Monet’s Water Lilies: How World War I Inspired Monet to Paint His Final Masterpieces & Create “the World’s First Art Installation”

When one con­sid­ers which artists most pow­er­ful­ly evoke the hor­rors of trench war­fare, Claude Mon­et is hard­ly the first name to come to mind. And yet, once viewed that way, his final Water Lilies paint­ings — belong­ing to a series that, in repro­duc­tion, speaks to many of no more har­row­ing a set­ting than a doc­tor’s wait­ing room — can hard­ly be viewed in any oth­er. These eight large-scale can­vass­es con­sti­tute “a war memo­r­i­al to the mil­lions of lives trag­i­cal­ly lost in the First World War,” argues Great Art Explained cre­ator James Payne. Mon­et declined to include a hori­zon line in any of them, leav­ing view­ers in “a vast field of unfath­omable noth­ing­ness, of light, air, and water,” at once peace­ful and rem­i­nis­cent of “the bat­tle-rav­aged land­scape along the west­ern front.”

Those bat­tle­fields “had no begin­ning or end, and no hori­zons. Time and space was for­got­ten, as sol­diers were enveloped in a sea of mud, sur­round­ed by water­logged and sur­re­al land­scapes, which cov­ered their field of vision.” The Great War, as it was then known, still raged on when the sep­tu­a­ge­nar­i­an Mon­et began these works.  (“He could hear the sound of gun­fire from 50 kilo­me­ters away from his house in Giverny as he paint­ed,” notes Payne.)

By the time he fin­ished them, in the last year of his life, the fight­ing had been over for eight years. In a sense, these paint­ings may have kept him alive: “He was con­stant­ly ‘rework­ing’ them and seemed inca­pable of fin­ish­ing,” even though, by his own admis­sion, “he could no longer see the details or make out col­ors.”

When these Water Lilies were revealed to the pub­lic, mount­ed in their own spe­cial­ly designed gallery in Paris’ Musée de l’O­r­angerie (arranged by close per­son­al friend Georges Clemenceau), Mon­et was dead — which may, in part, explain the crit­ics’ will­ing­ness to deride them as the work of an artist who had lost his pow­ers. “Mon­et, reject­ed by crit­ics in the 19th cen­tu­ry for being too rad­i­cal, was now being crit­i­cized in the 20th cen­tu­ry for not being rad­i­cal enough.” It would take a lat­er gen­er­a­tion of artists — includ­ing Amer­i­can painters like Mark Rothko and Jack­son Pol­lock  — to see his last works as “a log­i­cal jump­ing-off point for abstrac­tion,” and the space that hous­es them as “the Sis­tine Chapel of impres­sion­ism.” World War I has passed out of liv­ing mem­o­ry, but “the world’s first art instal­la­tion” it inspired Mon­et to cre­ate has lost none of its pow­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Paint Water Lilies Like Mon­et in 14 Min­utes

Rare 1915 Film Shows Claude Mon­et at Work in His Famous Gar­den at Giverny

1923 Pho­to of Claude Mon­et Col­orized: See the Painter in the Same Col­or as His Paint­ings

1,540 Mon­et Paint­ings in a Two Hour Video

A Gallery of 1,800 Gigapix­el Images of Clas­sic Paint­ings: See Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Ear­ring, Van Gogh’s Star­ry Night & Oth­er Mas­ter­pieces in Close Detail

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.


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  • DANIEL THALER says:

    I AM SO GRATEFUL TO YOU ART CRITICS. BEFORE YOU EXPLAINED TO ME WHY I SHOULD LIKE THE PAINTING, I THOUGHT IT WAS A HIDEOUS PIECE OF TRASH, BUT THANKS TO YOUR TUTELEDGE I WAS ABLE TO SEE WHAT A BEAUTIFUL PIECE OF ART IT IS. YOU FOLKS ARE SUCH A NECESSITY IN THIS WORLD. HOW WOULD ANYONE KNOW WHAT TRULY RESONATED WITH THEM IF NOT FOR YOUR EXPLANATION REGARDING IF IT SHOULD OR SHOULDN’T. I USED TO JUST LOOK AT A PAINTING AND EITHER LIKED/LOVED IT OR I DIDN’T.

  • Richard Waldron says:

    Read­ers may be inter­est­ed in my own post impres­sion­ist paint­ing that acknowl­edges Monet’s work. I called it “Homage a Mon­et” and sold it to my bril­liant web design­er Mark Har­g­reaves in lieu of fees. The giclees are still on sale at http://www.richardwaldron-art.org. Anoth­er paint­ing which was inspired by my trip to Monet’s Giverny home is “Monet’s boat­man”, now installed in a clients home in Aus­tralia. A third in the series “Rober­ta in the gar­den” sits on my sis­ter Roberta’s liv­ing room wall.
    My learn­ing comes cour­tesy of study­ing the works of Mon­et, Gau­guin, Van Gough and Singer Sergeant… all bril­liant artists. Please vis­it www. Richardwaldron-art.org for an inter­net view­ing of my pub­lished (and award win­ning) work.

  • DANIEL THALER says:

    WERE THESE MONETS THOUGHTS? HOW WOULD YOU KNOW, OR EVEN PRESUME TO KNOW. THE BOTTOM LINE IS THAT MONET IS A GREAT ARTIST AND YOU TWO ARE NOT. ARE YOU EVEN PAINTERS? HE’S NOT THINKING ABOUT JACKSON POLACK OR OTHERS YOU NAME DROPPED, YOU ARE. ALL OF THESE PHANTASMS YOU SEE IN THE PAINTING AND HIDDEN MEANINGS ARE STRICTLY FROM YOUR HEAD AS TO SOUND CULTURED. YOU ALL SEEN TO HAVE THE SAME VOCE AND SPEAK IN A VERY SOF WHISPER-LIKE TONE, TO GIVE THE ILLUSIONS YOU ARE ACTUALLY STANDING IN A MUSEUM, WHERE THEY WILL HAVE NONE OF THAT RUNNING DIALOGUE ALLOWED SO PEOPLE CAN VIEW THE PAINTINGS. STRICTLY A VISUAL MEDIA. YOU REALLY CAN JUST LOSE THE COMMENTARY.

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