Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies
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Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies Details
From bestselling author Ross King, a brilliant portrait of the legendary artist and the story of his most memorable achievement.Claude Monet is perhaps the world's most beloved artist, and among all his creations, the paintings of the water lilies in his garden at Giverny are most famous. Monet intended the water lilies to provide "an asylum of peaceful meditation." Yet, as Ross King reveals in his magisterial chronicle of both artist and masterpiece, these beautiful canvases (featured in black and white images throughout, as well as a 16-pg color insert) belie the intense frustration Monet experienced in trying to capture the fugitive effects of light, water, and color. They also reflect the terrible personal torments Monet suffered in the last dozen years of his life. Mad Enchantment tells the full story behind the creation of the Water Lilies, as the horrors of World War I came ever closer to Paris and Giverny and a new generation of younger artists, led by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, were challenging the achievements of Impressionism. By early 1914, French newspapers were reporting that Monet, by then seventy-three, had retired his brushes. He had lost his beloved wife, Alice, and his eldest son, Jean. His famously acute vision--what Paul Cezanne called “the most prodigious eye in the history of painting”--was threatened by cataracts. And yet, despite ill health, self-doubt, and advancing age, Monet began painting again on a more ambitious scale than ever before. Linking great artistic achievement to the personal and historical dramas unfolding around it, Ross King presents the most intimate and revealing portrait of an iconic figure in world culture.
Reviews
This is not a biography of Monet’s life. It is not a review of his prolific body of work. It is a story of the last 20 years or so, of the last living, and arguably greatest, Impressionist artist. The story is well positioned amidst the historical transition in France from the Belle Epoch through the horrors of German occupation in WWI. Some reviewers were disappointed by the focus on Clemenceau....I felt it was a bonus. Their lives were clearly intertwined, and I felt that I learned a lot about the marvelous old Tiger and his own epic role in history, and his strong advocacy for Monet.My strong likes include the accurate portrayal of Monet’s retreat to Giverny, and how he generated hundreds of paintings with his intermingled love of gardening on a grand scale. Compared to a sterile or idealized portrayal of Monet, I love the portrayal of Monet’s humanistic features: the good and the bad. We witness an artist, recognizing that he is past his prime, and close to death, physically and mentally struggling to complete one last epic work: the Grand Decoration. These are the black times in the closing years of any great artist.The book could well be considered the final chapter of Mr. King’s wonderful book “The Judgement of Paris”. Without reading that book first, “Mad Enchantment” could seem very incomplete. We learn for instance, that there are still strong critics of the whole Impressionist movement in the 1920’s, just as there were at the start of the Impressionist movement. Also since this book focuses on the struggles to complete the Grand Decoration with the water lilies, it skims over the dozens, if not hundreds, of other paintings produced by Monet during this time. If the story line seems disjointed it’s because Monet's efforts were mercurial during this period, ranging from frenetic painting, to months of inactivity, to months of physical struggling with his cataracts.Mr King is a great story teller. His great skill is placing the subject of his writings into appropriate historical context. He did the same with “Brunelleschi’s Dome”. I came away with a real sense of Monet’s last years, a greater impression of his will to live and create, and a real sadness for his personal struggles at the end of his life. He becomes “knowable” like a real acquaintance....and perhaps that is the greatest feat of Mr. King’s work.For readers who want a complete overview of the life of Monet and his work, there are other bibliographies. Carla Rachman’s 1997 effort for the Phaidon series of artists, is a good example. In fact there are many similarities of how Rachman and King record the last years of Monet’s life.