One
Oceanic Sensations
Most viewers have come to think of the installation of the
Nymphéas, given by Monet to the French state and unveiled
to the public in two specially designed rooms at the Musée de
l’Orangerie on May 17, 1927 (figs 1–3), as the official crown-
ing of Monet’s career. This was not exactly the case. Monet’s
Water Lilies languished half-forgotten from the day of their
installation to the late 1930s, then were damaged by water
leaking through the vellum skylight and the Allied bombing
in the summer of 1944. Not until 1952, a quarter of a century
after their installation, did the French state finally begin to
restore the Orangerie.1
Museum/Mausoleum
Spectacular as it looks today, the Orangerie installation of
twenty-two canvases was, in fact, part of an even larger series
of Water Lilies. What was installed was the result of a com-
promise between Monet and the state and had a direct impact
on the reception of these works. Monet apparently refused
one of the earlier architect’s proposals to install the Nymphéas
in the Orangerie into a perfectly circular space, comparing
the format to that of a circus.2 Ground plans reproduced in
the literature present the final design: two oval rooms and
their small oval antechamber.3 Although these plans reveal
that there was direct access to the paintings from the sides
at the back, they do not sufficiently indicate the fact that
the rooms – designed by Camille Lefèvre and aligned in an
elegant enfilade along the Seine, in a flow that echoes Monet’s
water reverie – were the back rooms of a building that had a
Facing page detail of fig. 1
front room of equal length (fig. 4). Extending to the west, this
room, the Annexe du Luxembourg, was devoted to tempo-
rary exhibitions. Thus, although Monet had been promised a
separate Monet Museum at the Hotel Biron in the early 1920s,
his murals were eventually confined to a splendid cul-de-sac.
The unpublished correspondence between the artist’s
increasingly disgruntled family and an unnerving succession
of directors, ministers, deputy directors, and deputy minis-
ters in the meanders of French bureaucracy during the late
1920s and the ’30s reveals the extent of the neglect of the
Nymphéas.4 While the public streamed to the exhibitions of
Old Master works in the front room, only a few curious or
melancholy souls ventured to see the Nymphéas behind them.
In 1935, Monet’s paintings were obscured by Flemish tapes-
tries exhibited on movable partitions in front of them; in a
letter sent to the Direction des Beaux-Arts in September 1936,
Monet’s son feared that this would happen a second time,
when the Orangerie would be presenting a Rubens exhibition
later that year.5
Since the 1950s, critics and the general public have cele-
brated Monet’s decorative Water Lilies murals as one of the
high points in the history of modern art. In 1982, in an article
that hinged on two widely divergent readings of “an art of
exhibitionality,” the art historian Rosalind Krauss singled
them out as the culmination of the transformation of
landscape painting into a compressed, horizonless space,
expanded to correspond to the absolute size of the wall:
The synonymy of landscape and wall (the one as the rep-
resentation of the other) of Monet’s Water Lilies is thus an
advanced moment in a series of operations in which aes-
7
1 (top) Claude Monet, Water Lilies: Study of Water/The Two Willows, ca.
1914–26, oil on canvas, 2 × 17 m, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris (Room 2, east
wall).
2 (bottom) Claude Monet, Water Lilies: Study of Water/Morning, ca. 1914–
26, oil on canvas, 2 × 12.7 m, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris (Room 1, south
wall).
3 (top) Claude Monet, Water Lilies: Study of Water: Clouds, ca. 1914–26, oil 4 (bottom) Camille Lefèvre, Ground plan of the Orangerie, final version,
on canvas, 2 × 12.7 m, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris (Room 1, north wall). March–April 1922.
 thetic discourse resolves itself around a representation of
the very space that grounds it institutionally. This consti-
tution of the work of art as a representation of its own
space of exhibition, is in fact what we know as the history
of modernism.6

Krauss’s argument stemmed from Institutional Critique (the

systematic inquiry into the invisible work of art-institutions,
particularly the writings of Daniel Buren). Yet her emphasis
on the isomorphism between the Water Lilies and their space
of exhibition also continued to fit in a compelling fashion the
teleology of modernism according to Clement Greenberg’s
famous dictat that painting should increasingly express the
two-dimensionality of its support – which Greenberg had
specifically applied to the Nymphéas in his essay of 1957, “The
Later Monet.”7 However, it sits much less comfortably with
what Walter Benjamin in his “Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction” (the second point of reference
of Krauss’s article) called “an art of exhibitionality.” Writing
from Paris in 1936, heartened by the recent victory of Léon
Blum’s Popular Front, Benjamin celebrated what he saw as the
final erosion of aura and ritual surrounding the unique,
handmade, elitist work of art. He attributed this erosion to
the advent of Socialism and the dissemination of photo-
graphy and film. Far from belonging to what Benjamin

11
defined as “an art of exhibitionality” – which he associated
both with medium (works designed for mechanical repro-
duction) and conditions of visibility (the fact that a work
could be readily viewed by the masses) – the Nymphéas as
mural (as opposed to the Nymphéas as serial painting) resides
wholly in the realm of aura. Benjamin described the polarity
thus:
Works of art are received and valued on different planes.
Two polar opposites stand out: with one, the accent is on
the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value
of the work. Artistic production begins with ceremonial
objects destined to serve in a cult. One may assume that
what mattered was their existence, not their being on view.
The elk portrayed by the man of the Stone Age on the walls
of his cave was an instrument of magic. He did expose it
to his fellow men, but in the main in was meant for the
spirits. Today the cult value would seem to demand that
the work of art remain hidden. Certain statues of gods are
accessible only to the priest in the cella. . . . It is easier to
exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than
to exhibit the statue of a divinity that has been fixed in
place in the interior of a temple. The same holds for the
painting as against the mosaic or fresco that preceded it.8
As critics such as Pierre Olmer, among others, did not fail
to notice at the time, few spaces in Paris felt more like the
inner sanctum of a temple and closer to a cella than the two
back rooms of the Orangerie.9 Indeed, one could say that it
is the flip side of the rhyming association between “museum”
and “mausoleum” noted by Theodor Adorno in his essay
“Valéry’s Proust Museum” that characterized the initial recep-
tion of Monet’s last work. Adorno, after describing museums
as “family sepulchres of works of art,” lamented the ill-fated
attempt to display works in settings that are intended
to imitate or suggest their origins: “When discontent with
museums is strong enough to provoke the attempt to exhibit
paintings in their original surroundings or in ones similar, in
baroque or rococo castles for instance, the result is even more
distressing than when the works are wrenched from their
original surroundings and then brought together.”10
It is this predicament – being trapped in limbo between
two equally uncongenial situations, immured in the
Orangerie and yet nearly forgotten – that characterizes the
story of the Nymphéas all along. The Orangerie seems to have
12
constituted a site of disturbance and irresolution at a moment
that ought to have been congenial for Monet’s mural-size
works, in the light of the revival of interest in mural painting
in France and elsewhere during the decade that followed their
installation.
Liminal Spaces
Monet, like most avant-garde Western artists of his era,
including Manet, van Gogh, Redon, Bonnard, and Vuillard,
and also the Art Nouveau designers of the Ecole de Nancy, fell
under the spell of Japan. His garden at Giverny was modeled
on the Japanese meditation garden he had seen at the Paris
World’s Fairs of 1867 and 1878.11 He may also have visited the
one constructed near Versailles in 1890, which included a red
lacquer bridge and pavilion built expressly for the contem-
plation of a water lily pool. The multi-panel folding screens
(byobu) and sliding screens (fusuma) shown in the Japanese
section organized by Monet’s friend Tadamasa Hayashi for
the Paris World’s Fair of 1900 were certainly also on his mind.
Perhaps he was thinking especially of the screens of the Kano
School, with their faintly delineated willows, irises, and pine
trees framing a central expanse of water (fig. 5).12
However, there are no such overt Japanese motifs in
Monet’s work. He was after something more ineffable than
the mere trappings of the vogue for all things Japanese, some-
thing more akin to an “elective affinity,” a goal that would be
fully understood only by a poet such as Louis Gillet, author
of the 1927 monograph Trois variations sur Claude Monet.13
From the moment Monet began to work on his Water Lilies
in the 1890s, there was a tension between the series conceived
as individual commodities meant to be sold and dispersed at
will and the series proposed to be seen as an indivisible whole.
In 1909, after his principal dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, exhib-
ited more than forty views of Monet’s garden as “Les
Nymphéas: série de paysages d’eau,” critics deplored their
imminent dispersal, calling for some benefactor to keep one
of the series as a group in recognition of their success as a
decorative ensemble.14 Only in 1914, after his friend Georges
Clemenceau, who was then prime minister, came up with the
idea of a public donation of the series to the French state, did
Monet himself truly begin to think in such ambitious terms.
He began to do so in anticipation of creating a public rather

5 KaihōYusho, Bamboo and Morning Glories, Pine and Camellias, ca. 1550–
1665, a pair of six-fold screens 1.74 × 3.36 m each, Cleveland Museum of Art.
than a private project – a change that occurred at a watershed
moment that would affect the project at its core: the onset of
the First World War. This duality of private versus public is
also characteristic of Japanese screens. Often architectural
and truly mural in scale, these folding, portable screens,
which were painted on reinforced paper panels, were
intended to provide domestic privacy in private homes. Yet
the sweep of their compositions, which could span several
panels, and the grandeur of their subjects, which mostly
ranged from heroic battle scenes to lyrical depictions of
landscape and weather, had a subtle but emphatically public
mode of address to which Monet must have been particularly
sensitive.15
Monet moved progressively to larger canvases, which he
initially meant to combine in diptychs and triptychs. He then
began to expand the single panels horizontally, to form a
curvilinear, mural-size frieze (see figs 2 and 3). By 1915, the
size of his canvases had quadrupled compared to the
Nymphéas of 1905–9: two meters high – taller than a man –
and as much as six meters across.16 While Monet continued
to paint so-called studies in situ on large canvases set along-
side the pond, these eventually had to be transcribed onto yet
larger horizontal panels in the studio. In spite of such trans-
position, it might be argued that the dichotomy between
“study” and “finished” work had in fact collapsed at that
point. The growing size of the canvases, combined with the
ravaging effect of a triple cataract on Monet’s sight (it was
finally operated on in 1923), might have led to an ever looser
and larger painterly facture. Large patches of brilliant pinks
and crimson inhabited the pools of water, while iridescent
blemishes of blues and purples and large sweeps of greens and
13

6 Photo of Claude Monet standing in front of Morning in his third studio
at Giverny, ca. 1925.
yellowish paint were dragged across the paintings’ surfaces. It
might also be argued that since Monet’s studio, which had
more than doubled in size in 1916 to house the enlarged can-
vases, was itself situated on the edge of the garden, forming
a continuum with what lay outside, Monet’s late project was
breaking down a second dichotomy, that between en plein air
and the studio. Lastly, since the Orangerie installation was
modeled on the way the curvilinear canvases were displayed
along the walls of Monet’s studio (fig. 6), the distinction
between studio and museum was itself eroded. It is this inter-
face of nature and the autonomous artifact, this isomorphism
of nature and architecture, that Monet shares with what had
already been a century-long feature of Japanese art.
In the Orangerie, Monet wanted a space specially designed
so that the pictures would wrap around the viewer, who
would find him/herself encircled by the panorama of the
work. The rooms had to be elliptical. Monet even proposed
that the number of works be reduced from twelve to eight so
that he could have an elliptical room at less expense than that
proposed by the first architect assigned to the project, Louis
Bonnier. After long and often frustrating negotiations, Monet
was satisfied with the plan designed by Camille Lefèvre, the
last of a series of architects hired by the state to work on the
Monet installation. However, with Clemenceau’s fall from
power in 1918, the project lost support. Rumors began to cir-
culate that the Japanese constructor Kojiro Matsukata, whom
Clemenceau had brought to Giverny, offered – perhaps to
compensate for the failure of the French plan – to buy and
install the grandes décorations in Japan, in a building designed
to Monet’s specifications. Other rumors circulated, claiming
that an anonymous American collector had placed an even
higher bid and had offered to buy the group of works at any
price Monet chose to name.17 In 1920, the critic François
Thiébault-Sisson revealed, with some indiscretion, Monet’s
desperate effort to secure his gift and to find a permanent
building for displaying the Water Lilies. His public account
ended with an exhortation: “Imagine the effect they would
produce reunited in the hall of the Grand Palais and ask how
greatly this spectacle would increase the prestige of France
throughout the world.”18 Thus, only the prospect of national
embarrassment at having a major work by a well-known
French master taken away permanently prevented their
installation in Japan. (Today, Monet’s water lily series instal-
lation is approximated in Japan by four of his canvases hung

14
together in 2005 at the Chichu Art Museum on the island of
Naoshima, in an extraordinary room entirely lined with white
tiles, designed by the architect of the museum, Tadao Ando.19)
In fact, Monet had not decided which of the dozens of can-
vases in the entire Nymphéas series would be selected for his
donation, or in what combinatory arrangement, leaving
several private collectors some leeway to form their own
ensembles of Monet Water Lilies. One French collector, Henri
Canonne, is known to have acquired eleven paintings from
the Nymphéas series between 1920 and 1924, which remained
in his family until they were dispersed some time between
1939 and 1942.20 Matsukata, three years before the unveiling
of the Orangerie, bought thirty-four paintings from Durand-
Ruel (including works not from the Nymphéas series), to be
donated to Japan, which he allowed to be shown at the
Parisian gallery in 1924 before they were shipped overseas. By
then ever more determined to see his Water Lilies exhibited
only as a cycle, Monet apparently insisted that one of them –
Reflections of the Weeping Willow on the Water Lily Pond, the
only painting from the 1920s series sold in his lifetime – be
withdrawn from the show.21 It is in homage to Matsukata’s
action, in contrast to the French state’s endless demurrals,
that Louis Gillet made an important change to the second
chapter of his Trois variations sur Claude Monet, published
just after Monet’s death. The chapter, a reprint of his 1924
review of the show at Durand-Ruel’s, was originally entitled
“Après l’exposition Monet: le testament de l’impressionisme,”
and he re-titled it “The great Japanese constructor.” Thus, in
place of the sacrosanct pair Monet/Clemenceau – the great
friends, the old patriarchs of the Third Republic, the French
grandees – Gillet substituted Monet/Matsukata. Monet and
his Japanese alter ego were now the great constructors.22
Monet’s stipulation, in the contract he signed with the state
on April 12, 1922, that his Water Lilies be mounted on the walls
of the Orangerie using marouflage was partly meant to
protect the canvases from moisture damage and insure their
evenly flat surface. Since Monet’s project called for curved
walls, marouflage also made it possible to avoid the construc-
tion of complicated stretchers for individual paintings. More
importantly, however, it functioned as a tacit guarantee that
the paintings could not be removed. His demand stemmed
not from a concern that they would be shown in some other
museum space, as the opportunity arose (for example, in
1937, as described later in this chapter), but to keep them from
being relegated to storage in some museum basement. The
same clause further specified that no other work of painting
or sculpture could be placed in the designated room with his
murals.23 He thus deprived the Water Lilies of mobility, which
was intrinsic to the portable and sliding Japanese screens, and
guaranteed them permanence instead.
In his long negotiations with the state, Monet had every
reason to be apprehensive about the fate of the Water Lilies
after his death. In the wake of France’s postwar rappel à l’ordre
(call to order) – a mindset and a whole culture that yearned
for the reassuring solidity and formal stability of neoclassicism
– Monet, as the quintessential Impressionist painter, was
subject to vitriolic attacks that revived some of the allegations
that had first been hurled at him in the 1860s and ’70s.24 André
Lhote, a painter forty-five years his junior, began a virtual
crusade against him in 1919 and did not relent in a review of
a Monet show in 1921 at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, pub-
lished in the prestigious literary journal La Nouvelle Revue
française. Lhote, unfavorably comparing Monet’s water-
garden pictures to the impeccably composed classical land-
scapes of Nicolas Poussin, used a typical postwar metaphor of
bodily mutilation to dismiss him: “Indifferent to all these
landscapes that only begged to be copied to enter the
museums for posterity … the century’s greatest eye and hand,
preferring the pond of Giverny, has committed one of
the most frightful artistic suicides. Can our times produce
nothing else but mutilated geniuses?”25 Indeed, Pierre Bon-
nard, the painter whose style was closest to that of Monet’s late
works, was harshly castigated at the Salon des Indépendants
in the spring of 1927 for his loose handling of paint, just as the
Nymphéas were being unveiled. Reviewing the exhibition,
Henri Malherbe wrote: “While recognizing [Bonnard’s] talent,
we feel justified in condemning the disorder of improvisation
in his landscapes, which rely too heavily on the excesses of
Impressionism, the hedonism of the south.”26
Gillet defended Monet’s late works by titling his 1924
review of Monet’s exhibition at Durand-Ruel “Le Testament
de l’impressionisme.” His aim was to exhume and resuscitate
Monet’s reputation:
We have been in too much of a hurry to bury Impression-
ism. This great school has not said its last word. In
the last thirty years, a diversity of movements stemming
from Cézanne and Seurat, Synthetism, Cubism, etc have
15
7 Pierre Bonnard, Pleasure, 1910, oil on canvas, 2.51 × 4.64 m, Paul Getty
Museum, Los Angeles.
 followed one another at breathless speed. One after the
other, the masters of the generation of 1840, have now
entered the past: Degas died, an octogenarian in 1917,
Renoir at almost the same age in 1919. Of this famous, by
now historical group, only Monet survives, almost alone,
as a great patriarch of painting, the last of the modern
masters to have known directly the masters of bygone days:
Ingres, Corot, Courbet, Manet. He is all we have left of the
great tradition. In him we grasp the link with history. While
the young ones are vying for primacy, while new formulas
wear out, this veteran alone with his visions in his retreat
is preparing for his theatrical entrance. One can predict for
that day a coup de théâtre.27

One may wonder on what grounds Gillet could have pre-

dicted a coup de théâtre in 1924. Since the 1900 Paris World’s
Fair, the only opportunity given to decorative painting
had been in private abodes: Bonnard had been asked by
Misia Natanson Edwards (after her divorce from Thadée
Natanson) for four panels in 1910 to decorate her dining-
room on the smart Quai Voltaire (fig. 7); Ker Xavier Roussel,
another pair to adorn the carriage entrance of the Paris home
of his dealers Josse and Gaston Bernheim; Edouard Vuillard,
a set of nine large paintings in 1913 for the Bernheims’
summer home in Normandy (fig. 8) (which he reworked in
1934), as well as two more panels for a residence on Avenue
Marceau.28
If anything, the debate that took place in the years preced-
ing the installation of Monet’s Nymphéas indicated that large
public decorative schemes were rapidly becoming a thing of
the past. The most recent example of a state-sponsored dec-
orative ensemble in the French capital had been commis-
sioned from the quartet of ex-Nabis Bonnard, Vuillard,
Roussel, and Maurice Denis for the new Théâtre des Champs-
Elysées on Avenue Montaigne in 1912 (fig. 9).29 Denis’s im-
mense classicizing frieze on the theater’s ceiling and what he
had to say, in 1915, in his introduction to Maurice Storez’s
book L’Architecture et l’art décoratif en France après la guerre
(comment préparer leur renaissance) can both be seen, in ret-
rospect, as a forewarning for Monet’s project:

8 Ker Xavier Roussel, The Abduction of the Daughters of Leucippus, 1913,

distemper on canvas, 4.2 × 2.6 m, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

17

9 Maurice Denis, The History of Music, ceiling decoration, 1912–13, oil on
canvas, 372 m in length, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris.
18
What are we waiting for, in order that a great epoch may
be possible in France? he asked. Above all victory! And then
a return to good sense. Revolutionary prejudices, the
excesses of individualism, the love of paradox, the fetishism
of the unexpected and the original – all the blemishes on
our art are also the blemishes on French society.”30
An enquiry launched in 1922 by the Bulletin de la vie artis-
tique, a journal financed by Bernheim-Jeune, around the
question “Tableaux de chevalet ou peinture décorative?” was
equally unpromising to Monet’s enterprise. The response
of the pointillist painter Paul Signac was as follows: “To my
mind a flower vase by Monet, half an apple by Cézanne, a
small panel by Seurat, are much closer to what I consider to
be decorative painting than the ceilings by the likes of [the
academic artists involved in the mural campaign for Paris
town halls] Besnard and Cormon.” Others argued that it was
the move away from an emphasis on solid form to color
that had led to this situation. Another painter, Barat-
Levraux, considered that “the few decorative panels one just
saw at the Salon des Indépendants clearly indicate that a
transformation has taken place in the mind of artists who
still want to cover large mural surfaces. Their aesthetic is
much closer to that of the Venetians of the Renaissance than
to that of the Primitifs [i.e., the Middle Ages].” Indeed, he
concluded: “We will probably see fewer and fewer decorative
mural paintings.” Their colleague Luc-Albert Moreau simi-
larly declared: “Any architectonic painting is suitable for dec-
oration; the mistake of the last thirty years has been to
believe in a decorative painting based on a two-dimensional
stylization of form. Great decorative painting is of a purely
plastic order and all about depth.” The problem had to do
with modernist architecture, according to Moreau and the
painter Suzanne Valadon. “Since decorative painting has
always been dependent on monumental architecture,” said
Valadon, “and our period is without such architecture to
speak of, it was inevitable that this kind of painting should
have been abandoned. It no longer had a destination.” The
views of the most important (in the sense of official) artist
interviewed by the Bulletin, Charles Igounet de Villiers, sec-
retary-general of the Société des Indépendants, did not bode
well for the Nymphéas:
Decorative works are finished realizations. Paintings are
more like studies and quick sketches – maybe for the best.
Life is a burden for artists. One has to produce a lot, exhibit
often, in order to sell. Great decorative painting requires a
long time of preparation, reflection, documentation, pre-
liminary studies, and then execution. It requires months,
years of work, and all of this for uncertain results. Decora-
tion, frescoes, stained glass, tapestry all demand much
more knowledge, will to work, than the speedily executed
canvas, with no composition or solid matter – where one
writes or evokes, in a telegraphic style, an impression, a
sensation.31
Le Corbusier – whose identity was perhaps more than
anyone’s associated with the whitewashed aesthetic of
modern architecture – certainly thought so and felt obliged
to interject. In a little piece entitled “Fresco,” which he pub-
lished anonymously in 1923 in his own magazine, L’Esprit
nouveau (but in which the sarcasm clearly bore the impri-
matur of his writing), he declared:
The very charming and shrewd organizer Marcel Tempo-
ral cries out: “painters have had enough rotting by bending
over easel painting. They aspire to the wall, they want to
make frescoes. Easel painting has had its life, we want
to return to the great traditions of the fresco.” An “esprit
nouveau” is persuaded of the contrary. Frescoes histori-
ographed [sic] the walls of churches and palaces, told
morality tales. One had no books and one read frescoes. In
a fleeting homage to Victor Hugo: “Ceci tuera cela.” Four
centuries have forged their way toward greater culture. We
got rid of showy display and unnecessary colors. We love
pure Ripolin and without noise. Frescoes that yell on our
walls to overwhelm us at all hours of the day? No. Wanting
to think, the Jansenists have created a Jansenist frame . . .
On the wall [the easel painting] is a small little square, her-
metically shut, which leaves you in peace. The turbulent
fresco goes where there is tumult, jolts, violence, it is in the
street, where it shouts all kinds of stories. The billboard
is the modern fresco, and it belongs in the street. It does
not last five centuries, it goes by in two weeks when it is
replaced. It is what an orator is to a philosopher, a harangue
is to a good book. Violent, it does not last. Easel painting
on the other hand is a closed book. Let’s not scream with
frescoes in our apartments and public places, where dignity
should reign since we have finally come to appreciate the
mute eloquence of pure proportions.32
Nevertheless, at the Paris 1925 “Exposition Internationale
des Arts Décoratifs,” the momentary reappearance of a mural
form of peinture décorative (as distinct from the scores of
hyper-polished japonisant lacquer screens produced by artists
such as Jean Dunand which are typical of Art Deco) led the
editors of the Bulletin de la vie artistique to claim to have
detected a shift in taste toward decorative schemes: “What
are we to believe in the face of this return to a type of fixed,
immovable decoration which, only a few years ago, seemed
contrary to the principle of a movable decoration one takes
around? Does it indicate a new sensibility? How does it
conform to modern change?”33 The critic Arsène Alexandre
sounded equally optimistic in the journal Renaissance de l’art
français et des industries de luxe, noting that the new archi-
tecture, with its massive, vaulted ceilings and large scale that
19
cement afforded, offered bigger expanses of walls for artists
to decorate.34
Coinciding with the unveiling of the Nymphéas installa-
tion, the Bulletin de l’effort moderne (the magazine financed
and edited by the influential Parisian art dealer Léonce
Rosenberg) published a series of three articles by the Italian
painter Gino Severini entitled “Peinture murale: son esthé-
tique et ses moyens.”35 The true legacy of Cubism, Severini
argued, was not easel painting but mural painting. He insisted
– launching into an argument that was raised again and again
by the conservative Right in the 1930s – that the birth of easel
painting as an autonomous object coincided with the waning
of religious spirit and the decadence of art. The return to the
mural would thus act as a double corrective. It would reduce
the fragmentation of Cubism and its severance of color from
drawing and shading; and by continuing to adhere to the
flatness of the picture plane, as Cubism did, thus uniting
form and content into a new totality, it would rescue art from
its debased condition as commodity. What drove Severini’s
interest in the mural was faith. Having become a devoted
Catholic and rejected his godless Futurist past, Severini was
hoping to have his call for a return to the fresco as church
art transposed to a lay modernist context. Nevertheless, it is
somewhat baffling that such a prominent place should have
been given in a modernist Parisian publication to articles
originally written for an obscure Swiss Catholic publication,
Nova e vetera, and that these should have been preceded in
the French journal by a similarly conservative two-part article
by Severini, “D’un art pour l’église,” written for the Revue
catholique de la Suisse romande.36 According to Severini and
these other critics, Monet’s Nymphéas were doomed to
failure, standing as an example of most things Art Deco was
not, and as the breakdown of Severini’s sacrosanct triad of
color, drawing, and shading (which is what later made them
important to Jackson Pollock in the 1940s).
In the Fall of 1926, weeks before his death that December,
Monet was still working on his panels. They were taken off
their stretchers and the Nymphéas room was inaugurated next
May by the minister of fine arts, Edouard Herriot, in the pres-
ence of members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and other
dignitaries and politicians, including Clemenceau.
Gillet, who had still hoped against all signs to the contrary
that the unveiling of Monet’s paintings in the Orangerie would
be a coup de théâtre, was forced at this point to contemplate
20
the possibility of failure. “Finally here they are, installed
according to his wishes, these famous Nymphéas. Eighty
meters of painting! When he gave this cumbersome gift to the
state, the latter found itself deeply embarrassed!” he wrote in
1927.37 In contrast, Pierre Olmer, writing for L’Architecture, was
pleasantly surprised. “Who would have thought,” he
exclaimed, “that this artist, most sensitive to the fugitive har-
monies of the hours and seasons, which unexpected aspects
he fixed in so many canvases, would some day be recognized
by the state as a great wall painter?”38 Another among the few
favorable reviews was by Thiébault-Sisson, a veteran writer on
Monet who went on writing about him, imperturbably, as if
the master’s reputation were unassailable. Reminiscing about
his visit to Monet’s studio at Giverny in 1918, he spoke of
wonder at the sight of Monet’s new works. “He had enlarged
his original motif with a nobility, an amplitude, a sense of
décor that were totally unexpected. Using a compositional
process whose simplicity was one of the happiest of inspira-
tions, he had depicted the water-lily pond from the perspec-
tive of the path that encircled it.” These were works, he wrote,
where “the prodigious variety of colors, purples, yellows,
amethysts, pinks, lilacs, violets, and mauves had now come to
form a whole of almost unbelievable sumptuousness, richness,
intensity of color and life.” He concluded: “At least Monet died
secure in the knowledge that his work would be displayed to
the public under the most favorable conditions, and this
knowledge in itself was to be the finest of rewards.”39
However, the obituaries for Monet published in the
two most influential French art magazines of the time were,
almost all of them, merciless. Waldemar George rebuked him
in L’Amour de l’art: “Monet has been the victim of his own
theories, and the only painter of his generation to have drawn
from these, fatal consequences. How different from the artis-
tic fate of a Renoir, triumphant over a doctrine he had judged
with severity, and which Monet insisted on carrying to its
logical end, becoming, little by little, its slave.”40 George ended
his piece by conceding that the Nymphéas were, after all, an
amazing achievement and that Monet still deserved his fame.
Jacques-Emile Blanche’s article for L’Art vivant was even more
unsparing.41 First came his displeasure with the installation.
What Olmer experienced as “the infinitely soothing and
serene” space of a temple, Blanche described as a place of
utmost discomfort: “The space is cold, too solemn, the walls
too white, the vellum too thin, allowing for an irksome light
to filter in. There are no seats. The place is infused by a mis-
placed Hausmannian solemnity . . . Fuzzy images look even
fuzzier when framed in stone.” The lack of definition, of land-
marks, he wrote, made him stagger. The real poetry of mural
painting belonged somewhere else – in the sharply defined
compositions of the great Italian fresco painters of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, revived by Puvis de Cha-
vannes. “A monument without a base is a mistake. . . . Thank
god Monet has given us a place to rest with his trees; if
not, this would be wallpaper.” Declaring his overall dislike of
Monet’s late works, Blanche dismissed them as too pretty, too
facile (richesse jolie). Unless one observed them scrupulously,
Monet’s panels could easily pass for theater props. Here
was the danger: too much taste touched on bad taste. A set
designer could easily mimic (faire la blague) these panels and
produce an equally seductive effect. “With Monet it remains
good painting, flirting all the while with the worst possible
taste, but one small step and it could lapse into vulgarity
[canaille].” Indeed, for Blanche the effect of the paintings
hovered close to the gooey opalescence of a Lalique vase and
a chromolithograph. Here Blanche managed to touch a nerve
by pointing to what modernism in general – reaching a peak
with Harold Rosenberg (in “The American Action Painters”
of 1952) and Clement Greenberg (from “The Avant-Garde
and Kitsch” of 1939 to “The Later Monet” of 1957)– feared
most: proximity with mass culture, vulgarity, and, worst of
all, the specter of kitsch.42 Two factors allowed Blanche to
develop his argument. One was what he saw as the “mistake”
on Monet’s part in his switch from serial easel painting to a
mural cycle and the consequent exacerbation of their visual
effect into mere “affect.” The other was the pervasive sense
among critics in the late 1920s that Monet, by outliving his
generation and by continuing to paint in the Impressionist
style, was repeating his own style to the point of self-parody.
Blanche’s insights foreshadow what the semiotician
Umberto Eco described, in an essay written in the early 1960s
(and thus in a decade famously less conflicted vis-à-vis
high art and low-brow culture than the historical juncture in
which Rosenberg and Greenberg were writing), as “the struc-
ture of kitsch.” Bad taste, Eco wrote, is “the fabrication and
imposition of effect. . . . Kitsch stimulates what pretends to
be a privileged aesthetic experience.” Eco went on to elabo-
rate the point: “The salient characteristic of kitsch, is its
inability to fully assimilate a citation borrowed from some-
where else (a work in another context or another artist) into
a new context which is too weak, or too shaky to support it.
While the borrowing is palmed off as the real thing, an
original invention, it sticks out from its new context like a sore
thumb.”43 The presence of these citations, a set of stylistic ele-
ments that Eco called “stylemes,” was in this case more para-
doxical as well as more problematic, since Monet was
seemingly “appropriating” his own style at a time when
that style was already considered passé. To explain his ideas
about kitsch, Eco offered as an example Giovanni Boldini
(1842–1931), whom he described as “a society portraitist
famous with the average public and infamous among mod-
ernists for his mixing or, rather, his juxtaposing crypto reac-
tionary naturalism in the more ‘critical’ areas of the sitter’s
face with the most flashy rendering of the ‘wild’ Impressionist
stroke in the ‘lesser’ areas of the clothes.” Eco’s reference here
to the exaggerated “Impressionist” style of brushstroke rein-
forces Blanche’s criticism of Monet, for it reveals how the
flourishes of the Impressionist stroke made it most suscep-
tible, among “–isms,” to the “fabrication and imposition of
effect.”
Gillet hailed Monet, born the same year as Rodin, as the
last survivor of a bygone time, that of the heroic generation
of Renoir and Degas, the last to have been able to evoke the
grandeur of the Bouchers and the Fragonards.44 But more
negative interpretations of this same reading, that of Monet
as a “living dead” who went on to outlive the achievements
of his generation, had become dominant in 1927 and after. Of
these, the essay “Vétheuil et Giverny,” written for the journal
Art vivant in 1929 by the novelist and diplomat Paul Morand,
and titled after Monet’s two most famous residences, is
certainly the most brutal.45 While Vétheuil signified youth
and innovation, Giverny suggested glory but also a parasitic
existence – as Blanche had more than intimated – on what
had come before. Giverny represented the artist’s old age, a
display of mere virtuoso technique. It was, in the words of
Morand, “Monet after Monet.” Morand, still anguished about
the evident ineffectiveness of the 1928 Kellogg–Briand Pact, a
year after its signing, along with the 1919 Versailles Treaty,
wrote, “We all know the Nymphéas were the worst present a
head of state could have ever given France.” He noted that one
could not blame poor old Clemenceau, who was blinded by
friendship, but that even Monet himself well knew the works’
weakness. Morand argued (basing his comments on Monet’s
21
correspondence, but using a nasty cliché) that Monet would
end up going down in flames; but at least he knew how to
burn. The donation of the Nymphéas to the state was forced
on Monet in 1921 by a notary. Indeed, Morand surmised, had
it not been for Clemenceau, Monet would have burned the
Nymphéas.
A large retrospective of 128 works by Monet was held in the
Orangerie in 1931. It was the only exhibition of his work at
a French museum between the two world wars and, as the cat-
alogue introduction by Paul Jamot, senior curator at the
Louvre, indicated, Monet’s standing had hardly improved.
Jamot chose to address the Impressionist “problem” head-on.
He granted that young artists could be forgiven their indif-
ference to and even scornful condemnation of Impression-
ism, since they had to be allowed to look at the past in search
of whatever stimulated their imagination. However,
he asserted that the duty of the critic was to understand the
succession of antagonistic artistic doctrines as a generational
phenomenon. The excesses produced by Impressionism, its
dissolving subtleties, the exaggerated predominance of the
sensory over the intelligible, inevitably would provoke a reac-
tion in favor of principles of solidity, order, composition.46
The matter of fact, even indifferent tone of Jamot’s tele-
graphic account of Monet’s last years further confirmed
Monet’s lingering irrelevance: “He was a leader in his youth.
To be able to lead others means to have in oneself the prin-
ciple of solitude. He ended his life as an artist as a lone, mute
patriarch of painting in the immense universe of his garden
of Giverny.” The critical response to the exhibition was just
as negative. It drew, to begin with, remarkably few reviews,
and their authors were even fiercer than Lhote had been ten
years earlier in 1921. While nothing in the catalogue indicated
that the Nymphéas were given pride of place in the exhibition
(even though it was held at the Orangerie), it was Monet’s
mural works that provoked the most disparaging comments.
Calling the Nymphéas a true catastrophe, a huge mistake at
the end of Monet’s oeuvre, the critic Alexandre Benoît wrote:
How empty this work is, what a misunderstanding this
strange and truly pitiful crowning of Monet’s career! What
kind of vanity seduced him into this sort of monumental
decoration when the man had no talent for this kind of
undertaking? What an irony that France, which has at
times light-heartedly allowed the greatest masterpieces of
this illustrious son to be plundered, should have erected
22
for his weakest works, and the vastest, an entire temple that
more than anything resembles the first-class cabin of an
ocean-liner.47
Jacques-Emile Blanche, in his comments on the Nymphéas
that year in his series of articles “Histoire des arts plastiques
sous la IIIe république” for the journal Nouvelles Littéraires,
reiterated almost word for word what he had said about them
four years earlier at the time of their unveiling: their form-
lessness was unfit for mural decoration and made worse, as
he saw it, by the fact that the panels had been fitted flush into
the cement walls. “Mural art has its own poetics and tech-
nique which is hard, solid, linear, that of the great Italian
fresco painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Cubism would give us more successful decorative schemes
than Impressionism.”48
Reverie/Trauma
The question of whether the paintings belonged to the realm
of the spiritual or to the rationalism inherited from
nineteenth-century positivism constituted the major point
of dissension between the authors of the two most important
contemporary books written on the Nymphéas: Gillet’s Trois
variations sur Monet of 1927 and Clemenceau’s The Water
Lilies of 1928.49 Gillet, the Catholic writer, poet, and art critic,
wanted to push the Nymphéas to the brink of the inchoate
and away from Western classicism (and its underlying logo-
centrism) toward Eastern mysticism:
How shall I attempt to describe the indescribable? Nothing
but curves, nothing but ellipses quietly echoed by the
pattern of the pavement; naked surfaces without moldings
meant solely to support this watery decor. . . . Here is
perhaps the only great work in Europe whose affinity lies
with Chinese thought, with the prayers of the Far East
about water, mist, the flow of things, detachment, Nirvana,
the religion of the Lotus. . . . We remain faithful to your
cult, oh Venus, daughter of Greece! But is it to desert you
to feel harmonies which you have not known, a music that
escapes the proportions dictated by the beauty of your
gestures and your body? The masters of the East knew all
about wisdom. Let us not complain if one of us, in a drop
of water under the sky of the region of the Vexin, swept by
 the winds and clouds of the Ocean, has rediscovered the
great ecstasy of the other side of the world. Rediscovered
this secret of forgetfulness and self-effacement of the indi-
vidual, which is still one of the forms of adoration.50
Clemenceau, the statesman, wrote his book about the
Water Lilies not only out of friendship but also out of civic
and didactic duty. It was he, one should recall, who had
spurred Monet to consider creating not just an installation
but a national public monument. Moreover, as he set out to
write the book at the age of eighty-eight (a year before his
death), his desire to secure the legacy of the Nymphéas was
clearly about securing his own place in history. Irked by the
fact that no catalogue had been prepared to accompany their
installation, and painfully aware of their condemnation by
critics and of the public’s inattentiveness, he set out to write
the missing guide.
To say at once what is on my mind, the Water Lilies in the
Tuileries are still unknown to the great Parisian Public. It
must be recognized that the museum of the Orangerie
is not made for the vulgar eye. The truth is that a passive
conspiracy of silence has been quietly instituted, uncon-
sciously helped by administrative lack of interest. On the
wall of the terrace of the Tuileries a little gray board, a trifle
bigger than the crown of my hat, tries to tell the public
that there is something there. A few steps further along, a
gigantic sign superbly recently announced a dog show.
The public did not hesitate. Is that doing justice to an exhi-
bition of art the like of which has not been given for a long
time in the civilized world? The directors of the Beaux-Arts
and that excellent architect Camille Lefèvre have given us
a masterpiece of hanging, worthy of the work and of the
country which it honours. . . . It is for our Parisians to
learn that they will find in the heart of Paris more than the
solution to a given problem in painting since there is the
world itself to look at, to analyze, to understand. A guide
is needed to this end, for the use of the public. I am told
that one is being prepared. But we have crossed the thresh-
old and from the first steps it is enchanting. How to
proceed? In what order should one approach these walls
which are the portals to fairyland?”51
After describing “a world within a world,” a work whose subject
was “an aspiration to the infinite,” a work producing an effect
of “indescribable stupefaction” on its viewers, Clemenceau
shifted gear. He launched into an attempt to reconstruct a
sequential rationale for the ordering of the twenty-two panels
– an order supposedly intended by Monet, yet never divulged
by him before his death. It was, of course, a misguided task.
Ignoring the loss of visual coordinates produced by the form-
lessness of the series, Clemenceau desperately looked for a firm
grounding, a safe place to stand, a repoussoir effect. He claimed
to have found it in one of the panels, which functioned, in his
words, as the “witness picture” for the start of viewer’s journey
– again a misguided notion. For while the Water Lilies of 1905–
8 reflected Monet’s desire to anchor the viewer by the inclusion
of a distant bank toward the upper edge of the canvas, and the
remains of an ever faint spatial recession, both devices had been
abandoned by the 1920s.
In a chapter entitled “The Critic Criticized” (le critique cri-
tiqué) Clemenceau singled out the writings of one author:
Gillet.52 He acknowledged him as “a great admirer of Monet”
and “a great prose stylist” but castigated him for being “a
pitiless metaphysician, who insists that the painter of the
Water Lilies leads us through flowery roads down to the bot-
tomless depths of non-being.” Clemenceau’s answer to
Gillet’s Nirvana was science – Brownian movement, the
breakdown of atoms, and the trajectory of vibratory waves.
To Gillet’s words “imaginary,” “subjectivity,” and “mirage,”
Clemenceau countered with “reality,” “objectivity,” and “a
fully evolved retina.” Yet he ended by admitting that “my dis-
agreement with Monsieur Gillet concerns philosophy, not
art.”
This disagreement “about philosophy, not art” elicited by
the Nymphéas can be mapped onto a similar disagreement
between the French writer Romain Rolland (a friend of
Gillet) and the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, in
an epistolary exchange that took place at exactly the same
time. The two men had met in 1924 and Freud regarded
Rolland’s pacifist engagement in his essay “Au dessus de la
mêlée,” published at the outset of the First World War, as a
great consolation in the dim political and intellectual land-
scape of the aftermath of the carnage of that war. The subject
of the correspondence between the two was the notion
of “oceanic sensation,” which Freud described in the first
chapter of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930):
I had sent him [Rolland] my small book that treats religion
as an illusion [The Future of an Illusion, 1927] and he
answered that he entirely agreed with my judgment upon
23
 religion, but that he was sorry I had not properly appreci-
ated the true source of religious sentiments. This, he says,
consists in a particular feeling, which he himself is never
without, which he finds confirmed by many others, and
which he may suppose is present in millions of people. It
is a feeling that he would like to call a sensation of “eter-
nity,” a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded – as
it were, “oceanic.” . . . One may, he thinks, rightly call
oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling
alone, even if one rejects every belief and every illusion.
The views expressed by my friend caused me no small dif-
ficulty. I cannot discover this “oceanic” feeling in myself. It
is not easy to deal scientifically with feelings.53
Freud dismissed this sensation – just as Clemenceau, the
secular and Republican statesman had – as an irrational,
regressive, crypto-religious manifestation. However, to dis-
cover (and diagnose) the source for the need for spirituality,
Freud presented religion as a “reaction-formation” against
nature, a nature that remained intractable and destructive in
front of a helpless humanity.
Rolland, who had just written a biography of Mahatma
Gandhi at the time of his meeting with Freud and had become
immersed in Hindu philosophy in the late 1920s, embraced
this oceanic sensation, as had Gillet in front of the Nymphéas.54
His position was significantly different, though, from that of
the other major French specialist in Hinduism, René Guénon.
In La Crise du monde moderne, also published in 1927, Guénon
saw salvation from the East, visualizing it as a model of spiri-
tuality to counteract Western capitalism’s decadent material-
ism.55 Yet what Guénon hoped for was that the West would
return to the religiosity of the Middle Ages – that is, Chris-
tianity and, more specifically, the doctrine of the Catholic
Church. It should be added that Guénon’s own views were
largely written in response to and in defense of the East against
the arguments made in another book published a few months
earlier: Henri Massis’s vehement La Défense de l’occident was
a response to another, even more clamorous and controversial
book, written by the German philosopher Oswald Spengler,
Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) in
1918. According to Massis, Spengler’s catastrophic view of
history was nothing but a perfidious attempt to excuse
Germany’s effort to destroy humanity, as well as to redeem
itself from the collapse of its own culture. Calling for a con-
24
solidation of Western Europe, whose disunity he traced back
to the schism provoked by the Protestant Reformation, Massis
warned his compatriots against the infiltration of Eastern
ideas into Germany. He argued that France ultimately had to
become the bastion against Asiatic, German, and Bolshevik
perils. This was a chain of reasoning that Rolland, being at
heart a layman and a pacifist (as were Monet, Gillet,
Clemenceau, and Freud), was far from upholding. In his letter
to Freud, Rolland insisted on “religious sensation” as being
quite different from “religion, properly speaking.” Open to
transcendentalism and to philosophies of immanence, he
compared “oceanic sensation” (using the same phrase as
Gillet) to Nirvana, a pantheistic and mystical experience of
self-abnegation and oneness with the universe.56
Until 2006, when entering the Nymphéas rooms at the
Orangerie, one found a panel citing Monet’s request that two
of his Water Lily panels be offered to the state as his way of
“taking part in the victory” over the Germans:
The Nymphéas of Claude Monet constitute the artistic and
spiritual testament of the painter. It is on the day of the
Armistice, November 11, 1918, that Monet decided to offer
France, like a bouquet of flowers, he said, the canvases
inspired by the garden he had imagined at his house in
Giverny. According to his will, these rooms were open to
the public only in 1927, upon his death.
Dedicated by Monet to French victory and peace, the
Nymphéas, diaphanous in their pastel colors and smoothing
of pigment, were certainly meant by the artist to offer a respite
from the savagery and brutality of the war. By offering them
on Armistice Day, Monet was also suggesting, both literally
and metaphorically, that his long horizontal expanses denoted
a temporal landmark. Indeed, as the literary historian Paul
Fussell underscored in his seminal book The Great War and
Modern Memory (1975), “the image of strict division clearly
dominates the Great War conception of Time Before and Time
After, especially when the mind dwells on the contrast between
the prewar idyll and the wartime nastiness.”57 The fact that
Monet’s death and the consequent bequest of the Nymphéas
to the state in 1927 happened to coincide with the year of the
official celebration of the end of postwar reconstruction can
only have reinforced its peaceful message. Moreover, that same
year, Aristide Briand (then the French foreign minister and a
Nobel Peace Prize recipient) proposed the Kellogg–Briand
Pact as a bilateral treaty between France and the United States
outlawing war between the two countries. The Pact was
expanded by Frank B. Kellogg, the American Secretary of
State, into a multilateral treaty renouncing war as a means of
settling international differences and was eventually signed by
sixty-two nations before going into effect in 1929, thereby ush-
ering in a short-lived hope for world détente.58 Clemenceau’s
allusion in his Water Lilies to recent discoveries in atomic
physics in relation to the dematerialization in Monet’s paint-
ings was itself a gesture toward appeasement. The physicist he
cited was Jean Perrin, like himself and Monet another “great
man” of the Third Republic, who had received the Nobel Prize
in physics in 1926, just five days after Monet’s death, for his
best-known book, Les Atomes, published in 1913 on the eve of
the war. A supporter of the League of Nations in 1919, Perrin
had made it his mission to disassociate science from the night-
marish vision of the war machine. He repeatedly emphasized
the disinterestedness and the humanist import of experimen-
tal science as well as the need for peace for successful scien-
tific development.59
Nonetheless, installed in the space of the Orangerie that
was apparently assigned to billet soldiers on leave from the
trenches during the First World War, the Nymphéas tended
to be yoked not so much to peace and beauty, the way they
had been intended by Monet, as to the lingering memory of
war.60 In Trois variations sur Claude Monet, Gillet described
the Water Lilies as blind painting (une peinture aveugle) with
a palette run amok (une palette égarée), works painted in
agony, groping along in great fear and doubt, by faint eyes
filled with darkness and a visual organ in ruins (l’organe
n’était qu’une ruine). Comparing them to Beethoven’s final
quartets, which were composed when Beethoven was totally
deaf, Gillet used what I think might be a pun on the word
mural: les oreilles murées, ears walled-in.61 Poetic as these
phrases sounded, they proved the most undesirable set of
metaphors to a French reader in the 1920s. Gillet’s own life
story is of some significance here. He had volunteered for mil-
itary service at the front in 1915 at the age of forty, an experi-
ence that proved to be a daily agony and which he wrote
about in harrowing terms in Chronique du temps de la guerre
(1919), Paroles et chansons des soldats de France (1919), and La
Bataille de Verdun (1920).62
Several Monet scholars have similarly drawn parallels
between the turmoil of war and the struggles of the aging
Monet, working against all odds and in ill heath in his studio
in Giverny. They have also written about his sense of loss,
with a son and a stepson at the front, and his mourning for
another son, Jean, whose untimely death in February 1914
immediately preceded his decision to work on the grandes
décorations. Monet himself made repeated allusions to his
emotional burdens during that time. “I wished to shut
myself up with work,” he told an interviewer, “in order not
to think any more of the horrors endlessly being commit-
ted.” On August 10, 1914, the day his stepson Jean-Pierre
Hoschedé was deployed to the front, Monet wrote in a letter
to him: “Think of us. Those who remain are also to be
pitied.”63
Biographical in nature, such commentaries inevitably rely
on a narrative mode that runs counter to the suspension of
narrative in the Nymphéas. Indeed, the installation at the
Orangerie is an immense field of color, the most demateri-
alized image painted up to that time. It was turned into a lieu
de mémoire (site of memory) not so much by a linear take
on history, or one of “before-and-after” (as the experience of
the First World War was described by Fussel), as by trauma.64
Freud defined trauma in the aftermath of the war as a
“double wound.”65 It was less a physical wound inflicted on
the body (which is what its etymological precedent meant to
the Greeks) than an injury to the mind – a psychic wound
that lasted longer than the healable physical wound. He
described this condition as one that manifested itself by an
incapacity to communicate what happened, followed after a
lapse of time by a “return of the repressed memory” – both
symptoms that the Nymphéas arguably enact. Nirvana – the
pantheistic oneness with the universe that Gillet and Rolland
had both identified with Monet’s Water Lilies – also meant
death, in accord with Freud’s notion of Thanatos (Greek for
“death”), which he elaborated as the “Nirvana principle” in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920); so too had death a lin-
gering resonance in Monet’s late visions of peace and
beauty.66
The negative response of many critics and commentators
to the installation might have been compounded by the fact
that its unveiling took place in 1927, a year that was marked
by a loosening of the rappel à l’ordre’s grip on French con-
sciousness. It is significant that the wound of the trenches
resurfaced at the time of the Surrealists’ involvement with the
technique of automatism. Most significant in this respect
25

10 André Masson, Battle of Fish, 1926, sand, gesso, oil, pencil and charcoal
on canvas, moma, New York.
are André Masson’s “sand paintings” of 1926–7 (fig. 10), which
were described as champs de carnage (fields of carnage) by the
poet Georges Limbour at the time of their first public viewing
in 1929.67 Masson’s entangled and carnivorous configurations
of underwater plants and animals made of sand violently
spattered with paint were about eternal primordial struggle.
They may also be read as a compelling example of indexical
inscription of the physical trace of the trench onto the surface
of the canvas.
The formlessness of Monet’s murals, the painter’s quasi-
automatic gestural application of the pigment, and the sense
of claustrophobia produced by the subterranean location of
the Orangerie installation might have functioned as an eerie
reminder of the dépaysement (or spatial disorientation, and a
favorite word of André Breton in Surrealism and Painting of
1928) experienced by soldiers fighting half-buried in the
trenches for months on end during the war (fig. 11).68 In his
book No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I
(1979), the historian Eric J. Leeds devoted a whole chapter to
this. He wrote:

26
 Many veterans who later returned to the site of their
combat in order to refresh their memories remarked
upon the overwhelming sense of spatial incongruity. The
trenches as they now appeared were much smaller, nar-
rower, more restricted than were felt to have been during
the war. Touring veterans, like those who return to the
settings of their childhood, were stunned by the gap
between the way things now appeared to be and the way
things felt to be before. There was a significant disconti-
nuity between the visual field and the space as imagined
and lived in.69

It is perhaps no coincidence that Kojiro Matsukata, the first

purchaser of paintings from the Nymphéas series as an indi-
visible mural ensemble, acquired these with the intention
of dedicating them to the relief efforts of Japan’s earthquake
survivors in 1924.
I have encountered only two allusions in the secondary
literature on Monet, both of them elliptical, to the parallel
between the Water Lilies and the trenches. One is in an essay
by the American art historian and critic Leo Steinberg, pub-
lished in Arts Magazine at the time of the installation of three
large panels from the series at New York’s Museum of Modern
Art in 1956, thirty years after twenty-two of the Water Lilies
were installed in the Orangerie. “While younger Frenchmen
trained their sight on German trenches,” he wrote, “Monet
gazed at his lily pond with dimming eyes and with a spiritual
courage for which language has only physical analogies.”70 In
the climate of the 1950s, however, such a comparison was
meant to be a redemptive metaphor. The other is a passage
written by Christian Derouet in an essay of 1996, “La Pein-
ture d’histoire à l’épreuve de la première guerre mondiale”:
“In the interlaces, the encrustments, are registered the plastic
contemporary ruminations of the mêlée roaring a few
miles away from Giverny. They reveal the troubling and phe-
nomenal amnesia that affected the combatants in their
deepest soul.”71 I would even go as far as to suggest that there
was a direct phenomenological parallel between the trenches
of the war and the Nymphéas by arguing that the canvases’
elongated shape and their height echoed in an uncanny
manner to later observers the dimensions of the trench itself.
What had felt – in deflationary order – like “an abnormal
little world,” greenhouse, forest, and aquarium to Gillet in
1924,72 and oceanic sensation to Gillet again in 1927, and the 11 Postcard of the trench on the Marne, 1914–15.

27
 cabin of an ocean-liner to Benoît at the time of the Monet
Orangerie retrospective of 1931, was likened to plain nausea
(or seasickness) by another critic in 1931, Albert Flament.
Tellingly, it was the phenomenological “affect” of Orangerie
as a bunkerlike space, rather than the pictorial “effect” of the
Water Lilies murals themselves, that he commented on:
Claude Monet is at home in the old Orangerie where two
rooms, which look more like crypts, are occupied by the
decorations he worked on during the last years of his life.
These two rooms, probably conceived by Monet himself,
are as featureless as possible, their ceilings much too low,
the lighting too diffuse. I tried a number of times to linger
to hear the harmonies intended by the old master of
Giverny. A migraine hit me almost instantaneously, my
sight got blurred. My only desire was to escape. One needs
architectural features for a room one intends to decorate.
By architecture I mean solids and voids, doors, windows
. . . The canvases don’t reach high enough. One feels as if
a tray were sitting on one’s head. It is quite amazing how
they managed to transform a ground floor into what
feels like a basement, a cave, a war bunker decorated by an
American snob – and there still are some! – to throw
parties at the time of the great “Bertha”! . . . The real
Monet is not to be found here, in this, alas, permanent
space at the Orangerie!”73

While the nasty pique at a (female) Ameritan socialite party-

ing in Paris while young men were on the front may be read
as symptomatic of the anti-Americanism that gripped public
opinion in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street Crash,74 the
most striking point is the way Flament ended – with the pre-
dictability of unending trauma, with the image of the bunker.
Monet’s wraparound installation at the Orangerie must
have reminded some of its contemporary observers, however
obliquely, of another type of circular installation of mural-
sized paintings, the panorama (fig. 12).75 The panorama is
a continuous circular representation of a scene hung on the
walls of a rotunda specifically designed to accommodate it.
Its lighting is usually natural, coming from a skylight in the
ceiling. Everything is arranged so that nothing extraneous can
encroach on the display and disturb the spectator’s field of
vision. While the parallel between the two was made over the
years, though only rarely, by art historians such as Bernard
12 Postcard of panorama of Waterloo, 1915, Mont St Jean, Belgium. Comment, John House, and Christian Derouet, the critics

28
who wrote about the Nymphéas at the time seem to have
wanted to refrain, as did Monet himself, from the compari-
son. One might argue that the most obvious reason is
that most panoramas had disappeared by then, that they were
indeed considered a mass-media phenomenon of the nine-
teenth century, something passé – in short, a dead issue by
1927. It is little surprise that Walter Benjamin – writing about
this nearly defunct popular art form as part of his Arcades
project, just at the time Monet’s paintings were being installed
– should have been in love with the panorama, the gradual
disappearance of which he linked in his essay “Daguerre et le
panorama” to the emergence and dissemination of photo-
graphy.76 By musing on how the city opens out in the
panorama to become a landscape, Benjamin touched on what
a later writer called “the paradoxical status of the panorama:
an enclosed area open to a representation free of all worldly
allusions.”77 He also alluded, unwittingly (since he does not
seem ever to have had the Orangerie installation in mind)
to one of the most uncanny aspects of the Nymphéas – their
phenomenological rather than phantasmagoric distension of
time and space beyond their given, measurable, coordinates.
But Benjamin’s concept of “opening out” was itself an
unorthodox idea.78 The nineteenth-century panorama was
first and foremost predicated on total visibility and on the
fiction of total recall. Created for visitors’ perusal in 360
degrees along balustrades, with the lighting recessed in such
a way that one could not see beyond the upper edge of the
canvas, while a fence masked the lower edge, panoramas pos-
sessed a hyper-illusionism. Often (if not always) devised to be
installed in close proximity to the sites depicted, they were
predicated on mimetic doubling. Monet’s “blind paintings,”
with their traumatic suspension of narrative, stood at the car-
dinal opposite of – indeed, as the consummate negation of –
the very plausibility of both.79 Thus, one may argue that the
chief reason for critics not to have mentioned the panorama
was that most of them realized that what Monet had painted
was in fact the counter-panorama par excellence.80
Again, considering that there was a later generation of
panoramas made in Paris and elsewhere in Europe during
the last thirty years of Monet’s life, and that these were not of
cityscapes (as many of the earlier ones had been) but of land-
scapes and battlefields, one could well imagine the notion
of a dystopic panorama becoming negative ammunition for
Monet’s disapproving critics. On the French side, the Franco-
Prussian War is known to have inspired up to eight panora-
mas.81 To my knowledge, Bernard Comment is the only
author to mention what he calls the “last” French war
panorama, the Pantheon of the War, painted in 1919 by Pierre
Carrier-Belleuse and Auguste François Gorguet, for a site he
leaves – frustratingly – unspecified, leaving equally unspeci-
fied the time of its destruction, so that it is not known
whether it was still in existence at the time of the Water Lilies’
unveiling. Dedicated to the glory and memory of First World
War soldiers, it measured 14 by 30 meters across and included
6,000 life-size figures – including sovereigns, political and
military leaders, and war heroes – portrayed against a battle-
field scene stretching from Calais to Belfort.82 Whatever its
fate, it is clear that this is not the kind of spectacle that comes
to mind when contemplating the Nymphéas.
There were other panoramas, however, which though not
in Paris and not in other capital cities either (they have been
destroyed, or left rolled up in the basements of various insti-
tutions, not all of them museums), came closer to the feeling
of emptiness elicited by Monet. Edouard Castres’s Bourbaki
Panorama of 1881 in Lucerne (fig. 13); Franz Roubaud’s Battle
of Sebastopol of 1905, painted to celebrate the fiftieth anniver-
sary of the year-long siege of Sebastopol in 1854–5, showing
the defeat of the allied forces by the Russian army, in situ in
Ukraine; the Panorama of the Battle of Borodino of 1912 (fig.
14), also by Roubaud, celebrating the one-hundredth anniver-
sary of the Russians’ defeat (but memorialized as a heroic
moment) in the Muzei-Panorama Borodinskaya Bitva,
Moscow; Louis Dumoulin’s Battle of Waterloo painted in 1912
to celebrate again the one-hundredth anniversary of the
event, in Belgium; and finally, just seven years before the
Nymphéas, Alfred Bastien’s Battle of the Yser made in 1920
for Brussels’ Musée Royal de l’Armée et d’Histoire Militaire,
depicting the destruction of the Belgian town of Ypres at the
very beginning of the war in October 1914.83
What is also interesting about these panoramas vis-à-vis
Monet is the fact that by the 1920s several had been cut to
pieces and reduced to fit their new abodes, and subjected
to the vicissitudes of an itinerant life. Indeed, some of these
immense panels were conceived from the start as nomadic
structures, in the manner of a circus (a comparison made by
Monet in horror, as mentioned at the outset of this chapter),
so that once the initial attraction for the local inhabitants
had evaporated, the panels could be moved from town to
29
13 (top) Edouard Castres, The Bourbaki Panorama, 1881, 9.80 × 11.5 m,
Lucerne, Switzerland.
14 (bottom) Franz Roubaud, Panorama of Borodino, 1912, 1.5 × 15 m, Muzei-
Panorama Borodinskaya Bitva, Moscow.
town, in the hope of generating more ticket entries and
better remuneration.84 Furthermore, although they were
meant to kindle national pride, many projected a disen-
chanted view of history indelibly marked by the scars of
war.85 As immense horizontal expanses, these panoramas
were characterized by the disappearance or, more accurately,
dissolution of the figure into large, anomic, empty spaces.86
In the Bourbaki Panorama, it is the blinding white expanse
of the snowy fields that dominates;87 in The Battle of
Sebastopol, the dull and undifferentiated alignment of the
blockhouses; in The Battle of Bodorino, this time without a
repoussoir effect, the scorched earth left behind by artillery
fire; and in the Battle of the Yser, the desolate remains of
Ypres fumigated by the first instance of the German use of
mustard gas.88 The drive for mimesis and panoptic control
of the earlier panoramas, which held the mesmerized viewer
in the middle, had thus given way to its opposite – loss and
dépaysement – as evidenced by the seasickness, the sense of
unreality and vertigo experienced by viewers, not unlike
what was expressed by critics about the Nymphéas as the
years went by.
Mural Effects at the Paris 1937 Exposition
For all the French state’s discomfort with this unwanted gift,
the Nymphéas were not exactly forgotten in the late 1930s. A
long letter dated May 10, 1937 addressed to Blanche Monet-
Hoschedé (Monet’s daughter-in-law) from Henri Verne, who
was then Directeur des Musées Nationaux, indicates that the
state made a concerted effort to bring these works out of
the shadows, or what Verne more generously called “their
splendid isolation.”89 Since this correspondence has long
remained buried in the archives of the Louvre, I shall quote
Verne’s plea at length:
We have come to believe in the inconvenience of isolated
museums. My belief, and it is not just my own, is that had
the installation of the Nymphéas taken place today, neither
Claude Monet nor Clemenceau would have refused to
consider our proposal. I have the numbers: in spite of
our sincere efforts, in spite of neighboring exhibitions
that attract 200,000 visitors per year, we have not managed
to attract in the Nymphéas rooms more than 6,000 visitors
32
per year, 5,173 more exactly in 1936. Why have they been
placed at the back of the Orangerie? even if the usage I
have made of the front rooms is not necessarily harmful
to them. But I repeat, I am convinced that if I had made
Clemenceau and Monet the offer that follows, they would
have understood the reasons behind what is a token of
sincere admiration and glorious homage to these works. In
three rooms of the Musée d’Art Moderne, they would be
installed almost exactly as in the Orangerie. This master-
piece by the great master would be placed in the midst of
all the art movements that have either derived from or
reacted against it.90
Alternatively, Verne proposed, one could wait for the time to
elapse for their entry into the Louvre (the legally required
twenty years after the artist’s death), where he was planning
a new arrangement of the museum’s French art in the wing
then occupied by the Ministry of Finance.91 Verne pleaded for
the first solution, the one that would bestow the Nymphéas
their rightful artistic status, in a new edifice that would be
inaugurated with great pomp, thanks to the exhibition during
the 1937 Paris World’s Fair of the masterpieces of French art
in a seven-museum project on the Trocadéro hill. He contin-
ued, with a reference to a new influx of visitors to the Louvre
(a boast about one of the great populist policies of the
Popular Front92):
The Nymphéas will be there for all to see, without having
to pay an extra admission fee, and visitors would draw a
lesson about modernity that would be the ideal homage to
Monet. The splendid isolation of the Nymphéas has meant
solitude, the neglect of an exceptional work, even though
it had been exhibited at the Orangerie in a movingly poetic
fashion. . . . I have had the luck to attract to the Louvre in
the last twenty months an entirely new public, very large,
very attentive, that streams into the sculpture rooms visited
till then by very few people. The museum of modern art
will be open in the evening, like the Louvre. Let me extend
this success to the Nymphéas, and you will have served the
glory of Claude Monet.
The response of the Monet family, sent three days later on
May 13, 1937, was highly defensive and negative. They saw this
proposal as yet another affront to the master, a betrayal of
his wish in the contractual stipulation with the state, and
yet another excuse on the part of government officials to do
nothing to improve the condition of the Water Lilies where
they were. As for the works entering the Louvre instead, that
possibility had already lapsed. In short, they wrote, “the
Nymphéas should not leave the rooms of the Orangerie,
where they should remain forever.”93
During the months leading up to the 1937 World’s Fair,
there was a flurry of articles, editorials, and art columns in
such dailies and weekly papers as Beaux-Arts, Comoedia,
Marianne, and L’Intransigeant demanding that the state
commission murals for the fair from French artists. Yet, for
all Verne’s good intentions, not a word was uttered on the
Nymphéas in the commotion elicited by the preparations for
the fair. Monet’s name was not mentioned once in the reams
of editorials and articles that appeared in the columns of
daily, weekly, and bi-weekly papers calling for mural com-
missions for artists. This silence (except for one demeaning
comment made by Robert Delaunay) is baffling.94 After all,
Monet’s Water Lilies, trapped in the Orangerie, stood as a
prime example of a modern mural installation in Paris. With
their pigment having seeped deep since their marouflage
into the wall itself (which would in any case have made their
relocation a most delicate undertaking), the Nymphéas had
even, paradoxically, become the closest example to the real
thing – frescoes – as anything produced in France since
their unveiling. Nevertheless, whether figurative or abstract,
modernist or all’antica, painted on or merely affixed to the
wall (as the great majority were), the murals on display at
the 1937 Paris Exposition still managed to convey a modicum
of “mural effect” that bespoke architectural stability – pre-
cisely what the ever-evanescent Nymphéas acutely failed to
deliver.
Despite Verne’s reassuring arguments about the institu-
tional framework of a major museum, it might have been the
thought of seeing the Nymphéas installation trivialized that
lay behind Monet’s family’s refusal. By becoming part of the
spectacle of a world’s fair, Monet’s opus ran the risk of being
tainted by the mass commercialism of the “panoramania”
of the late nineteenth century, when, after special rotundas
stopped being built for the panoramas, the world’s fairs
turned them into proficient cash machines with a plethora of
new names: the georama, the neorama, the cosmorama, the
stereorama, the polyorama, the diaphorama, the cineorama,
the mareorama, and finally the pleorama (from the Greek
pleo, “I go by water”) – to the dismay of art critics who went
on lamenting the success of this “vulgar” pseudo-art form.95
“At the 1937 fair, are we going to visit, aboard a fake plane,
the hilltops of Mont Blanc?” asked a writer in 1935 in the pages
of the regional Le Savoyard.96 Or, as a journalist writing under
the pseudonym le guetteur (the spotter), put it in another
small journal, L’Eclair, a year before the fair:
The 1937 fair will give some luster to a kind of spectacle
which had its day but which has stopped interesting the
crowds since the triumph of cinema: the panorama, which
will be presented under novel forms utilizing all the recent
progress in the arts of scenography, cinema, and light.
These were true works of art, and as David would say to
his student, after visiting them: “this is the place to go to
study nature.”97
The hand-painted illusionistic panorama was wisely
dropped at the 1937 fair, replaced by the photomural –
deployed in every single national and French regional
pavilion (mostly in the tourist sections)98 – and by cinematic
screens (the grounds of the fair included up to forty of them).
Nevertheless, the great crowd-pleaser at the fair was Raoul
Dufy’s Fée Electricité, a huge wraparound painting that
recounted, in an anecdotal mode and a jovial illustrational
style reminiscent of the Larousse Illustré encyclopedia, the dis-
covery of electricity via portrayals of its inventors through
history, 110 of them, all in period costumes (fig. 15). Behind
the figures, adding another upbeat note, was a mythological
tableau with the gods of Olympus gathered in the center. An
upper band, depicting the forces of nature versus the work of
man, unfurled like a huge scroll. Beginning with the maritime
landscape of the Normandy coast, it moved on to cityscapes
animated by birds, factory chimneys, a harbor, a shipyard
with a huge ocean-liner, cranes of hydroelectric factories,
electrical rails, and iron bridges. Using a new chemical
medium developed in the early 1930s – resinated oil emulsi-
fied in gummed water – Dufy was able to superimpose his
quasi-Day-Glo colors and retouch them while wet, still main-
taining the translucent, light touch of an immense water-
color.99 Indeed, it was as if the entire installation had been
illuminated by electric light not from above but from behind,
a wondrous effect created for what was in every other way a
totally anachronistic commission, especially compared to the
other science pavilions. More than the panorama, the inspi-
33
15 Raoul Dufy, La Fée Electricité, 1937, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de
Paris.
ration for Dufy was the theater backdrop, something that
must have brought little comfort to the Monet-Hoschedés in
their discussions with Verne.
Ironically, had Monet’s Nymphéas been reinstalled in the
Trocadéro, they would most probably be displayed today in a
space adjacent to that of Dufy’s La Fée Electricité. One of the
very few works preserved from the 1937 fair, Dufy’s mural was
put on permanent view in the Palais de Tokyo in 1964. There,
it would have been seen across the street from a decorative
scheme by Henri Matisse, the other great absentee at the fair.
Not even considered a possibility by Verne or any other
curator for Paris’s new modern art museum in 1937, Matisse’s
second version of La Danse of 1933 (based on the one at the
Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania) was installed in
the Palais de Chaillot, after prolonged delay, in 1977.100
So it is that the obstinacy of Monet’s family prevented
the Nymphéas from being exhumed from their bunker/
mausoleum and secured as a fountainhead in the master nar-
rative of twentieth-century modernism, as are similar Monet
Water Lilies canvases acquired in 1955 by the Museum of
Modern Art in New York.101 It was not until the early 1950s
that the Nymphéas, after almost three decades of neglect,
resurfaced into public consciousness – an episode that is
recounted in the last chapter of this book.
35