Monet’s Garden
I have long marveled at Claude Monet’s ability to create such beautiful, even tranquil, paintings at a time that must have been so trying—he was losing his sight, the war was raging all around him. In a piece about a recreation of Monet’s gardens at Giverny, the New York Times gives some insight.
It is an intriguing juxtaposition. In 1900, though Monet was wealthy and famous, his days as an innovator would have been thought long past, eclipsed by Cézanne, van Gogh and other Post-Impressionists, and soon to be pushed further back by Fauvism and Cubism. In 1915, with war raging all over Europe, few would have singled out Monet’s painting as particularly relevant to the art historical or sociopolitical moment.
But war was on his mind. In June 1918, then 77, he wrote in a letter to one of his dealers: “What an unnerving life we are all living. I sometimes wonder what I would do if the enemy suddenly attacked. I think that it would be necessary to leave everything like everyone else.”
Then, a week later, he wrote another of his dealers, “I do not want to believe that I would ever be obliged to leave Giverny, as I have written; I would much rather die here in the middle of what I have done.”
These quotations evoke a mood like that of “Irises”: a mix of anxiety, depression and determination, now and then punctuated by moments of visionary exultation. Decades later, the Abstract Expressionists of New York would take a similar spirit of existentialist despair and defiance and run with it. He was, after all, ahead of his time.