Monet Water Lilies: A Beautiful Scene and a Symbol of War

December 1, 2021 Come On Out

BY TATSIANA COQUEREL

“It took me a long time to understand my water lilies…. I grew them without thinking of painting them…. And then, all of a sudden, I had the revelation of the enchantment of my pond. I took up my palette.” —Claude Monet, 1924

Sometimes you want to write a story about something extraordinary, sometimes you want to tell the readers about your feelings and emotions, and sometimes you just want to evoke some behaviour that will lead to some actions that might bring positive changes in our very busy contemporary world. Today I want to talk about something that turned my view on Art upside down. I was always a big fan of Impressionist works, with their portrayal of nature through quick brush strokes and accents on light and colours.

Fig.1 Reflets verts (détail) C. 1915-1926 Oil on canvas, 200 x 850 cm Musée de l’Orangerie - Room 1, MUSÉE DE L’ORANGERIE, https://www.vogue.fr/fashion-culture/article/musee-de-lorangerie-monet-water-lilies-available-online-virtual-art-visit

Claude Monet is definitely one of the artists who knew how to use natural light to give a very dynamic and hypnotic feeling to his paintings. During his career, Monet was very often labelled as a “chocolate box artist” - overexposed or too easy. His last works, the enormous Water Lilies canvases, now known as the "Nymphéas", (Fig.1-3), are amongst the most popular artworks in the world. Nevertheless, there is nothing traditional or cozy about these last paintings of Claude Monet. They are fundamental to Art because they break all the boundaries and change our vision of art with their strange, confusing and mesmerizing vision.

Very often we are viewing Monet’s “Water Lilies” as simply an artistic interpretation of the garden, a great passion of the artist. But did you know that these paintings are a direct response to the most violent and apocalyptic period in modern history? They were in fact perceived as a war memorial to the millions of lives tragically lost in the first world war. By the age of 74, Claude Monet lost his sight and, instead of retiring, he decided to take a revolutionary approach to create Water Lilies - a collection of paintings that would define his career as a great artist.

Today we can enjoy Water Lilies visiting the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris. The installation has 22 paintings divided into 8 panels in two rooms. They were developed in such a way that the four panels in one gallery would represent sunrise and the four in the other would evoke dusk, recreating the beginning and end of darkness. One of the greatest artistic achievements of the early 20th century, they cover 200 square metres of canvases, which surround and enclose the viewer with desolate nonverbal abstractions. Monet himself described them as “something that gives an illusion of an endless whole with no horizon and no shore”. By omitting the horizon from the picture, Monet did not give us a sense of scale, positioning the viewer above the waters with a fast field of deep void, light and air.

Fig.2 Les huit compositions des Nymphéas, Orangerie Museum Paris, https://www.musee-orangerie.fr/fr/collection/les-nympheas-de-claude-monet

Ultimately, these Water Lilies canvases became a war memorial, representing those battlefields with no horizon - no beginning and no end - when time is forgotten. Monet was deeply affected by the horrors of war and Water Lilies would be his personal response to the mass tragedy of the first world war. There is a sense of mourning in it. We can see them today the same way the viewer could see them in 1927, when they were first installed in the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris after the death of the great artist. Unfortunately, critics did not see something extraordinary in these grand paintings and characterised them as being extremely dull. These mesmerising Water Lilies were forgotten for decades until the abstract expressionists such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock rediscovered Monet in the 1950s. Nowadays, in visiting the Musée de l'Orangerie we can appreciate how artistic genius Monet planned and calculated every little detail of the installation of his paintings, placing them in an egg-shaped room with carved walls. The larger-than-life scale space in the room, the space between panels, the rhythm, the daylight coming from above, mesmerizing energy and emotional effect thrills every visitor who grasps the Water Lilies in Musée de l'Orangerie, which is now called “The Sistine chapel of Impressionism'' (Fig.3).

Today, the impacts of the impressionists’ work can be seen around the world. Claude Monet gardens and his water lilies inspired Kitagawa Village in Shikoku, Kochi Prefecture, Japan to open "Monet's Garden" Marmottan in 2000 as a garden that reproduces the garden of Claude Monet in Giverny in France. Kitagawa and Giverny villages both share a similar goal of creating Monet’s gardens, while overcoming obstacles caused by global industrialisation.

Fig.3 Nymphéas Orangerie 01 Les Nymphéas de Claude Monet, Room 1 Musée de l’Orangerie NYMPHÉAS MUSÉE DE L’ORANGERIE, https://www.vogue.fr/fashion-culture/article/musee-de-lorangerie-monet-water-lilies-available-online-virtual-art-visit

Kitagawa Village "Monet's Garden" Marmottan supports sustainable living, trying to avoid using pesticides and striving to protect flowers and trees from pests and diseases. They also promote education and local industries as a place to deepen their contribution to the region and develop together with the region. It is the world’s only facility that is allowed to use the name “Monet’s Garden.” Approximately 70,000 plants are grown on the premises of about 30,000 square meters and you can enjoy a beautiful landscape that changes from season to season. Blue water lilies that are particularly popular are in full bloom in the garden from around late June to early November. Monet’s Garden Marmottan is divided into 3 sections. In the Water Garden (Mizu no Niwa) the famous multi-coloured water lilies float upon the shimmering ponds; vibrant flowers that canvas the Flower Garden (Hana no Niwa) from the ground up to arches and trellises change through the seasons like a never-ending painting; and the Garden of Bordighera brings ambience of the Mediterranean to Japan (Fig. 4-7 below: Kitagawa Village "Monet's Garden" Marmottan, Photos by Sebastien M., 2021).

The creation of the replica of Monet’s gardens in Japan continues the invisible connection between East and West over the centuries. The artist himself had a huge passion for Japanese art and was known as a great collector of some of the profound collectable pieces by Japanese artists. Monet’s remarkable collection of Japanese prints comprises two hundred and thirty-one engravings. Some of the art pieces from this collection can be seen in Giverny, in the house of Claude Monet. The dining room of Monet’s house in Giverny is decorated with yellow panels, furniture, sideboards, cupboards in the same colour, offering visitors to embrace an abundance of Japanese prints (Fig.8).

The Japonisme (a French term that defines the popularity and influence of Japanese art and Design in the second half of the 19th century) was very fashionable among French intellectuals and artists, such as Vincent van Gogh, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro and Claude Monet. Such a change of influence in Western art and culture took place after Japanese ports reopened to Western trade in 1854, which had been closed to the West for over 200 years. While in the 19th century it was common for European artists to idealize the beauty of nature, they would pay more attention to harmony, symmetry and to the composition of empty spaces after being introduced to the Japanese artists.

The most essential input of Japanese art in Europe can be seen through insertion of the most ancient Japanese philosophy Wabi-Sabi into European Art and Design not only in the 19th century but nowadays as well. Japanese artists are very careful with overcharging their artworks, while in Europe, on the contrary, the space filled with different objects and different colours very often defines the sense of beauty. The Wabi-Sabi fundamentals of empty spaces provide artists with a new possibility of introducing hidden meanings or sentiments. The outstanding characteristics of Japanese art with its flat and bold colours and dramatic stylisation, had significant influence on Claude Monet’s work.

Fig.8 Japanese woodblock prints, Monet’s house dining room, Fondation Claude Monet Giverny, https://fondation-monet.com/visite-virtuelle/#/salle_a_manger/

The artist turned his water lily ponds into poetic projection surfaces of an inner world. It is very interesting to mention that Claude Monet's fascination with all things Japanese started from a small food shop in Amsterdam, where he spotted some Japanese prints being used as wrapping paper for purchased goods. This purchase in a little shop in Amsterdam changed the life of Claude Monet and the history of Western art. Inspired by works of Japanese artists, such as Utagawa Hiroshige, (Fig 9 below, Nihon Bridge Morning View, The Fifty Three Stations of the Tokaido Road by Utagawa Hiroshige, 1834, via The Hiroshige Museum of Art, Ena ), Monet created a Japanese garden in his cherished home in Giverny. He turned a small, existing pond into an Asian-influenced water garden and added a Japanese-style wooden bridge (Fig.10 below - The water garden at Giverny, via Fondation Claude Monet, Giverny, https://fondation-monet.com/). What happened next? We all are witness to the miracle - he started to paint the pond and its water lilies, and never stopped.

Claude Monet understood how to apply Japanese motifs in his own work, developing his very distinct artistic style by concentrating on light, which was, in fact, the very subject of all his paintings. It explains why Monet’s works remain so popular in Japan nowadays. The proof of such a great respect towards artists is the Chichu Art Museum, which is the most important monument in Japan dedicated to Claude Monet. The Museum was established in 2004 by artists and architects. The building was designed by star architect Tadao Ando. It is placed in the midst of wild nature on a small island in the Seto Inland Sea. The whole idea of this Museum is to enable everyone to rethink the relationship between nature and people. The museum was built mostly underground to avoid affecting the beautiful natural scenery (Fig.11 below - Chichu Art Museum, Benesse Art Site, Naoshima, https://benesse-artsite.jp/art/chichu.html). In Japanese, the word ‘chichu’ means ‘underground’, therefore one tends to imagine a dark and hazy space where the natural light is cut off. But it is quite the opposite – the natural light here complements creatively designed spaces given the depth and volume and sense of endless eternity occupied with light. As we can see the light plays an essential role here in the same way as it plays at the Musée de l'Orangerie. Monet water lilies here are surrounded by space, light and a feeling of being close to nature as never before. The only difference in comparison with Musée de l'Orangerie installation space is the square shape of the rooms with Monet art works in the gallery of the Chichu Art Museum (Fig.12 below - Claude Monet at the Chichu Art Museum, Benesse Art Site, Naoshima, https://www.harpersbazaararabia.com/culture/art/art-exhibitions/claude-monet-at-the-chichu-art-museum-benesse-art-site-naoshima).

For admirers of Monet’s Garden, the Chichu Art Museum has a garden that consists of nearly 200 kinds of flowers and trees corresponding to those planted at Giverny by Claude Monet. Visitors can enjoy the water lilies, willows, irises, and other plants here. The garden aims to provide a touchable experience of the nature which Monet was trying to capture in his paintings all his life. And if you have a “love affair” with all things sweet and yummy, then the museum shop will offer you honey cookies and raspberry jam based on the recipes left behind by Monet. The connection between Claude Monet and Japan over the years established both ways and with the Chichu Art Museum, this bond became even stronger.

Every time I start writing a new little story or article - I always know that I will find something interesting, captivating, new and inspiring for myself and for the readers. Going through the biography of Claude Monet and analysing his work, I realised that the key element of life is a constant hunger for knowledge, for learning something new from other cultures, people, designers, musicians, artists, scientists and of course nature. The richness of something different, unknown coming into our life can change it forever, no matter who we are and what kind of job we are doing in our everyday routine. And speaking of art, as the main subject of this article, maybe sometimes we have to open our hearts to the colourful silence on the canvas, instead of trying so hard to understand it. At the end everything is simple in life: we can not see what we feel, but we always can feel what we see…