When I went to New York in 1980, I was impressed by the Picasso retrospective, especially his masterwork, Guernica.* During the same visit, I entered the room with Monet’s Water Lilies, (27.0) and was awestruck. The three-part painting shows water lilies floating on a lake with the reflections of trees and clouds. Picasso combined subjects from multiple angles through Cubism. Monet showed simultaneous angles through reflections.
In 1890, Claude Monet (1850–1926) had gardens planted at Giverny.† In old age, he embarked on a series of monumental compositions depicting his garden’s lush lily ponds. He wanted to surround his viewers with water, flora, and sky. Eventually, he created about forty large-scale panels, with Water Lilies among them. Monet continuously reworked this series from 1914 until he died in 1926.
Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints influenced many Impressionist artists, including Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Vincent van Gogh. These artists incorporated the flat planes of color, expressive lines, and asymmetrical compositions that they admired in ukiyo-e prints. Like the Impressionists, the ukiyo-e prints depicted bustling urban culture and everyday life.
Monet’s collection of Japanese woodblock prints numbered over 200 by the time of his death. He wrote to his son that “Hiroshige is a marvelous Impressionist.” It was probably his love of these prints that led him to ask for an arched footbridge to be installed at Giverney. That Japanese footbridge became the centerpiece of a series of paintings. TheMet has one,§ and the MoMA has another.**
The Impressionists’ fascination for ukioye-e prints reveals an important cross-cultural exchange. A new social outlook emerged as more attention was paid to ordinary life instead of “high” culture. The term “ukioye-e” means “floating world,” an allusion to the Buddhist concept of fleeting worldly pleasures. Buddhism saw that as entanglement; the Japanese printmakers, by contrast, celebrated courtesans, kabuki actors, landscapes, and working activities. This coincided with choices the French artists were making: Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) painted portraits of prostitutes and scenes of Parisian theater life. Edgar Degas (1834–1917) painted dancers and bathing women. Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), whose early works pictured street scenes and ordinary people, is most known for the sensual paintings of Tahitian women.
Scholars see Modernism as a rejection of the old order that plunged the world into World War II, asserting that the rejection of ornamentation and mythological scenes reflected a disillusionment with the established culture. When we look back at the Impressionists and the Ukioye-e printmakers, we can see that the shift toward the everyday had begun long before the 20th century.
If we study art history, we deal in big themes. But no artist can know how they belong to a larger movement. An artist pursues their passions, their own sensibilities, and engages in their own search for meaning. How that joins with others must be a matter for others to see.
After Monet’s passing, the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris installed twenty-two panels on curved walls as a gift from the artist to the nation of France. The remaining canvases stayed in his studios until the late 1940s. MoMA acquired their paintings in 1959.
Why do I love these paintings so much? They have a subject, but they don’t dictate what one is to think. One can revel in the color, forms, and shifts in perspective. There are no hard edges, but there are forms. No single focal point vies for attention. One can wander through the beauty of natural variation—just as if one was walking near the actual pond. Monet brings us face-to-face with nature and leaves us to realize that we too are part of the floating world that the painting depicts.
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Water Lilies. Claude Monet. 1914-26. Each 6′ 6 3/4″ x 13′ 11 1/4″ (200 x 424.8 cm), overall 6′ 6 3/4″ x 41′ 10 3/8″ (200 x 1276 cm). MoMA.
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80220?sov_referrer=theme&theme_id=5110
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(Picasso)
† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fondation_Monet_in_Giverny
§ https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437127
** https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79254