Monet's Water Lilies, II

Water Lilies I -- because of operator error -- is about three posts down. That's what happens when you start drafting and don't come back to a post for awhile. Looking at it is a good reference point for what follows.

A Monet show opened in early May at Gagosian Gallery on 21st St. in Chelsea, where it will remain through June 26. I rode down to see it last Saturday, over two dozen paintings spread across four large rooms, and right next door to another monument of sorts, one of the city's nearly two dozen Manhattan Mini-Storage locations. They're almost everywhere, and only one of several companies, monuments, hardly the right word, to the stuffs of our lives. In Manhattan, he who lives with the most toys gets to store most of them, it seems.

Anyway, Monet -- the Gagosian show helped ease the withdrawal I continue to suffer from the closing of Water Lilies at the MoMA in mid-April after seven wonderful months, starting September 13 last year. In the Gagosian show the best works for me were those of the Japanese footbridge and a rose arcade at Monet's property in Giverny -- they had the same brilliant oranges and browns of the Japanese footbridge painting in the MoMA show, which was either my first or second favorite of all I have seen in NY, rivaled only by the Gerhard Richter retrospective from several years ago, before we moved here.

And it was all the more powerful for being small -- only six paintings -- and away from the main bustle of MoMA. According to accompanying texts or audio, Monet devoted much of the last 25 years of his life to cultivating a Japanese-style pond at Giverny, and to painting his garden, the pond and the water lilies within it. The work centered on the creation of large-scale panels of the water lilies, a group of which he donated for permanent installation in the Orangerie in Paris. (Which we never visited when we lived in Paris, but is now yet another reason to go back there.) In 1955 MoMA became the first museum to acquire one of these compositions. It was lost in a fire, which ironically destroyed very few other works at the museum. But the MomA quickly acquired others – a triptych, one mural-size panel, and two other paintings. The recent exhibition was the first time they’d been shown together in the new MoMA building.

I must have gone half a dozen times, including an early day after my release from the hospital and on the last day of the show. My favorite times and when I'd usually go was during the MoMA's occasional early openings for members, when I would often have the large room almost entirely to myself.

But on the last day, there were great crowds, including groups of little pre-school kids, all of us gathered one last time to immerse ourselves in the blues, greens, white-pinks, and in that one stunning smaller work the brilliant oranges, greens and ochres of a version of The Japanese Footbridge.

The show-stoppers though, and what kept drawing me back over and over again, were the two massive works that faced each other on opposite walls of the narrow room. Monet worked on both from 1914-26, reworking them constantly and on one particularly, the pastel-toned one of the two, applying enough thick layers that standing close to the painting, and looking at it from the side you could actually see the piled-on paint.

Both the NYT review at the opening of the show and the exhibition audio note that these paintings were considered mediocre by some until after WW2 when the abstract expressionists came along. Some were actually quick sketches, drawn in the garden itself, but the largest two were worked in his studio and each involved hours and then years of layering of color, building up texture.

It was important for the show to isolate these paintings, separating them from other displays in the museum and, especially, keeping them together and few in number. The NYT review wrote of the “meditative, immersive quality of these works,” and “the challenge of looking and painting, painting and looking”

MoMA bought its first waterlily painting – 18 ft. across – in 1955 for $11.5K. Three years later, after the fire, it spent $150K for the replacement. Even the latter price is almost laughable now.

Here is what the two large paintings, both called "Water Lilies, 1914-26", did for me. The first and larger, a triptych with curved walls giving an angled display meant to draw the viewer in, to, as the exhibition audio said, force the viewer to "pay attention." It worked with me: I felt as if I were in the pond, no border in sight and looking at eternity. Its facing pendant, lighter in color, thicker in layering, was all about time of day and seasons. Depending on where one looked, it was fall, spring, summer or winter in Giverny, dawn or late afternoon.

I paid a lot of attention and I'm the better for it. It was a good, psychic shaking as grabbing visually as, in a completely different context, "hot chile peppers in the blistering sun" throws you instantly into Dylan's aural world of the fugitive couple in Romance in Durango.

Last post at least for some time. Recovery continues to take all my energy.