Widowed again in 1911, Monet in his grief was unable to paint for three years. He no longer sought romantic love, but he was rescued by Alice’s daughter Blanche Hoschedé, who in 1914 moved in to care for him. Blanche, herself a painter, had adored Monet ever since, aged 10, she had pushed his canvases in a wheelbarrow. Her affection and practical help stirred him to embark, at the age of 73, on his most monumental project: the “Water Lilies”, begun on the eve of the first world war, in mourning for Alice and for his older son, who had just died, and in terror for his remaining son fighting in the trenches.
To excavate the contribution of these women is not to diminish the force of Monet’s originality, but to rethink how he worked and how his paintings work on us. This is what I hope biography adds to appreciation of his art.
The genre is a key route into art history in the 21st century. In the past two decades, biographies of Impressionist and modern artists have surged:
Matisse, Cézanne, Renoir, Munch, Mondrian, Bacon, Freud, Braque, several magisterial volumes on Picasso, and a single book on just 10 weeks of Van Gogh’s life.
The trend is pronounced, largely because life-writing has become a bulwark against intellectual currents undermining the humanities, and strongly affecting the art world. While academic history, museum exhibitions and art-making itself are increasingly overrun by theory, the discourse of the culture wars, and the games of conceptualism, biography rescues the personal and individual. As the roll call tells, it’s one of the few safe places left to be a dead white male genius.
Monet, voracious, volatile, reckless, is a paradigm of the species, in his huge ego and the heroic self-belief necessary to challenge tradition. Alice called him “the Marquis” because he was so demanding, for Blanche he was “a violent character, with a good heart”.
Like Picasso, his art altered each time the woman in his life changed. Unlike Picasso, he strove for equality in his relationships, chose strong partners and apologised for “the outbursts and the bad side of my character”.
Rejecting conventional model-artist subservience, Monet never painted a nude — the only significant artist of his time not to do so. Instead, his sensuality in pictures flowed into nature. Monet “makes us adore a field, a sky, a beach, a river”, wrote Proust. “To draw out the truth and beauty of a place, we must know that they are there to be drawn out. There has to be someone who will say to us, here is what you may love; love it.”
That he enlarged the joy of vision is Monet’s greatest legacy. That he did so by inflecting every scene with his own emotion is why we still engage viscerally with the pictures.
After Camille’s death, Monet painted Vétheuil’s frozen Seine, its ice blocks, fringe of snow-covered fields: nature a gigantic shroud of mourning. Aggressive seascapes such as “Storm off the Belle Île Coast”, waves frothing against rocks, date from the nomadic 1880s, when he toured the Channel and Atlantic coasts alone, seeking consolation from the ocean, unsure of his future: “it was a joy for me to see this furious sea, it was like a nervousness”, he wrote. Van Gogh was influenced by the curling sinuosities of these seascapes; Matisse travelled to paint Belle Île in homage to Monet.
And “to render what I feel, I totally forget the most basic rules of painting”, Monet said of the wartime “Water Lilies”: tangled skeins and coils of impasto in fierce colours, precursors to abstraction — yet embodying the bourgeois dream of an enclosed garden, nature tamed, the world’s horrors kept at bay.
1911年莫奈再次成为鳏夫，痛苦中的莫奈三年之内无法执笔绘画。他不再寻求所谓浪漫的爱情，而爱丽丝的女儿布兰契侯赛迪拯救了他，她于1914年搬过来照顾他。布兰契本人就是一个画家，她从10岁起就十分崇拜莫奈，她曾将莫奈的油画布挤到独轮车里。她的爱和真诚的关怀让莫奈在73岁高龄，即一战前，开始了最具里程碑的项目“莲花”，以此来悼念他的爱丽丝和刚刚去世的大儿子，同时也为其他在战壕中斗争的儿子担忧。
发掘这些女性的贡献，并不是为了削弱莫奈本身的力量。而更是为了让我们去重新思考他怎样工作以及他的作品如何让我们痴迷。这正是我希望自传能够增添人们对他的艺术的欣赏。
21世纪以来，风格成为艺术历史最关键的研究途径。在过去的20多年里，印象主义者和现代艺术家的自传层出不穷：
马蒂斯、塞尚、雷诺阿、蒙克、蒙德里安、培根、佛洛依德、巴拉克。有关毕加索的几部大部头，甚至有一本书仅仅记述了梵高生命中的10天。
趋势是不言而喻的，很大程度上因为生平的记述可以顽强抵抗着所谓学术知识的主流看法，而这些严重低估了人性并强烈的影响着艺术世界。尽管所谓的理论、偏离轨迹的文化之争和概念主义的游戏已经逐渐碾压了正常的学术历史、艺术展览和艺术创作本身，还好自传挽救了这其中的人性和个体的存在。就像教室里点名一样，这也许是仅存的几个方式能够让人们记得“逝去的白人男性天才”。
贪婪、变化无常并且粗莽的莫奈正是一个特定类型的代表，即非常的自我、英雄化的自我信仰，无处不在地挑战传统。爱丽丝称他为“侯爵”因为他太强势，而布拉切则说他“十分暴力，但是心肠很好”。
向毕加索一样，他的作品会随着他生命中的女人的改变而改变。但是不像毕加索，他又努力追求这种关系的质量，选择强大的伴侣，并道歉“请求原谅自己的咆哮和性格中坏的一面”。
拒绝像传统艺术家那么屈从于时势，莫奈从未画过裸体艺术- 这是那个时代伟大艺术家中唯一一个。相反，他作品中性的主题都融入自然中。普劳斯特写道，莫奈“让我们羡慕一块田野、一片天空、一个海滩、一条大河。要画出这个地方的真实和美丽，我们必须知道这个地方的存在就是让我们画出来的。这时一定要有一个人告诉我们，你也许会喜欢这个地方：那就大胆的爱它吧.”
莫奈留给后人最大的成就就是扩大了视觉所带来的享受。他将自己的情感反映到每一处景致里，这就是人么为什么直到今天还能够发自肺腑的欣赏他的作品。
卡蜜莉死后，莫奈创作了Vetheuil 结冰的塞纳河，一片冰冻的河面和白雪覆盖的田野接壤：大自然本身就是巨幅的哀吊的幕布。十九世纪八十年代当他独自游弋在诺曼底的英吉利海峡和大西洋海岸时，他试图从海洋中寻求慰籍，思忖他不确定的未来，创作了极其险恶的大海场景，波浪疯狂的敲击着礁石：他曾写道：“对我来说，感受波涛汹涌的大海让我很享受，这让我神经紧绷。”这些海景中曲折婉转的笔触，深深影响了梵高。而Matisse也曾来到Belle Ile 并以此作为题材创作来向莫奈表达敬意。
谈到战争时代的“莲花”系列，莫奈说“为了表达我的感受，我完全忘记了绘画中最基本的规则“：绞缠交错的笔触，强力的色彩加厚重叠，似乎是抽象派的前奏– 仍然表达着一个中产的梦想：幽怨的花园、静谧温顺的环境，世间一切的恐惧都被置于一隅。
Now as then, Monet’s paintings offer respite from what became, within his lifetime, an increasingly technological society, while his faith in a cohesion between the human and natural is enticing as our own harmony with the environment disintegrates.
This is not mere nostalgia. Pioneering African-American painter Kerry James Marshall, seeking to create a “counter archive” of pictures featuring black figures who were historically left out of museum pictures, employed Impressionism’s vocabulary of leisure for his dream of equality. In 2018 Marshall’s “Past Times”, black figures picnicking and boating in reference to Monet’s “Déjeuner sur l’herbe” and river idylls, sold to rapper P Diddy for $21mn.
Monet was radical in every aspect. When friends dragged him to the Louvre to learn by copying Old Masters, he climbed out of a window and from a balcony painted views of modern Paris. Literally turning his back on the past, he was the man for the moment. Impressionism was launched after the FrancoPrussian war (1870-71) when the fledgling Third Republic forged its identity as a secular democratic state.
A republican atheist, Monet in 1891-95 depicted “Rouen Cathedral” 30 times, not as a religious monument but as a surface for light and dripping paint — golden, pink, violet. Rightwing reviewers complained that “the pious cathedral crumbles under an atheist sun”. Leftwing critics, exemplified by Georges Clemenceau’s front page in the newspaper “La Justice”, claimed victory for secular materialism.
With Clemenceau, his close friend, Monet was later involved in the Dreyfus affair, which divided French society — justice and equality versus conservative patriotism for the army. Monet supported the disgraced Jewish captain against the rage of his antisemitic friends Renoir and Degas. In 1899 he withdrew from the moral horror and social disorder, to the refuge of his water garden, and began the symmetrical, orderly “Japanese Footbridge” series. Later, he took a photograph staring at himself in his pond: Narcissus in a straw hat.
When I started exploring Monet’s life, the first thing I researched was his response to the Dreyfus affair — I couldn’t commit to writing his biography if he had been on the “wrong” side. Why would politics matter? It was not that Monet’s position on Dreyfus is detectable in his paintings, any more than Degas’s virulent antisemitism is evident in his nudes or ballerinas; it is that writing a biography seems impossible without broad sympathy for the subject.
Lives of painters and writers enrich understanding by giving social as well as personal context — Monet (1840-1926) spans a period of tremendous change in post-revolutionary France. But the real impetus behind biography is deeper and has affinities with fiction: it is storytelling, unfolding how a character gets through life; strengths and flaws of personality versus the power of fate.
For a biographer, it is a rollercoaster of discoveries, disappointments, doubts. Maddeningly, Monet burnt all Alice’s letters to him, though kept his to her. And as for many famous figures, some crown jewels of letters and diaries remain in the family, and access isn’t easy. In Paris, one step-great-grandson allowed me to glance at Alice’s journal but not make notes; in Giverny, the widow of another step-great-grandson, the diary’s previous owner, amplified details recalled by heart.
I spent dusty days in archives, and scoured auction catalogues for unpublished letters — one, from a childhood friend, gives the earliest known eyewitness description of Monet: in the 1850s, roaming the cliffs overlooking Le Havre, his skin torn by brambles as he clambered to find the right motif for his already “divine” drawing.
The circle of Channel coast sightings closed in the 1920s when the portrait painter Jacques-Émile Blanche encountered Monet, “old but still very handsome” wrapped in furs, sitting on a dike “in a bitter west wind which ruffled his long white beard, mingling it with the foam of the waves”.
就如同他所处的时代一样，莫奈的作品给日渐技术化的社会来带来了一丝短暂的停留。他相信人与自然之间的内在联系也深深吸引着我们，尤其是当下我们与环境的和谐已经支离破碎。
这不仅仅是对过去的怀念。先锋派的非洲裔美国画家凯瑞詹姆斯马歇尔就借用了印象派对于“休闲“的元素来表现他对于平等的梦想。他试图创造一个反传统的作品，以黑人作为主题，而他们往往被排除在博物馆的画作外。2018年马歇尔作品的”旧事“以二千一百万美金出售给饶舌歌手迪迪，该画作就是借鉴莫奈”草地上的午餐“和其河畔牧歌式风情，描绘了黑人野餐和泛舟的情景。
莫奈无论在哪个方面都离经叛道的。当朋友拖他到卢浮宫来临摹那些名作时，他却爬出窗外，从阳台处绘出了当代巴黎的景色。基本上与过去背道而驰，而只在乎当下的某个时刻。普法战争后，法国新生的第三共和国开始了世俗民主的国家政权，而正是此时，印象主义诞生。
作为共和派的无神论者，莫奈在1891到1895年间在不同作品中竟有30多次描绘鲁昂大教堂，当然不是作为宗教的纪念碑，而是来承载光影绘画的表面– 金色、紫色、粉色。右翼评论家抱怨道“神圣的教堂在无神论的阳光下崩塌“。左翼批评家，尤其是以乔治克莱孟珂在”公正“报头版所声称那样，世俗的物质主义取得了胜利。
后来，他和他的密友克莱孟珂卷入了德雷福斯事件，该事件分裂了法国社会– 公正平等对军队保守爱国主义。莫奈支持名誉受到损毁的犹太上尉，并和他反犹太的朋友分道扬镳。1899年他为了躲避社会混乱和恐怖，隐退到自己的花园，开始了对称的、有序的“日本小桥”系列。后来拍摄了一张自己凝视花园里池塘的照片：草帽下的水仙花（自恋）。
当我开始探究莫奈的生活时，第一件事情就是他对待德雷福斯的反应。如果他站在错误的一方，我可能不会承诺还能够撰写他的自传。为什么政治事件会改变我的想法呢？并不是莫奈对于德雷福斯事件的看法可以在他的作品里找到蛛丝马迹，他更没有像德加斯那样把狂热的反犹太主义明显的体现在其裸体和芭蕾舞女作品中。而是如果要书写一个人的传记，你需要对他有广泛的同理心。
如果要更好的了解画家或者作家的生活，我们还要加入社会和个人的背景。莫奈所生存的时代恰恰是革命后的法国大变革时期。但是真正的驱动力是十分深远的并具有戏剧性：这是一部徐徐道来的故事，揭示了这样的一个个性是怎样在其一生中逐渐塑造的；个性的力量和缺点以及对应的命运的使然。
作为一个传记作家，整个过程就像坐过山车一样：发现、失望和怀疑。莫奈发疯一样把爱丽丝给他的信都烧毁了，而把他给爱丽丝却保存了下来。就如其他的名人一样，一些犹如皇冠上的宝石一般的信件和日记仍然保存在相关家庭里，而且很不容易拿到。在巴黎，他的一位没血缘的重孙允许我们一睹爱丽丝的日记但是不允许做记录。在Giverny，另一位没有血缘的重孙的寡妇之前拥有莫奈的日记，她通过回忆向我们讲述了很多的细节。
在灰尘飘荡的档案室里，我度过了无数的日夜。搜肠刮肚的研究未出版信件的拍卖清单，包括一封来自于童年时代朋友的一封信，从而让我们能够了解早期莫奈的一些经历：在十九世纪五十年代，他在俯瞰鲁弗尔的悬崖边漫无目的的闲逛；他为已经很“神圣”的作品继续攀爬寻找更适当的笔调，而让蔷薇刺破皮肤。
二十世纪二十年代海峡沿岸的观景地关闭了，那时肖像画家遇见了穿着皮草的莫奈, “苍老但是还是十分帅郎“，他坐在大堤之上，”刺骨的西风吹拂着他那银白而悠长的胡须，其中还夹杂着海浪中的一痕泡沫“。
