MONET's SELF-PORTRAIT hidden in his WATERLILIES

MONET'S SELF-PORTRAIT hidden in his WATERLILIES

Monet's two oval-shaped rooms filled with his Nympheas (Waterlilies) paintings (1918-27) in the Orangerie in Paris at first glance appear to have no human figures except the visitors looking at the panels.

The second room has three paintings that show the dark shadows of willow trees on the water line:

Some might wish to read those dark, thick trunks as human imprints on the waterscapes, but, in truth, the surfaces on these canvases are filled with the colors of light, clouds, waterplants, and flowers.

But in the FIRST ROOM of the WATER LILIES as you enter from the lobby,


approximately at the spot on the left wall marked by the arrow above, you will find a face hidden in the cloud reflections of the pond:

just to the left of the man standing in the photo below and to the left of the large dark mass of foreboding water depth:
It is the facial signature of the artist, who is following in the tradition of self-portraiture for painters, established by Masaccio, over on the right. (See my blog entry on Masaccio and the tradition of self-portraiture for painters.) If you compare photographs of Monet near the end of his life and the closeup of this section of the cloudscape in the Waterlilies, there is a wonderful similarity of form:

 

The artist paints himself into the painting with his long scraggly white beard, with darker greys near the mouth for the darker parts of the mustache and beard that have not yet turned white. The right eye appears larger as the left eye does in the photo. It is as if Monet were looking in a mirror to replicate himself. The lids above the eyes are darkened, too, and there is a suggestion in the painted version of the furrowed lines between the eyebrows. 

          Here is the artist himself, staring lucidly out into the light, out into eternity, presenting himself as the author of the works in the two rooms, inserting himself into the cacophony of paint he has used to create cloud reflections on the surface of the pond water. In the whole vision of the pond his eyebrows and lids become waterlily pads, and his beard is a mass of colored mixtures with white, pink, and gray strokes. He wishes his face to remain hidden in a totality that is not meant to be about him or about any human beings. As we have said in another blog entry, he wanted to paint infinity in two rooms specifically designed to imitate the scientific symbol of infinity. He places himself in the swirl of that infinity forever. He consciously inserts his own right to authorship in a painting collection meant to evoke a garden of beauty without human figures. Even his ear is a small projection on the right in the blackness that covers the canvas on the right in this first wall painting in the series.

Perhaps the dark mass to the right of this self-portrait is meant to pull his face forward out of the depths while at the same time evoking the dark unknown of death. (Monet dies in 1926 just a few months before the rooms are finished being installed in 1927)

                                    

He suspends himself, as he does his water lilies, between the sky and the water, in a cloud-like formation that keeps him aloft in space, even as he displays his skill at painting the beauty he sees on the earth.

MONET'S GARDEN in PARIS: The Orangerie WATERLILIES

MONET'S GARDEN in PARIS: THE ORANGERIE WATERLILIES

In the wonderful L'Orangerie Gallery in Paris

are two oval rooms filled with waterlily paintings (Nympheas in French) designed by Claude Monet explicitly for those spaces. 

Monet intended the figure 8 of these rooms to remind the viewer of the symbol for infinity:   ∞  .
He expressly asked for the natural light to flood in through the ceilings in order to reinforce his
notion that the paintings represented light moving from east to west during the course of two days.
                                         ROOM 1

ROOM 2

The paintings were conceived of as an ""illusion of an endless whole, of a wave with no horizon and no shore," as Monet put it. 

Here you can see how one room leads seamlessly to the next so that the viewer feels the flow of the

water and the paintings' color from one oval to the other, certainly the wave that Monet was describing.

         When we look closely at any of the curved panels (4 in each room), we become aware of the

lack of horizon in all of them.

The viewer latches onto the white waterlilies as a way of grounding him/her/self in the vast expanse of the ponds depicted. 

There are actually three different surfaces that Monet conveys in these curved waterscapes:

1)   SURFACE OF THE WATER: where the white waterlilies grow

2) DEPTHS OF THE WATER:  where the dark green reeds grow

and
3) REFLECTIONS OF THE SKY AND AIR ABOVE THE WATER: where the clouds float.

The waterlilies hover between the sky and the depths of the water in a fairy-tale world of

turquoise and deep blue and white. The viewer floats, too, from panel to panel, suspended from gravity even when sitting to look at the paintings, so powerful is the sensation of being freed from the

earth. Monet's desire to convey infinity is accomplished beautifully in these two interwoven rooms of water. His prescience about the quality of space travel is here.

       Just as we become aware of the suspension of gravity, the weightlessness of the universe in

these rooms of color, we are also made aware at the same time of the changing nature of light over the course of various days. 

Thus, the light turquoise and pink of early morning:

and the amber sunset tones of dusk when the light starts to fade:

Monet had been working on paintings of his water-lily pond in Giverny from the 1890's, soon after he had moved to the property west of Paris. But in 1918 he realized that the France as a country needed to recover from the Great War of 1914-18, and as part of the healing process, he offered to paint these rooms for the nation. With the help of Prime Minister Clemenceau, who had become a friend of Monet's, the project was carried out over many years, and was finally installed properly in 1927,
months after the artist's death in 1926. Like Beethoven, whose deafness did not keep him from hearing inside his brain the music he composed, Monet did not have to see these paintings completely in place to know the effect that they would have on the viewers of them.

The sheer visual pleasure that he produces with the combinations of pinks and greens and deep purples and blues is as nourishing and healing as he intended them to be.

The viewer can submerse him/herself in the water as if swimming, or can smell the fragrance of the lilies or feel the soft touch of their petals.

The viewer can fly among the clouds reflected on the pond's surface and become one with the colors in a sky that knows no national boundaries or languages.

   While Paris as a city during Monet's lifetime (1840-1926) is growing as an urban center with the improvements to avenues, building facades, and park life begun during Haussmann's renovations under Napoleon III, the life of the countryside is more appealing to Monet. He continues to paint
a plein air, out of doors, from the 1890's until the end of his life in his rural setting in Giverny, about 50 miles outside of Paris. His awareness of the nurturing needed for the nation to recover from war,
though, enabled him to transport, through oil paint on canvas, his garden in Giverny, into the very heart of the capital city. Monet's garden walk continues Haussmann's idea about urban living that every city dweller needs to be within 10 minutes of a park to live happily in a city.  But Monet goes beyond that and uplifts the urban inhabitant and city visitor to a garden where belief in reality is suspended in a world of color and light, flowers, and clouds, air, and water.

His notion of infinity is one of continuous nurturing through beauty. The movement of light through
two days repeats without end from one oval to the other and the viewer is transported with the light
over,
in, and
above the water.

MONET's GIVERNY

MONET's GIVERNY

Once Claude Monet (1840-1926) had made enough money from his paintings to buy property, he moved with his family to a large house in Giverny west of Paris near the River Epte. There, beginning in the 1890's, he had two gardens planted, a formal flower garden with regular paths behind the house (upper section in plan), and a second water garden further from the house with bridge, weeping willows, and water lilies (lower section in plan, photo right with wisteria on the bridge.)
                                                                   House

 Photo and painting of formal garden:

Photo and painting of second, water garden (painted bridge has been replaced with a lower arc bridge now):

The Epte River (a tributary of the Seine) was and is the source of the water for the second garden. From 1890 to the end of his life Monet painted that water garden in some of the most memorable images of nature's beauty.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, N.Y., 1899                            Washington, National Gallery of Art, 1899

 

Princeton Univ. Art Gallery, 1897-99























Water Lilies, 1906, Art Institute of Chicago










The paintings that he did there of the Japanese bridge and the water lilies beneath it sum up 3 themes which interested Monet throughout his life:
1)   LIGHT on the surface of WATER and BUILDINGS
2)   FLOWERS
3)   SERIES OF THE SAME SCENE repeated at different times of day.

1) LIGHT on the SURFACE OF WATER and BUILDINGS is something that captivated him from the beginning. In fact, the very first painting exhibited that is connected directly with the term "IMPRESSIONISM" was his 1872 painting of the harbor at Le Havre where light, water, and buildings appear. In the scene we see boats and figures sketched in silhouettes against the main subject, the sun's reflection on the water in the harbor at sunrise. The title of this work in French, Impression:  Soleil Levant, (Impression: Sunrise) is what caused critics of the painting to coin the phrase "IMPRESSIONISM" which was then applied to art works made by Monet and others.

It is such an "impression" that the viewer cannot distinguish which vertical black or blue strokes represent smokestacks and which represent trees or ships' masts; they look very much alike.  The thickest paint strokes are horizontal, visible, and irregular, much like the sun's rays would be on various surfaces:  orange and yellow for the light bouncing off the moving water, dark green strokes for the water waves and for the reflections of the figure and boat to the left of the sun's reflection. The people are less important than the single orange globe in the middle of the sky. Impasto orange and gold stripes raised like embossed gold leaf sections on the surface of the painting form a thick path for the viewer to follow into the distance to the center of the perspective.
            Nature, in the shape of a perfect circle, is the focus of the scene, but Monet keeps human connection to the sun by illuminating the human figures as parts of the shadows cast by the star's light. The artist does not care if the viewer sees his brushstrokes; he is saying, "I want to capture the light and color I seem to see, the movement of the water, and the mood established at sunrise on the harbor." Nature overshadows humans, literally. The LIGHT on the SURFACE of the WATER is what hooks the artist and viewer. Life is just about to stir in the harbor; the fishing boats are heading out to sea, the cranes are about to move, the smokestacks are piping up, the sails of the sailing ships have yet to be hoisted up the masts. But the scene could almost equally be a scene of the sunset in the same place; the time of day is subservient to the observation of light from the sun through clouds.
                                

In his later Giverny works, LIGHT on the SURFACE of WATER and BUILDINGS  is also the real subject of the art:


The viewer sometimes wonders if the water surface in the painting is cloud and sky reflected or water itself. The light picks out the green of the lily pads, the pink of the lilies, the whites of the clouds, or is it mist?(On a side note the mist painting sold in July 2014 for 31 million dollars at Sotheby's.) Sometimes the objects seem an excuse for a colorful rendering of light itself. Even the man-made bridge in the scene is transformed into an arc of light and color where the viewer is more aware of the shimmering on the bridge panels than of their actual structure:   
                                 Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge, 1897-99, Princeton Univ. Art Gallery

The real bridge and water garden were created from Monet's own designs. His painted bridge is a fantasy, too, an improvement on nature and man. And we wish to inhabit Monet's world of seeing because he makes reality better than it is.

2)  FLOWERS

Early in his career he chose colorful flowers as subjects, such as in the Poppy Field at Vetheuil in 1879.

When he begins his gardens at Giverny, he makes sure that real water lilies are given a place in the second garden. In his paintings completed at Giverny he often eliminates the human figures and buildings and paints just the flowers themselves. 
 

 Around 1914 at Giverny, as his eyesight grows cloudy with cataracts, he starts to paint canvases where the viewis closer and closer to the flowers until he blocks out the weeping willows, bridge, water and sky; we look down on the lily pads without any other sense of perspective.The white and pink flowers alone captivate his color sensitivities. He transposes the floating plants onto canvas with impasto blotches of pink, white, and yellow paint. These lilies (called Nympheas in French) dominate his paintings and towards the end of his life are the subject of huge triptychs that sometimes curve, obscuring the view of anything else for the person who sees them in art museums today. The colors become the viewer's focus, a new narrowing that calms and satisfies as prayer.

Cleveland Art Museum's triptych of Nymphaeas by Monet, 1915-26:

Museum of Modern Art's triptych in New York, Water Lilies, 1914-26

Musee de l'Orangerie's Nymphaeas room, Paris, 1914-26:

3) SERIES of THE SAME SCENE

While the Nymphaeas are certainly a series in and of themselves, Monet's obsession with the idea of painting the same scene at different times of day and over and over again begins much earlier. (His painting series has been studied splendidly by Paul Tucker.) Monet painted haystacks, poplars, Rouen Cathedral, and other locations at different points in his career, but always with the intention of conveying the same scene in different kinds of light and weather.

HAYSTACKS: 1890-91, summer and winter  (both in Chicago Institute of Art)

POPLARS: 

Four trees (Met, N.Y.)        Poplars Autumn, Philadelphia Museum of Art (both 1890-91)

 :

ROUEN CATHEDRAL:

 

Musee d'Orsay, Paris, 1894, Full Sunlight       Musee Marmottan Monet, Paris, 1894, Sunset

These two Cathedral paintings are only five years before one of Monet's Japanese bridge paintings from Giverny, the 1899 version in Princeton University Art Gallery:

He continues to paint the bridge even up to 1919 when some of his views of it are rendered more abstractly, either because of poor eyesight or because he is influenced by other painters like Turner, Chagall, and Picasso. The arc of the bridge is still there, the willows on the sides, the water underneath but they all swirl together:

                                               London, National Gallery, 1919-20

                                          Musee Marmottan, Paris, 1918-19

His colors in these abstract versions, however, are almost edible they are so lusciously interwoven, dark blue, turquoise, greys, purples.     

                                                                                                  Musee Marmottan Monet, Paris

      In all of his series the painter's desire to reproduce and enhance nature in every season and hour comes across vividly. Monet draws us in with the combinations of colors and makes us question what is deep pond, what is cloud surface reflected in the pond water. And does that matter, if the colors harmonize and cohabit so pleasantly?

Institute of Art, Chicago

By the age of fifty the artist has reached his own personal Paradise in Giverny and he wants the viewer to join him in enjoying it. With every thoughtful consideration of his turquoise garden filled with islands of pink petals, he seduces us with the beauty of paint color and nourishes us with his own private sea of tranquillity.