I am stuck in some important canvases; I am stubborn. I am working more than ever . . . to the point of almost making me ill. -- Monet, 1888
I will stay here all the same, and if these savages must kill me, it will be in the midst of my canvases, in front of all my life's work. -- Monet, 1914I don't have much longer to live and I must dedicate all of my time to painting, with the hope of arriving at something that is good, or that satisfies me, if that is possible. -- Monet, 1920s
Claude Monet has been much in the news lately. But while the world talks of his Water Lilies, the painting I keep remembering is his Willow Tree.
We visited the Monet exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Art last month. "Monet in the 20th Century," the exhibit is called. It's in Boston until Dec. 27. The exhibit will only be shown in Boston and London, because among its 75 paintings are five of Monet's monumental canvases -- the Grandes Decorations -- and they are difficult to transport. The MFA is devoting more space to this exhibit than to any it's ever shown.
It's space well spent. Critics call the work Monet did from age 60 to 86 "the most complex and innovative" of his career.
Only after we got home from Boston did the big news break. One of the paintings, Water Lilies 1904, is stolen art, probably taken by the Nazis from a Jewish collector named Paul Rosenberg.
Rosenberg's descendants say the painting was plundered in 1941 for the private collection of Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. The Rosenbergs, now of New York, had asked the London-based Art Loss Register to trace 58 works once in Paul Rosenberg's possession.
An article this week in the London Independent speculates the painting, one of Monet's most reknowned, might not even go to London. The family could file a lawsuit to keep it in the United States while they try to recover it.
Why did no one identify this painting before now? It is one of about 2,000 pieces of art now in French museums, known to be in German hands during the war. One answer: With the end of the Cold War, art historians, archivists and heirs are just now doing the research, finding proof of previous ownership.
Some have criticized MFA directors for displaying a painting they knew was recovered after World War II. Others credit the museum for publishing a catalog that helped the Rosenbergs locate the painting. During the past few weeks, there's been much discussion of art and war.
And the painting itself? Lovely. Lots of green. One of 48 water lily paintings Monet did after he moved to Giverny in the late 1890s.
So the lilies are entrancing. But I keep thinking about the willow tree. That tree symbolized France to Georges Clemenceau. Clemenceau was Monet's friend, as well as the prime minister.
Walking through the museum with the headset on my ears, I looked at the willow tree and heard these words:
The haunting images of the willow tree are intensely emotional, with the tree's twisting trunk silhouetted against thick, virtually unreadable foliage . . . At the time Monet began these paintings, the war was going badly for France, and it is possible that this tree expressed his pain at the suffering taking place on the battlefields.
To me that tree symbolized the struggle of a country but also the struggle of one man, growing old. When World War I began, Monet was still grieving over the deaths of his wife and older son. He feared for his remaining son, a soldier. For a time, Monet stopped painting. Eventually the fierceness of his genius reasserted itself and he began again.
He began this weeping willow in 1917; he finished it in 1919. Clemenceau was so moved by it, he asked Monet to donate it to the nation.
I have to agree with Clemenceau. Something about this painting, more than any of the others, expresses to me the torture and triumph of Monet's life.
His biographers, Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge, say of him, "When Monet was away on painting expeditions he would write home almost every day. He tells about the weather, about his encounters; defends himself against reproaches for being so long away from home. Above all he tells about the trouble he is having getting anything finished. Wherever he is, on the Normandy coast, in Brittany or Antibes, the story is the same: first the search for motifs, then an explosion of activity with many starts, followed by fury and frustration . . . despair at not being able to finish as much as he had hoped . . . Day after day he sits down to tell the same story, an incantation of hope and despair."
His intensity is there, for all to see, in the paintings in the museum in Boston. It is especially evident in his unfinished works -- and in the willow.