Claude Monet did not set out to save the world. the idea came to him gradually, culminating with his Water Lilies. At first, he merely wanted to paint truthfully, which to him meant representing what he saw around him. The previous generation of artists and writers had claimed the social value of Realism and Naturalism. The Realist painter Gustave Courbet who acquired a reputation for left-wing political militancy, claimed that by revealing “truth,” he would set humanity free. Of him, the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote ironically, “Courbet saving the world.” Monet had met Courbet on the beaches of Normandy, and while not adopting his radical political message, he was impressed by his unconventionally loose and tactile handling of paint and the way it seemed to make forms physically present. The Naturalist novelist and critic Emile Zola, believed that writing fiction about contemporary themes would serve social progress. He staunchly defended the painter Edouard Manet, Monet’s most immediate predecessor, on grounds that Manet painted only what he saw with his own eyes. Manet was also close friends with Baudelaire, who advocated the painting of modern life and claimed that art could contribute harmony to otherwise conflicted times.
So although Monet began his career simply painting his favorite landscapes, he did so within a culture that saw painting as socially and politically progressive—modern, in short. One of his most famous early pictures, Garden at Sainte-Adresse, was done in 1867 from the window of his aunt’s suburban villa, overlooking La Manche (known as the English Channel). With both leisure boats and industrial craft passing near the busy port of Le Havre, which is just out of sight to the left, Monet demonstrated—consciously or not—the relationship between leisure and the modern economy. His father and aunt (the figures in the foreground) were grocers and ship suppliers near the port of Le Havre.
In the early 1870s, among Monet’s topics taken from modern life, were a group of more direct pictures of the industrial port of his hometown Le Havre, including his most famous single picture, Impression, Sunrise. After moving to Paris, in 1877, he made a famous group of pictures representing the Saint-Lazare train station. In these groups—the beginning of his work in series—Monet was celebrating France’s industrial progress and prosperity, while at the same time demonstrating his skill at transforming such scenes through his colors and loose technique into pleasing aesthetic objects. He also made many pictures of urban and suburban leisure—beach scenes, public and private gardens, tourist sites, and family activities—scenes that captured the lifestyle of the modern bourgeoisie, to which he and his family belonged. In those pictures there was a direct coupling between pleasant activities and their surroundings and the aesthetic pleasures one finds in Monet’s colorful and spontaneous pictures. Both art and reality reinforce one another.
Monet took as his subject the modern bourgeoisie, as in the lush Garden at Sainte-Adresse.
—Garden at Sainte-Adresse, 1867; Artvee
Garden at Sainte-Adresse was notable not only for its modern subject matter, combining industry and leisure, but also for its borrowing from Japanese aesthetics, as seen in prints and screens that became popular beginning in the 1860s. The prints’ bright colors and flattened perspectives—evoked in this painting by the simplified geometry imposed by the fence and flagpoles—were the first aspects of japonisme. These elements were imitated by many Impressionists in order to be considered novel, modern, and anti-academic, even though they drew on an ancient, albeit foreign, tradition. Similarly, spontaneous brushwork, which challenged the smooth finish of academic paintings, was said to reveal that a particular artistic personality, or temperament, lay behind the creation of the artist’s image. Zola had defined painting as “a corner of nature seen through a temperament.” The best artist, in other words, creates an aesthetic experience from reality, reflecting the artist’s individuality and originality by producing an alternative and personal way of considering that reality itself. This attitude, too, was political, since it challenged the traditions of the state-supported Academy, which ranked historical subject matter above scenes of contemporary life and set rules for how paintings should be executed—smoothly, with illusionistic perspective, indicating assiduous calculation and workmanship. Monet’s early works were often attacked as shoddy and mere incomplete sketches, but he also had a few defenders, and many critics in fact recognized that people were tiring of academic productions and were craving renewal.
Monet’s pictures were soon marketed by the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel and were gradually accepted by forward-looking collectors. While he began earning enough to live comfortably, few people today realize that he was working during tumultuous times. In 1870, Prussian armies had invaded France and set siege to Paris. Rather than see Monet forced to serve, his father paid for a substitute, which allowed the painter to wait out the conflict in London, where he first met Durand-Ruel. The French National Assembly went into exile in the elegant Atlantic port city of Bordeaux. Following the French surrender and the vacuum left by the Prussian withdrawal, Paris was taken over by the Paris Commune, a makeshift government based on socialist principles, forcing the assembly to delay its return to Paris. It settled, of all places, in Versailles, with its enormous baggage of monarchic glory. Troops from the army defeated by the Prussians sought redemption and the reestablishment of order by viciously attacking the communards, who were ordinary citizens considered rabble by the army’s aristocratic chief, the monarchist Field Marshall Count Patrice MacMahon. The civil war that ensued was more bloody than any battle with the Prussians. Following the defeat of the Commune, artists gradually returned to Paris, but it was nevertheless a time of political dissent and repression under a regime now led by MacMahon.
As a way to attract attention and patronage early in their careers during the difficult post-Commune 1870s, several of the Impressionists tried their hands at decorative paintings, that is, they made large paintings meant to improve the look and feel of interiors. One of Monet’s attempts to show his talent for decoration featured a garden scene. A few years later, Durand-Ruel commissioned him to decorate the panels of his sitting room, which Monet did with bunches of flowers and related motifs painted within the raised decorative moldings of the room’s wood paneling. He also completed four paintings showing the gardens at the department-store owner Ernest Hoschedé’s Chateau de Montgeron, pictures that were meant to hang together in the living room. The most famous of the four reveals the flattened perspective and bold, sometimes overlapping, forms of Japanese prints. The pleasing effects of these innovative elements came to have a positive value called “decorative”—a term that suggested both a private and a public function. Just as decoration of the interior had the ability to create an agreeable environment for its inhabitants, elements within each painting could produce similarly soothing effects for individuals. Not yet abstract, but abstracting in the sense of being simplified and suggestive, such work contributed significantly to the demise of academicism.
Upon seeing Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, the critic Louis Leroy declared: “Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.”
—Impression, Sunrise, 1872; Wikimedia
An important reason for the Impressionists’ decision to mount their own exhibitions, beginning in 1874, was the increasingly conservative cultural policies of the post-Commune government. MacMahon claimed not only to restore order to the nation, but to restore morality. Whereas some of the original Impressionists had been able to exhibit before the defeat of the Commune, their works were now excluded, having been deemed too progressive and threatening to the traditional morality of noble historical themes and meticulous work ethic espoused by the Academy. In the late 1870s, however, MacMahon’s leadership was voted out in favor of a liberal regime dominated by those committed to democratic policies. In the world of art, independent exhibitions such as those begun by the Impressionists in 1874 began to flourish, whether organized by consensus-based artist organizations or by private dealers. During the 1880s, Monet prospered in this relatively peaceful and open environment. He was able to purchase a house of his own rather than move from one rental to another; in 1891, he bought the property at Giverny, which has become famous for its gardens and its water-lily pond.
One of the attractions of the village of Giverny was that it was on a quiet secondary railroad route that connected to the main line between Paris and Le Havre. In fact, the single track and a road ran directly behind Monet’s property, with the stop only a few meters down the road. He could easily travel to Paris if he wished, and he could order supplies directly for delivery to his home. On the other side of the tracks was an alluvial plain with a little stream running through it. After purchasing parcels of this land, Monet had gardeners divert water from the stream and dig a water-lily pond, which he complemented with plantings inspired by Japanese landscaping. Over the pond, he built an arched footbridge in Japanese style. There, on the other side of the tracks and behind a fence he built to reduce soot, he could paint without being bothered by visitors or the children of Alice Hoschedé, with whom he lived and later married, following the death of his wife, Camille, in 1879, and Ernest Hoschedé’s bankruptcy and death. He was transforming land itself for aesthetic purposes, just as he transformed his surroundings through the characteristics of his art. The parallel between artist and gardener is obvious; it was the first garden whose main purpose was to be painted but whose artificiality, rising out of barren land, itself constituted one of Monet’s greatest artworks.
In this new arena, Monet’s decorative impulse became preeminent. He thought about filling an entire room with paintings of water lilies. For an exhibition at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in 1909, he showed 48 water-lily paintings that created a complete environment. In order to enhance the illusion of immersion in his environments, he increased the scale of his paintings. In earlier individual works, especially earlier Water Lilies, he had already tried to create a sense of immersion, by cutting out the sky and forcing the viewer to imagine ducking under the Japanese footbridge. Now, in 1909, as critics noted, it seemed as if he produced the effect of an aquarium. In other words, Monet had created a complete environment, both landscaped and painted. Others claimed to experience the cosmos through his pictures, an infinite dream realm, or something supernatural. It was a time when poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé and artists such as Paul Gauguin and his followers, the Nabis, sought to use words, objects, colors, and forms to symbolize unnamable feelings, the spiritual, or the mysteries of life. Monet, while preserving a certain realism by painting his surroundings, was at the same time said to arouse thoughts both intimate and universal of peaceful contemplation.
Monet played with perspective, immersing viewers in the sun-drenched poplars near his home in Giverny.
—Poplars in the Sun, 1891; Wikimedia
There was a consensus among progressive social thinkers that, thanks to their visionary capacity, artists belonged to a vanguard of social leadership—in French the word is avant-garde, now used in English. It had its roots in the Romantic utopianism that began in the 1820s and 1830s. In the preface entitled “To the Bourgeois” for his Salon of 1846, Baudelaire claimed that art can restore balance and harmony to the inner self, like a salve for the modern condition of ennui and alienation. He wrote that art was like “a warming and refreshing beverage, which reestablishes the mind and the stomach to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.” By the 1890s, certain writers advocated decorative art for the public, believing it could help smooth over differences by providing the kind of experiences all human beings could share. One writer in particular, Roger Marx (no relation to Karl), who was involved with centrist politics, advocated Social Art (L’Art social) in essays that he gathered as a book of the same title in 1913. By producing unity of emotion, public art could contribute to the peace and health of society. In 1900, Marx wrote:
At present the yearning for beauty has become a social need; one expects to find comfort in it—that sovereign benefit that elevates, distracts, and consoles the soul. . . . The need for beauty is the sign through which both instinct and the desire for social progress are affirmed. . . . Our period dedicates its efforts to the improvement of the human condition. . . . That is why art, whose calling is to decorate things we use and things that surround us, now appears as a search for well-being in its noblest form.
Marx’s ideas came at a renewed time of political conflict. In the Franco-Prussian War, Germany had seized France’s eastern province of Alsace as well as northern Lorraine, called Moselle. Efforts on the right to avenge the loss to Germany began to disrupt everyday politics, whereas anarchism and worker unionism were simmering on the left. Governments became unstable. Then, the arrest for spying of a Jewish army captain named Alfred Dreyfus launched a virulent wave of anti-Semitism that created a political polarization. The Dreyfus Affair set liberals like Monet and Zola, who believed in his innocence, in opposition to those who assumed the worst because Dreyfus was Jewish and had been born in Alsace, then occupied by Germany, even though the Dreyfus family had fled Alsace for Paris. And despite finding the real culprit, a French army officer of aristocratic Hungarian descent, the hidebound army refused to reinstate Dreyfus until 1906. The decade before the outbreak of World War I, in 1914, was fraught with political extremes, with anarchists on one hand and proto-fascists, as in the xenophobic Action Française, on the other. During this period Monet traveled to picturesque destinations both within and outside France. His famous series of the Rouen Cathedral was painted in the early to mid 1890s. Afterward, he followed his stepson to Norway, where he made a group of almost abstract snowscapes. Then, early in the twentieth century, he exhibited a successful series devoted to London, which he had not visited since the 1870s.
Monet’s loose brushwork and everyday subjects were an affront to the pristine pictures of the official Salon.
—The Turkeys, 1877; Wikimedia
The crowning achievement of that decade, however, was the 1909 exhibition of Water Lilies, for it finally achieved a virtually unanimous critical success. Writers seemed to compete with each other to explain the paintings. In his long essay on Monet that year, Marx claimed to quote Monet, but it is more likely that he put the painter’s thoughts into his own words, saying that Monet himself saw the palliative effect of his work:
There are harmonies and concerts of colors that are sufficient in themselves to move us. . . . In a moment of temptation, I thought of using waterlilies as a theme to decorate a living room. Extended along the walls, enveloping all its sides in a single unity, it would provide the illusion of a whole without end without horizon or shoreline. There, nerves stressed by work could be relaxed, as in the restful example of still waters, and to the person living there, this room would afford shelter for peaceful mediation in the middle of a flower-filled aquarium.
When World War I broke out in 1914, France and Germany were pitted against one another. Thanks to the intervention of Britain and the United States, France, under the leadership of Georges Clemenceau, was able to recover the territories of Alsace and Moselle that it had lost to Germany in 1870. Clemenceau had for a long time been a friend to the Impressionist painters, in particular to Claude Monet, on whom he later wrote a book focused on the Water Lilies and filled with personal memories. During the war, Monet, who was by that time in his mid seventies, demonstrated his unshakeable patriotism by supporting the local hospital with food from his garden, dedicating paintings to raise funds for victims, and participating in other activities to support the wounded. Clemenceau called Monet “a man of action,” that is, “in the highest sense of the word, a man who proposes to contribute something from the best of his life to the life of his contemporaries and who throws himself, his heart enflamed, into a perilous adventure, undaunted by disappointments.” The critic Arsène Alexandre agreed: He said that while many others were despondent during the war years, Monet’s “vitality rebelled against such inaction. He tells himself that to work is to defend France. . . . He attacks, not a painting . . . but a cycle of paintings.”
The realist painter Gustave Courbet declared his independence “from any regime except the regime of freedom.”
—Gilbert Randon, Portrait de Courbet en gravure sur soleil rayonnant, 1867, in Le Journal Amusant, BNF, Paris. Bibliothèque Nationale de France
On the day following the German surrender, Monet wrote to his friend Clemenceau offering the gift of a painting to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. He wrote, “It’s not much, but it’s the only way I have of taking part in the victory.” This project turned into the two grand oval rooms of the Orangerie, at the very heart of Paris. There, one enters what, with fewer crowds than today, could seem a sacred, meditative space, in which both body and mind seem spirited away from worldly concerns. It creates an environment in which a variety of interpretations is possible, from those who believe they are in the presence of a cosmic Eden to others who believe they have penetrated to the most profound truths of nature.
Even if the grandiose social ambitions underlying much progressive art of Monet’s time seem naïve against the background of subsequent history such as World War II, they provide a context for art that corresponds to the hopeful mood that followed a restored France and the League of Nations in the wake of World War I. That the Water Lilies still speak so universally, that long lines of people from around the world, as well as locals who return time and again, consider them worth experiencing speaks loudly to the kind of public art Monet eventually, and self-consciously, produced. Faith in the creativity of humankind and the ability of art to embody values that cross geography, class, and race, is a message that comes directly from the decorative and social impulses of Monet’s day and still resonate today.