Today I’m posting the second part to a previous blog post about Claude Monet and the book Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet & the Paintings of the Water Lilies, continuing my blog series on Monet, Giverny, and Other French Musings.

As mentioned in my previous post, the Museé Claude Monet a L’Orangerie des Tuileries had opened to little fan fare, which was perplexing since Monet had become one of the most well known, and collected artists of his time. His long time friend, Georges Clemenceau, noted bitterly that a sign announcing a dog show in another part of the building was much more prominent than the one announcing the inauguration of the Museé Claude Monet in May of 1927, just five months after Monet’s death.

It was as if France had turned on Monet. France’s most important daily art newspaper claimed his water lily masterpieces, what he called his "Grand Decoration," “The work of an old man.” An assistant curator at the Museé Luxembourg, exclaimed, “For me this period is no long Impressionism, but it’s decline.”

Art lovers and critiques at the turn of the century where ready to move on. Tastes were changing. But instead of praising the Impressionism movement, they scorned it and the artists that were part of it. In a special issue of L’Art Vivant, which devoted six articles to Monet in 1927, one critique claimed Monet’s paintings were, “postcard niceties of a certain American taste purchased by the vulgar nouveaux riches." They had nothing nice to say about the museum itself claiming the space was sterile, uninviting and viewing the paintings in the two oval rooms was a “disagreeable experience.”

Monet’s donation and the newly opened museum continued to plummet in popularity. The museum was poorly maintained the light quality was dismal and the oval rooms housing these great masterpieces were used for other functions. At one point, an exhibition of Flemish tapestries was hung in front of Monet’s paintings. Water was known to leak down through the skylight and drip on the canvases, and one of the two rooms was used as a storage area. Monet’s godson, and son of artist Camille Pissarro, claimed Monet had been twice buried, once after his death and the second time with the opening of the museum. A retrospective of Monet’s work in 1931, supplemented by canvases that were in his studio when he died, brought even more scathing comments of his work and those of the Impressionists.

During World War II, the L’Orangerie was bombed and one of the panels was damaged. The lack of concern was so great, the shrapnel wouldn’t be removed for another 20 years. The building itself was renovated in the 1960’s with another story added to the top eliminating the skylights that illuminated Monet’s work. This after the French Ministry acquired the Jean Walter-Paul Guillaume collections consisting of works by Picasso, Cézanne and Renoir. Essentially the magnificent water lily panels were relegated to the basement in a gloomy dark space.

It wasn’t until after World War II that things started to change. The L’Orangerie became a place of pilgrimage for Americans, especially the American art students on the GI bill in the late 40’s and 50’s, who rushed to admire the Nymphéas by Monet. Ellsworth Kelly, an ex-soldier studying in Paris reached out to Michel Monet and Jean Pierre Hoschedé, Monet’s son and step-son to ask if he could visit Giverny which had been abandoned and was in disrepair. Monet’s studio still housed a number of canvases sharing the space with birds and other creatures. He produced Tableaux Vert now housed at the Chicago Art Institute as an homage to Monet and Giverny.

In the 1950’s and 60’s American and Canadian painters kept Monet’s spirit alive living and working in the area around Giverny. American artist Joan Mitchell purchased and lived on a property in Vétheuil. The gardener’s cottage there had once been Monet’s home. Mitchell and the painters of the Abstract Expressionists movement were greatly influenced by Monet’s later work seeming to fit right in with the works of the time by Pollack, Rothko, and Mitchell.

It is ironic that the renewed interest in Monet’s work would have been brought on by Abstract Expressionists, especially American ones. Monet disliked work of the Americans and “avant garde” contemporaries of the 1920’s. He did not want to see or have anything to do with Cubism and it probably would have gotten his goat that his works were being compared to the “Abstract Expressionists” of the 1950’s and 60’s. It was the renewed interest of this group that brought attention to his later water lily paintings and once again American collectors came to snap them up. Walter Chrysler purchased a large scale water lily canvas for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Unfortunately it was destroyed in a fire and was replaced by another work purchased from a dealer in Paris who had bought most of the remaining work of Monet from his son Michel. Word spread to American collectors as it had when Monet was alive. Joseph Pulitzer III, a passionate collector of modern art purchased a six foot wide water lily canvas in which he decorated his pool house at his mansion in St. Louis.

Fast forward to 1996, the French Minister of culture at the time realized the curation of the placement of the Jean Guillaume collection to the Monet Nymphéas were completely backwards. The doors to the Musée de L’Orangerie closed in 2000 and a major renovation to the museum began in 2003. During the demolition the paintings were hermetically sealed in reinforced boxes and temperature and humidity controlled. The second story added in the 1960’s was removed with the water lily paintings often being in distress, setting off alarms during the jack hammering of the demolition. The project would take six years and $36 million dollars. Now Monet’s Grande Decoration, takes the place of prominence lit with natural light from skylights above, just as Monet would have wanted it. The Guillaume collection is exhibited in the annex below along with a space for special exhibitions.

I have visited the L’Orangerie before and after the 2003 renovation. Today, it is hard not to find a line stretching out the door into the the Tuileries Gardens. Avoiding weekend crowds, on cold gloomy winter days it became a place of meditation for me when I lived in Paris. Monet had come full circle, his grande vision of the space to house his last momentous project of his life, is appreciated and visited by thousands.

Come back for the next post which will tell the story of a very peculiar visit to the L'Orangerie!

Links:

Musée de L'orangerie, Paris France

Part I: Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet & the Paintings of the Water Lilies

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Today is the first post in a series on my blog about Claude Monet, Giverny and other French musings.

My favorite thing to receive as a gift is a good book. When I discovered Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Paintings of the Water Lilies by Ross King, I couldn’t get it in on my Christmas list last year fast enough. King is also noted for Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture, and Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling. King’s books are extremely well researched and Mad Enchantment is no exception. Focusing on the latter part of Monet’s life at Giverny, and his series of water lily paintings, including the “Grande Decoration” that would be the large paintings eventually ending up at the Musée L’Orangerie in Paris, it delves into his obsession with creating such an enormous oeuvre for an artist at his age.

I discovered several things from the book that I never knew before about Monet. One is he would work on several canvases at once of the same scene while painting plein air. Essentially, they were a series of the same view captured at the moments in time before the light changed. As he was working on one canvas and the light had changed too much, he would grab the next one and work on that one for a while and so on. Sometimes even working on one for only seven minutes. It wasn’t uncommon for him to work in all weather conditions shuttling canvases back and forth and when he went on painting outings he was followed through the fields by his children and step children carrying canvases for five or six paintings of the same subject matter done at different times and with different lighting effects.

Georges Clemenceau & Claude Monet_  Photo:  Wikimedia Commons — Georges Clemenceau & Claude Monet_ Photo: Wikimedia Commons

He had a deep and long lasting friendship with George Clemenceau, the French Prime Minister during World War I. Clemenceau’s fortitude during the war helped the French get through it. Being one of the original architects of the Treaty of Versailles, he was instrumental in the war ending and getting reparations for the French from Germany. Clemenceau and Monet corresponded religiously. Clemenceau was a huge support mentally, emotionally and physically for Monet and his work.

Claude Monet in his studio with the "Grande Décoration"  _Photo: Wikimedia Commons — Claude Monet in his studio with the "Grande Décoration" _Photo: Wikimedia Commons

So it was right before World War I that Monet had the idea for the the larger than life canvases, he called “La Grande Décoration,” the series of water lily paintings that are now one of the most highly visited series of paintings in Paris at the Musée L’Orangerie. He painted them during the war while he was in his late seventies. While the enemy was close, on several occasions with their attacks on Paris and it’s environs, Monet never contemplated leaving. He would rather parish at his home with his work if it came to that. It was through his connections that he was able to garner favors for gas, so he could continue to use his cars, (he was a car collector), cigarettes, which he smoked like a fiend, and wine, which no French man can live without, during the war. Plus, he was aided with transport for all of the art supplies that he needed for his “Grande Décoration, " which would be coming from Paris.

Hotel Biron, Musée Rodin, Original Planned Location for an Annex for Monet's "Grande Décoration"  His Donation to the State of France_ Photo: Wikimedia Commons — Hotel Biron, Musée Rodin, Original Planned Location for an Annex for Monet's "Grande Décoration" His Donation to the State of France_ Photo: Wikimedia Commons

After Rodin donated his entire collection of sculptures and paintings to the French Sate on the condition that his workshop, the Hotel Biron and his home outside of Paris become museums, the seed was planted in Monet’s mind that he could too be honored in such a way by donating his “Grande Décoration” to the State, if they agreed to build a venue or museum to his exact specifications to house and display the series.

Clemenceau was instrumental in getting the ball rolling and Monet started negotiations with the French State to make his gift a reality. But it was not smooth sailing and resulted in several tumultuous occurrences that everyone involved, including Clemenceau, wondered if it would ever come to fruition. Monet would tumble into fits of rage and depressions due to dissatisfaction with his work. He was known to take a knife slashing and then burning hundreds of canvases, not only the water lily works, but to those done through the course of his life. One panel in the collection of the L'Orangerie had to be repaired from the swipe of a knife. It is estimated that in his lifetime he destroyed more than five hundred canvases.

Painting at the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, Done while Monet had Cataracts_ Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Another obstacle was Monet's health. He wondered if his grand project would ever come to completion due to his failing eye sight due to cataracts. He had multiple surgeries on his right eye, with long difficult recovery times, plus trial after trial of prescription glasses that never seemed to work for him. Eventually he found the right lenses with a new scientific discovery, an instrument made by Ziess, that could map the surface of his eyes to create a lens that would be the best that he could get. Even those at first didn’t meet his satisfaction. He barreled down the rabbit hole into another fit of depression. After having surgery and multiple treatments on his right eye, his left eye was getting worse, and he refused to go through another bout of surgery, having suffered enough on those with the right eye.

L'Orangerie, Paris, France  Photo: Wikimedia Commons — L'Orangerie, Paris, France Photo: Wikimedia Commons

As he was finally adapting to his new way of seeing, he continued to work on the large water lily panels and was working with the architect on the design of the space that would eventually be their home. Originally it was planned as an addition to the Hotel Biron, Rodin’s museum. But when the architect fell out of favor for not meeting Monet’s specifications a new one was hired along with a search for a new location. It was then that the L’Orangerie, the former shelter during the winter for the orange trees of the Tuileries Gardens, during the time of the Third Republic, was considered. It had also been used for dog and agricultural shows and expositions, and was also a place for lodging immobilized soldiers during the war. Monet agreed to rennovating the L'Orangerie and the architect began drawing up plans according to Monet’s wishes for two oval rooms and a skylight to light the works.

Detail of a Section of a Water Lilly Panel in the L'Orangerie Showing an Unfinished Area_ Photo: copyright Kim Minichiello

Time was of the essence because the French State was in an agreement with Monet and a date had been determined when Monet would hand over the work to be installed in the L’Orangerie around 1924. As time was getting close, he made every excuse to not follow through and canceled the donation. An exasperated Clemenceau was distraught and didn’t want anything more to do with Monet, and the situation almost destroyed their friendship. The underlying factor, on Monet’s part, was that he not only felt dissatisfied with the work, and that it was such a part of his “essence” he couldn’t part with the paintings while he was still alive. Even today in one of the panels there is an unfinished area, as if Monet couldn’t come to terms with completing them.

The Water Lilies Room in the L'Orangerie, Paris, France Photo:  Wikimedia Commons — The Water Lilies Room in the L'Orangerie, Paris, France Photo: Wikimedia Commons

After Monet died in 1926, the project finally came to fruition. Clemenceau was instrumental in making sure all of the details were addressed to open the L’Orangerie and dedicate the master works of his dear friend. The date of the dedication in May of 1927, and the opening of the Musée Claude Monet a L’Orangerie des Tuileries opened to very little fanfare. Clemenceau noticed that day that a sign for a dog show to take place at the same time in another part of the building was more prominent then one announcing the inauguration for the Musée Claude Monet. In fact art critics after his death didn’t hail him as a master artist. Because of the changing taste to more modern works at that time, they claimed the impressionists produced art that was essentially “fluff” and were postcards of niceties for American tastes. This, Monet’s momentous, glorious gift to the French State and no one seemed to care. By the 1950’s the L’Orangerie was essentially deserted and in disrepair.

It is hard to fathom what went on in the L’Orangerie after the dedication of the Claude Monet Museum in 1927 and how it became what it is today. Stay tuned for Part Two of this blog post to find out, or grab a cup of tea, a comfy chair and a copy of Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies.