wealthy Americans grew to appreciate the French Impressionist painter
Show me the Monet
How wealthy Americans grew to appreciate the French Impressionist painter – as an artist but also as a financial asset
From bestselling author Ross King, a brilliant portrait of legendary artist Claude Monet and the story of his most memorable achievement, the water lilies.
Claude Monet is perhaps the world's most beloved artist, and among all his creations, the paintings of the water lilies in his garden at Giverny are most famous. Seeing them in museums around the world, viewers are transported by the power of Monet's brush into a peaceful world of harmonious nature. Monet himself intended them to provide “an asylum of peaceful meditation.” Yet, as Ross King reveals in his magisterial chronicle of both artist and masterpiece, these beautiful canvases belie the intense frustration Monet experienced at the difficulties of capturing the fugitive effects of light, water, and color. They also reflect the terrible personal torments Monet suffered in the last dozen years of his life
ay/Art
Show me the Monet
How wealthy Americans grew to appreciate the French Impressionist painter – as an artist but also as a financial asset
Ross King
Mad Enchantment tells the full story behind the creation of the Water Lilies, as the horrors of World War I came ever closer to Paris and Giverny, and a new generation of younger artists, led by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, were challenging the achievements of Impressionism. By early 1914, French newspapers were reporting that Monet, by then 73 and one of the world's wealthiest, most celebrated painters, had retired his brushes. He had lost his beloved wife, Alice, and his eldest son, Jean. His famously acute vision--what Paul Cezanne called "the most prodigious eye in the history of painting"--was threatened by cataracts. And yet, despite ill health, self-doubt, and advancing age, Monet began painting again on a more ambitious scale than ever before. Linking great artistic achievement to the personal and historical dramas unfolding around it, Ross King presents the most intimate and revealing portrait of an iconic figure in world culture--from his lavish lifestyle and tempestuous personality to his close friendship with the fiery war leader Georges Clemenceau, who regarded the Water Lilies as one of the highest expressions of the human spirit.
n 16 November 2016, the investment guru and philanthropist Tom Marsico, one of the wealthiest men in the United States, became a little bit richer: an auction at Christie’s in New York sold Claude Monet’s Grainstack for $81.4 million. The price, which broke the record for a Monet painting at auction, was more than six times what Marsico paid for it in 2002, proving that few investments offer a more buoyant rate of return than a Monet. Star performances by Monet in the auction houses of London and New York have become routine. Yet the exorbitant prices paid for his paintings today don’t stand in any kind of chastening counterpoint to Monet’s commercial fortunes during his own lifetime. The stories of the critical resistance to Impressionism – and consequent financial hardships of the movement’s painters – are, of course, the stuff of popular legend. To be sure, Monet did suffer some early hardships. ‘We have enough of that kind of painting,’ sniffed a juror in 1868, rejecting his works for the annual Paris Salon and thereby scuppering his chances of making sales.
That same year, Monet was (no doubt wisely) refused credit for paint, and he supposedly spent one entire winter eating nothing but potatoes. For much of his career, though, he was no starving artist, and the diet of potatoes soon came to be replaced by such favourites as foie gras from Alsace, truffles from Périgord, and lobster in peppercorn sauce. ‘You get the best cuisine in France at his house,’ enthused one visitor treated to the delights of gastronomy chez Monet.
The fact is that, after the age of 50 (he lived to be 86), Monet was unrelentingly flush with cash: a happy outcome for such a bon vivant. His wealth kept him in a fleet of automobiles, tweed suits from a fine English tailor in Paris, and a sizeable staff of gardeners to tend his famous gardens. In this respect, he has more in common with Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons, with their high-octane dealers, deep-pocketed collectors, and multimillion-dollar fortunes, than he does with artistic outliers such as the penniless Vincent van Gogh. His surname is an apt one, as headline writers and other punsters appreciate, enjoying its near-homonymity with ‘money’. He was, in fact, the Jazz Age’s answer to Koons, because in 1922, four years before his death, the sale of one of his canvases to a Japanese tycoon made him the world’s most expensive living artist.