right).

‘Monet in Giverny: Landscapes of Reflection’ is the title of another modest 12-painting late Monet show at Cincinnati Art Museum, with works nearly all drawn from American public collections. For the specialist, the republication in the catalogue of Octave Mirbeau’s essay ‘Monet and Giverny’ from the 1891 magazine L’Art Dans Les Deux Mondes might well itself justify its purchase. Mirbeau’s essay evokes the garden’s seasons and clarifies Monet’s self-assertive individualism and the way in which it extends into a pantheistic vision. This text is well analysed in Benedict Leca’s lead-essay, which suggests that the late paintings contain a dialogue between spatial illusion and painted materiality.

There is a danger, however, of denying any illusionism in these works when he suggests that ‘Monet broke the mirror’. Didn’t Monet write in 1908 about wanting ‘to succeed in rendering what I perceive’? By contrast with Leca’s essay, Andria Derstine’s text takes the idea of reflection as a pretext for rambling around the theme of Oberlin College’s purchase of a Monet painting and the interweaving of Monet’s Orangerie murals with two world wars. (The Orangerie murals were presented to the French nation to celebrate the 1918 armistice and then were sadly damaged in the Second World War.)

Lynne Ambrosini’s essay looks usefully at the pre-history of water reflections in French painting, from neoclassical theory to practice among the realist Barbizon school artists such as Millet, Corot and Daubigny. Beth Wilson’s essay reflecting on the relation of Monet’s painting to photography seems deeply problematic to me. Much of what she focuses on photographically (the snapshot, serial photographs) came about decades after Monet had developed his artistic vision, which involved a more sophisticated practice than that found in contemporary photography.

Turning finally to ‘Monet’s Water Lilies: The Agapanthus Triptych’, this is the sort of venture that really does bring new specialist insights while creating a splendid exhibition, albeit including only eight paintings. The focus is on three canvases in the collections of Nelson-Atkins, St Louis and Cleveland museums, where the exhibition was staged consecutively. (Really the word ‘triptych’ should not be used here since it is not a question of three separate scenes combined but of one work on three canvases.) These three sections of one work were all variously acquired from the artist’s estate via the Paris art market from 1956–60.  These panels in fact constitute together a ‘grand decoration’ that was finally dropped from the Orangerie two-room hang but planned for the circular room initially projected for a building in the gardens of the Rodin Museum in Paris. The catalogue includes a technical study of the Nelson-Atkins panel and an essay by Simon Kelly exploring what happened to these works, on the basis of photographs of earlier states and scientific examination.

Kelly is cautious about drawing conclusions, especially the idea that they were dropped from the Orangerie because they weren’t good enough. We can certainly see how the agapanthus plants bottom left and right were removed in the process of repainting, making the current title essentially inaccurate. This change aesthetically ‘ungrounds’ the painted vision even more than in its first state, as clumps of lilies lower down are painted over and a more floating feeling is created. The painting’s rejection from the final two-room Orangerie scheme may simply have been because its formal qualities were in some sense too close to other works that were to hang beside it in the initial plan.

Kelly’s essay is a significant in-depth addition to the extant literature, but it seems to me that we still need more discussion in the literature of the relationship of Monet’s murals (both those arrangements initially planned and those finally installed) to standard decorative schemes of the day, and also in late Monet studies generally, what is conspicuously lacking is a properly historicized discussion of the world-view underpinning Monet’s late vision.

Monet’s Water Lilies: An Artist’s Obsession  by Eric Zafran and James Rubin is published by Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn., 2011. 56pp.  24 colour & 14 mono illus, £17-95. ISBN 978-0-91833-3056

Monet in Giverny: Landscapes of Reflection edited by Benedict Leca is published by Giles/Cincinnati Art Museum, 2012. 96 pp., 33 colour & 14 mono illus, £9.95. ISBN 978-1-907804-03-8

Monet’s Water Lilies: The Agapanthus Triptych  by Simon Kelly with Mary Schafer and Johanna Bernstein is published by Saint Louis Art Museum with the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2011. 70 pp., 41 colour & 28 mono illus, £11.99. ISBN 978-0-89178-095-3