_Books

'Monet' artfully intertwines text and photos

MONET
By Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge
Abrams, 304 pp., $75
By Paul Skenazy
C
LAUDE MONET waS 86 wben be died.He'
lived long enough to see France pay 200,000
francs for a painting rejected in the annual '
Salon 54 years earlier. He outlived two wives, children
and stepchildren, his biographer, tbe whole impres- '
sionist era; by the time he died in 1926, he had a surre-
alist colony for neighbors in his hometown. "
A prodigious painter and extraordinarily active
man, Monet would sometimes complete more than 50
canvases in a year. Even late in his life, he might be at
various stages of work on up to 100 paintings at once.
He demanded that the landscape artist work not only
from nature but also in it. He painted at the edge of
cliffs during storms, in Holland in the dead of winter.
"Monet" is the story of this remarkable man's e v ~
tion to nature in art. One cannot imagine a more care-
ful intertwining of exegesis and pictorial text than has
been achieved here. Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge
are to be commended for the attention apparent in
every aspect of this work.
The book traces Monet's career from the early
1860s, when the "unfinished" quality of his canvases
led to rejection by the Frencb art establishment,
through his travels in the 1870s and 1880s throughout
France in searcb of challenging subjects, to his deci-
sion in 1883 to settle in Giverny, a small village out-
side Paris. It was bere that Monet lived for the last 40
years of his life, bere that be created his famous gar-
dens of bead-high rows of flowers, lily pond and trel-
lised Japanese bridge with overbanging willows. The
garden became the subject of most of his late work
and was a work of art in itself.
It was during these Giverny years that Monet '
became more and more obsessed with capturing the
exact relation of light and color and object as they
were reflected at one instant, from one angle, before
being altered forever in the rush of time. He would sit
and study a motif for hours, day after day, working on
one canvas after another as the light altered the shape
and tone and meaning of his subject He collected his
perceptions over weeks, accumulating them on the
canvas into an illusion of the instantaneous impres-
sion. He steadied the instant with his patience.
Monet's series of views of one motif - the stacks in
the field, the poplars outlined against fog and river;
the Rouen Cathedral - led eventually to a vision of
creating an exhibition space in which the viewer
would be surrounded by nature, immersed in and
encircled by a series of integrated canvases. The
result was the "Nympbeas," or water lilies, which
Monet donated to France for permanent display in the
Orangerie in Paris. His last years were devoted to
these unique studies of leaf and light, color and cloud
and reflection, which he completed despite the pres-
sures of age and his failing eyesight (he was nearly
blind at times). '
Forge narrates Monet's career as a series of experi-
ments culminating in these triumphant last works.
This interpretive structure provides perhaps more
cohesion and direction to Monet's achievements than
they actually had and leads Forge to slight paintings
that don't confirm his dramatic rendering of Monet's
accomplishments, like the turbulent and ambiguous
late studies of the Japanese bridge in bright yellows
and reds that make him exclaim: "We don't know why
they were painted, at least in any sense that would sat-
isfy an art historian."
Most of his analyses of individual works are illumi- ,
nating; occasionally, however, helapses into vacuous
critical jargon.
The main problem with Forge's commentary is the
almost complete absence of personal and cultural con-'
text. We get little sense of the social and political life
in France during these turbulent years (though Monet
was involved in several issues, like the Dreyfus affair,
and counted noted politicians and journalists among ,
his intimate associates). Biographical material is men-
tioned only in passing. The first 17 years of Monet's
life are dismissed in two paragraphs, the death of
Camille, his first wife, is referenced through a poi-
gnant anecdote about the paradoxes of artistic voca-
tion.
The complicated relations that led to Monet's long-
, standing living arrangement and eventual marriage to
Alice Hoschede (and his role as stepfather to her Iilany
children) is confined to a cryptic reference to Hos-
chede as his "possessive and resourceful companion."
It is as if Monet's whole world were as silent, perspec-
tiveless and self-reflective as the lily pond.
, But it is somewhat unfair to emphasize what I miss
in a book that contains so much. Monet's art has been
reproduced in too many posters and advertisements" ,
until the originality of the creation has been diluted by
our sentimental attachment to his subjects. This book
helps restore some of that sense of revelation and that
edge of newness all great artists provide. _
Paul Skenazy teaches at UC-Santa Cruz.