In September 1870, while Prussian soldiers were trying to starve Paris into surrender, Claude Monet was in Normandy with his wife Camille and their son Jean, looking for a boat from France. They were not alone. Every day hundreds of people descended on the docks in the hope of escaping the Franco-Prussian War; only later would Monet learn that some of his best friends had slipped through the same crowd. By November, he and his family reached London, although they spoke no English. Months passed and the siege of Paris gave way to the Paris Commune and thousands of civilians killed. The Monet family moved to Holland, where Camille taught French and Claude painted canals. In photos taken in Amsterdam at the time, their eyes look a decade older than the others. They bought pots for a garden they could grow when the killing stopped.
Fleeing to two countries to avoid war is, in a sense, the rule rather than the exception in this artist’s life. He ran from apartments to avoid creditors. He fled to the French coast to avoid the man whose wife he was about to marry. After marrying, he flees Paris for the tranquility of the countryside. There were a dozen addresses in five years, but Gauguin’s unmatchable escape to Tahiti usually turns into a myth. If nothing else, Monet now stands for gardens and domesticity and the knowledge that the same things will be in the same places tomorrow – the kind of comfort, you might say, that is most important to someone for whom things often haven’t been.
In the nearly one hundred years since his death, Monet has become a . . . but do i really have to tell you? No canvas has remained unmagnetized by the kitchen, no sector of pop culture has remained unruly. The first art review I remember was for one of his lily ponds; the critic was Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Titanic. (“Look at how he’s using color here,” he coos, running his fingers over the canvas with a dreamer’s sensibility.) There are currently no fewer than fifteen cities hosting or vying to host “Claude Monet: The Immersive Experience,” in which you place on headphones and step into the artist’s shoes. The show’s website includes a photo of two women taking the VR tour “together,” ie. inches apart but lost in their own screen worlds. One is turned away from us; the other covers her mouth.
It’s a familiar twenty-first century moment, a bit utopian and a bit dystopian. It would be easy to call it a complete perversion of a great artist, but Monet made bright, strangely dark moments something of a specialty. An early painting of Camille sitting on a park bench shares more of its mood and composition with this photograph than one might expect. Flowers are carried over Camille’s right shoulder; on the left, a gentleman in black stares at her into nothingness. This was in 1873, shortly after the Monets returned to France. They finally had their garden and six-year-old Jean to share it with, but it was also the year Camille lost her father. The text on the wall next to the painting, which hangs at the Met, suggests that the scene “telegraphs sadness,” but “uncertainty” might be fairer: two people cocooned in a place created for their pleasure, almost erotically intimate, but stunned by unknown thoughts. Time flies and technology sprints. Loneliness and togetherness, which may be parts of the same modern itch, have hardly budged.
When it comes to biographies of artists, it’s rare to hear that the form reflects the content – if there are cubist lives of Picasso or expressionist lives of Munch, I haven’t had the pleasure. Jackie Wullschleger’s Monet: The Restless Vision (Knopf), on the other hand, could be called an impressionistic biography of the central impressionist. Some important events take place in blurred flashes, but the overall shape of his eighty-six years is clear. Every few chapters, a sudden bit of detail takes your breath away.
All biographies are a little impressionistic in this sense, Monet being unusually so. “Only one eyewitness account of Monet, other than his own,” we learn in chapter one, “survives from before the age of seventeen.” Little information survives about how he met Camille. He insisted that military service in Algeria was an integral part of his artistic growth, but the work he did there has not yet been traced. Later, when he was rich, popular and friends with the Prime Minister, a fog thicker than any other clouded his life. Several times when he endured interviewers, he told them half-truths: he served in Algeria for two years, although it was actually one; he paints exceptionally en plein airalthough he did maintain a studio; his mother, Louise, died when he was twelve, although he was actually sixteen. Decades seem to have passed without him mentioning her, and if she is somewhere among the thousands of letters he sent, no one has found her. He destroyed almost every letter he received.
We know that he was born in Paris in 1840 and grew up in Havre. His merchant father, Adolf, wanted him to go into business, but Louise seemed to encourage his artistic dreams. Some of his earliest works are caricatures of strangers he sees by the water. (He was good at noses.) At seventeen, he befriended the landscape painter Eugene Boudin, who showed him how to paint straight from nature, sometimes sitting next to Monet and painting the same view. In 1858, Monet completed his earliest surviving canvas, View from Ruel; judging by the version of his mentor, Monet emptied the scene of buildings and animals. You might think he was just trying to make things easier, but fifty years later he was doing much the same thing: simplifying in the interest of intensification.
Decades later, Monet still spoke of Boudin as a creative father, the antithesis of his biological father. Adolphe did, at least for a time, send rent money to his son, although Monet claimed to have paid for it by selling caricatures—a particularly slippery trick, but a useful one, judging by the number of artists who said versions of it. The bigger twist is that Monet did grow as a businessman: a workhorse who spent grueling chunks of his twenties painting from five in the morning to eight at night; who has consulted with his primary dealer on how to drive sales; who ignored that dealer when he learned a rival could make him more money; and who finished something like two thousand pictures, not counting the hundreds he cut with a knife.
“After college, I skipped three years of acting and improv and went straight to law school.”
Cartoon by Jose Arroyo
Rats on prices and commissions are rarely interesting to the average reader. “Monet: The Restless Vision” is perhaps the first biography of an artist I have come across in which such a thing is not simply read, but sexy. What others treat as mundane context Wullschläger, art critic for Financial Timesbecomes a full feature. She cites a letter in which Monet, having received twenty-five hundred francs for “A Haystack,” asks the buyer to tell everyone that the figure is five thousand, and right there, as if accompanied by a violin, is our man … mischievous, smug, positively gleeful about the fine art of selling fine art. She is equally sharp in the daily life of her character: in Giverny, where he spent decades, he would get up at dawn, paint for hours, eat like a hungry animal, return to work and continue until dinner at seven. Sleeping, eating, painting, shopping and selling, all stages of one energetic process.
It’s easy to forget how many of the key Impressionist images – of theatre-goers, garden walks, people eating, boatmen, lazy picnickers – were made by people with little to no time to spare. Monet: The Restless Vision’s chapters on his early adulthood in Paris have a palpable grime: he sweats to finish the paintings on time, working in studios so small that some of the larger canvases can’t fit; he sneaks out of hotels with an unpaid bill; he borrows recklessly, and when he cannot repay, he cuts up his own art rather than hand it over to the creditors. Camille, seven years his junior, appears again and again in paintings from this period, partly because he fell in love with her, but also, surely, because she was a thrifty nanny. In 1867, after she gave birth to Jean, Monet’s family cut him off. Three years and hundreds of feverish hours of painting remained until the wedding.
