Blog

Note: Enjoy this next installment that takes us to Claude Monet's famous home and gardens in Giverny, France. I didn't love it there, but I did find a growing satisfaction in beginning to explore what's involved in becoming a Real Artist.  Please let me know your thoughts .... Ellie

Our route to Giverny meanders along the Seine passing through La Roche-Guyon and several other historic and picturesque villages. The narrow road twists and turns, steep cliffs to the right forcing the eye to a wide view of the serpentine river. For a representational artist, every bend in the road presents another irresistible composition. While I could easily have stayed in Vétheuil, the journey to Giverny doesn’t disappoint.

The village of Giverny, on the other hand, seems to have lost its charm to art tourism. Monet—the reason people come to Giverny—left Vétheuil in 1881 and after looking around the area for a couple of years, in 1883 he eventually found a place to rent and eventually purchase in Giverny, only ten miles away. His life at the time was emotionally and financially very complicated. But he could see the potential in the property and settled in to eventually create a large studio, as well as the pond and gardens that have become the draw for more than half a million visitors annually.

By now we’ve seen on the river large excursion boats filled with passengers with this one destination foremost on their bucket list. We follow signs and, while the lot seems oddly empty, we park our car and walk a few hundred yards into the village proper. We have yet to see many people, in fact we spy only one or two couples on the pedestrianized street of the village. As we walk past cafes shut for the season, I dare to hope we will have the place to ourselves, while as the same time wondering why Giverny seems so deserted and, as a town, void of the signs that mark a town where people actually live. I’d had similar questions in Vétheuil, but there we saw a post office, a school, and even if we couldn’t see their occupants behind the curtained windows, houses that people clearly lived in. None of these are in evidence in Giverny. It seems to be a faux village, picture perfect, like the set of The Truman Show, and similarly unreal. Yet, for many visitors to Giverny (including me), I suspect Monet represents the quintessential Artist: Monet= The Real Deal.

And, now that I’m here in France, paying homage to Monet and Mitchell, the Real Artist question is foremost in my mind. Are these Art Giants somehow more authentic in their Art than I am? If so, in what way? If not, why do I discourage myself with doubts? Am I here to worship at the altar of their Art, like so many of these tourists, and what exactly does that mean? Thinking back to those populated excursion to the Orangerie and the Mitchell-Monet exhibit, I dare to hope we might have this empty place to ourselves that I might reflect along these lines.

Alas, once we show our tickets at the entrance gate, and go through to Monet’s house and garden, we are not alone. Buses from the large tour boats have already disgorged hundreds of tourists, many of them Americans, all of them with mobile devices. Having been diverted to a separate entrance, they’ve been herded into small clusters of 15 or 20, shepherded by a leader who speaks to them through the headsets with which all have been provided. Roo and I, hearing no such voices, follow signs that point us to the various attractions—Monet’s house, the flower garden, the waterlily pond.

We first look around the house, admiring the art reproductions, appreciating the famous yellow of the kitchen walls, table, and chairs, the blue and white tiles and gleaming copper, reminded by a barking docent: NE TOUCHEZ A RIEN! We head for the gardens.

Still a bit Covid-wary, I’m not so keen about being in close proximity to so many people. As everyone  jostles for souvenir shots in the many scenic spots, it helps that we’re outside. We follow in line along the path around the perimeter of the pond. Packed in on the far side of the pond, near one of the two Japanese bridges, we can’t help but overhear a French tour guide interacting with his flock.

The guide had just described to the group how Monet, whose painting obsession was neither understood nor admired by the community, had to pay the neighboring farmer to paint the piles of wheat straw on his land. Someone asks a question about the haystack paintings. The guide responds with undisguised irritation. Why do Americans insist on referring to them as haystacks when they are wheat strawstacks? the guide wonders aloud. He then attempts to inform his group about the distinction between hay and straw. His audience, however, persists, insisting they are haystacks because that’s what Monet’s paintings are titled. (I’ve been to the Art Institute of Chicago and, yes, their collection is full of these paintings and the work haystack appears all of those titles.) I suddenly twig that a longstanding translation error may be at the root of the current tussle. It appears that when Monet’s titles were translated into English someone ignorant of agricultural terminology made a mistake; and, ever since, most American English speakers know them, albeit incorrectly, as haystacks. Hoping that my two cents worth of insight contributes something to cross cultural understanding, I can’t resist offering  this possible explanation to the guide.

This group moves on and another approaches. In the interval Roo and I grab a seat on an almost vacant bench to rest for a few minutes and to snap a few pics of our own. The gardens and especially the pond—colored with the reds, oranges and purples of autumn and spanned on either end by the iconic curved bridges—are beautiful and ooze with the kind of romance non-artists often assign to painters. I overhear two ladies from the U.S. who’ve just met exclaim, “It’s so lovely!” and “I wonder if they do weddings here?”

Mindful of my reasons for this trip—my search for intuitive clues to my own artistic life, I try to avoid the rabbit hole it’s too easy for me to fall down into. I determine to open myself to whatever is here for me to learn from. 500,000 people can’t be totally misguided—there must be something here beyond the cynicism that seems to arise automatically in places like these.

Moving on, we arrive at the spot by the pond where Monet set up his easel for painting large canvases. I’m pretty sure he was not dabbling in romantic notions or concerned with renting out the space for special events. As a painter, I suspect his intent was quite the opposite and practical. He positioned himself, not to swan over the view, but to control his subject as much as possible and make shade for himself while he painted.

Obsessed with looking and seeing, this was after all the same artist who had painted the corpse of his first wife. Camille had been his model before she became pregnant with their son and, after some scandal, Claude eventually married her.  After succumbing to an intense illness at age 32, she lay motionless on her deathbed. Her modeling days, however, were not over. Author Emile Zola, a close friend of Monet, writes in his fictional L’Oeuvre inspired by the incident. “At first he resisted, but the vague idea took form, began to be an obsession. At last he gave way, took up a small canvas, and began a study.”

I’d never known this about Monet. Quelle macabre! Was this a gesture of grief, a desire to preserve the image of his beloved? Or, did he seize this opportunity to observe the color changes in her lifeless body? Given he’d already been dallying with Alice Hoschedé, who would become his second wife, during Camille’s illness, he must have had mixed emotions as Camille passed. But even allowing that painting may be an artist’s best way of processing emotions or that making images of the deceased might have been a more common practice in his time, Monet’s action seems a more than a little creepy.  When I tell an artist friend about “Camille on Her Deathbed,” he quips, “Well, he finally got his model to hold still!”

With Camille’s death, Monet clearly had finished with fidgety, difficult to control models. With his permanent move to Giverny, he could keep his garden-related motifs alive; and he did, in fact, paint them for the length of his own life. If you’re an outer-referenced artist you search out conditions and circumstances that match your vision, sometimes—if you’re Monet—risking life and limb to do so. (I learn later that Claude almost drowned painting a seascape in Etretat.) In addition, if you’re Monet, once you’ve achieved financial success, you’ll not only search out places to paint, but you will also create them. And, then, you’ll employ other people to care for them while you stand to one side, under a shade umbrella, to paint what you see. Monet spent tens of thousands of francs each year to maintain the gardens, planting (and replanting) waterlilies, in order to have the colors of his chosen palette in front of him.

Monet, we learn, was obsessed with his waterlily pond from its inception. Like a painting that refuses to resolve, he wrestled to own the property and drained the marshy land near the house to make it useful for his purposes; then, for the remainder of his life, he constantly tweaked it to achieve his desired result, never quite reaching the ideal of the vision that eventually fails him. The last 20 years of his life, Monet painted garden motifs almost exclusively, ultimately straining his failing eyesight to produce the yards of canvas (300 feet in length)  that form the la Grand Decoration that, after much strife, landed posthumously in the Orangerie.  Now, the vast studio in which Monet tortured those monumental paintings into existence, houses the Gift Shop for the tourist attraction. Largely innocent of the darker side of the creator of these bright gardens, as I had been, people queue up here to buy books, refrigerator magnets, or postcards bearing an image of the artist’s famed waterlily paintings.  

Declining to purchase, however, we finally move away from the crowds and return to the vacant non-village where we find open one café. Over a bowl of overpriced soupe l’oignon I reflect that if contemporary sensibilities prevent me from entirely liking the man’s headstrong personality, I do respect Monet’s tenacity and wonder if controlling behavior is necessary for an artist? And maybe I’ve understood wrongly—perhaps it’s not control but assertiveness that’s needed. Because of or, in spite of, Monet’s troublesome personality, when I inquire of Google on the ride back to Omerville, I learn that Monet’s art has indeed earned him a spot on every Top Ten List of Great, Famous, or Best-Loved Artists. It’s why so many, including me, have made the pilgrimage to Giverny.

Back at La Musardine in Omerville it pleases me that it seems to please our hosts, that we’ve paid our respects to Monet in Giverny and Vétheuil. (They don’t seem to know much about Joan Mitchell beyond her name.) We take a seat at the heavy oak table in Antonella and Jean Luc’s open plan living space. After sharing a round of apertifs with them—we raise a glass to Art—Jean Luc presents us with dinner: chicken with a coconut curry sauce, with perfectly cooked sticky rice and, for dessert, a custardy pear clafoutis with chocolate drizzle. Warmed with the delicious home cooking—so welcome after a week of eating out—we linger and chat. I’m pleased that when he learns I too am an artist, Jean Luc wants to explore my painting website.

Mostly we’re using French to communicate but they both know enough English to understand me, or Roo jumps in to translate. My paintings express me too. Interpreting Jean Luc’s nods and smiles as approval, but unsure if he’ll understand or be at all interested, I risk showing him “First Flight,” the six-minute audiovisual tour of my BIRDS FLY IN project. I look for signs that he understands what the multimedia installation is about and notice Jean Luc’s eyes tearing as he watches. Migration issues are global. I’m reassured to see that the project can touch people across international borders and cultural differences. While I’m not here seeking a venue for the project, I can see it’s having the desired effect far from Michigan and, for now, that’s ça suffit.

I go to bed feeling full and satisfied in so many ways with the enoughness of the day. I drift off to sleep, musing about Art and the Artist. If Monet—and in my view, Joan Mitchell—are Real Artists, what am I? Tomorrow, we travel downstream on the Seine to Porte de Seine.