Review of ‘Monet’s Water Lilies’ at MoMA, New York

It took me a long time to get down to the much-loved exhibit of six of Monet’s late garden paintings, created in his 70s and 80s at Giverny. Fortunately, though the one large exhibit room was crowded, one could still spend some time with the paintings which I did.

Two are very large (rectangular, one being a triptych). These are both of the water lilies. The single canvas is largely pale colors, ethereal and delicate and worked on over several years. The triptych is amazing; we drown in the blue and swim to the light reflection of clouds in the center. We fall into it.

The four smaller paintings (though by no means small) use richer, darker colors and almost violent, slashing and swirling strokes. Here is the old man in his studio and his garden; age has not quieted him. This is not mouse pad Monet. A late painting of the famous Japanese bridge is startling. The bridge is almost lost in the intense oranges and rusts and maroons. Gone is any sense of the tranquility which has made him the most loved artist of our time, the sense that all is well and orderly. One thinks of what he had endured then! He had lost his wife Alice, his beloved older son, his beautiful step daughter, and suffered the death and destruction of the First World War. He had lost many colleagues of his youth. He was also in danger of blindness.

In another painting, a wispy African lily plant which he planted at the pond’s edge seems to stretch up and lean sideways with some tremendous inner fierceness.

By his final brush strokes at the age of eighty-six, Claude Monet had been painting nearly seventy years. He had been born into a world where the railroad was new; he lived to see early planes, the telephone, and of course the car which he owned but never drove himself. He went from the poverty of his early years as an artist when he sometimes had no paint or food and was thrown naked from his rooms in the middle of the night because he could not pay. But some people felt he was old school in his last years; the days when impressionism was new were long past.

The MoMA exhibition holds both his tranquility and his rage. His times and losses shaped him and changed him. It was a long road from the boy of twenty who came to Paris in 1860 to become a painter.

Stephanie Cowell is a New York City novelist whose novel about the struggling years of the young Claude Monet, Claude & Camille, will be published April 6th, 2010 by Crown.

Claude Monet. Agapanthus. 1914–26. Oil on canvas. 198.2 cm x 178.4 cm. © The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Sylvia Slifka in memory of Joseph Slifka.

Yesterday, 24 February 2010, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Clinic jointly hosted a symposium exploring the possibility of making art accessible to dementia patients.

Alzheimer’s disease is said to start in what is the brain’s memory center – by destroying cells and causing problems with thinking and behaviour. During the disease’s early to mid stage, however, those areas of the brain that govern emotion, perception and creativity are thought to remain intact. These undisturbed areas of the brain make it possible for patients to respond to visual arts and music, even when they have lost connection to the everyday world.

“It makes good sense if you think about the neurology of the disease,” said Dr. Randolph Schiffer, director of the Clinic’s Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas. “Art can be a way to reach and maintain the healthy areas” of the brain.

Schiffer, also a speaker at the Cleveland symposium, said the joint programme highlights a trend among physicians to approach Alzheimer’s treatment in less of a medical way. “I try to talk to them and relate to them and hold on to that sense of who they are,” he said. “Our task is to help the person hold themselves together as long as possible and help with transitions.”

There is not a lot of research to prove Alzheimer’s patients respond to art and music, but Schiffer says he and other physicians have seen it. Forty volunteers from both the art museum and the clinic will learn to tailor art tours for patients with dementia. Special tours resulting form this collaboration will begin in the next few months. Clinical physicians will be encouraged to advise their patients and their caregivers to sign up for the tours.

The Cleveland project follows in the footsteps of the very successful MeetMe project in New York City, the Museum of Modern Art’s Alzheimer’s Project: Making Art Accessible to People with Dementia.

“Clemenceau came to pay us a visit after lunch and stayed until 5 o’clock. … He was so amazed by the garden, and the water lilies, that he said to his daughter as he left: ‘You know, on the way home we are going to sell Bernouville, there is nothing more to be done after seeing Monet’s garden!’” Alice Monet, June 1909*

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, has in its collection a number of Claude Monet’s paintings of the pond he created, the water lilies and the Japanese bridge. These include the large triptych, Water Lilies (1914–26), a painting of the water lilies in the pond, Water Lilies (1914–26), The Japanese Footbridge (c. 1920–22) and Agapanthus (1914–26).

These paintings have a special status within MoMA’s collection, this museum was the first public collection in the United States of America to acquire one of Monet’s large-scaled paintings. For a limited time, these paintings, and two loans of similar paintings from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, will be on show for the first time in MoMA’s new Manhattan building.

“Monet’s Water Lilies” will be on show until 12 April 2010. A book, titled Claude Monet: Water Lilies by Ann Temkin and Nora Lawrence, that recounts the history of Monet’s water lilies paintings in the Museum’s collection has been published to coincide with the exhibition.

Claude Monet. Water Lilies, Reflections of Weeping Willows. 1914–1926. Oil on canvas. 51 1/4″ x 78 3/4″ (130.2 x 200 cm). Private collection. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Look in the photograph at the top of this article to see the reflections of the weeping willows on Monet’s pond.

Click here, for more information about the exhibition on MoMA’s website. If you have seen the exhibition, leave a comment below.

*Quote from page 57, Monet’s Garden in Giverny inventing the landscape. 2009. Musées des Impressionnismes, Giverny.