The Anguish of Looking at a Monet

In September, 1870, while Prussian soldiers were trying to starve Paris into surrender, Claude Monet was in Normandy with his wife, Camille, and their son, Jean, looking for a boat out of France. They weren’t alone. Every day, hundreds of people went down to the docks in the hope of escaping the Franco-Prussian War; only later would Monet learn that some of his best friends had shoved through the same crowd. By November, he and his family had reached London, though they spoke no English. Months passed, and the Siege of Paris gave way to the Paris Commune and thousands of murdered civilians. The Monets moved on to the Netherlands, where Camille taught French and Claude painted canals. In photographs taken in Amsterdam around this time, their eyes look a decade older than the rest of them. They bought pots for a garden they might grow when the killing stopped.

Fleeing to two countries to avoid war was in some ways the rule, not the exception, of this artist’s life. He fled apartments to avoid creditors. He fled to the French coast to avoid the man whose wife he would marry. After getting married, he fled Paris for the calm of the countryside. He had some dozen addresses in five years, but it wasn’t the macho, Gauguin-in-Tahiti kind of fleeing that tends to turn into myth. If anything, Monet now stands for gardens and domestic coziness and knowing that the same things will be in the same places tomorrow—the kind of comfort, you could say, that matters most to someone for whom things often weren’t.

In the nearly hundred years since his death, Monet has become . . . but do I really need to tell you? No canvas has been left un-kitchen-magnetized, no sector of pop culture remains unconquered. The first art review I can remember was about one of his lily ponds; the critic was Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in “Titanic.” (“Look at his use of color here,” he coos, wiggling his fingers over the canvas with dreamboat sensitivity.) At present, there are no fewer than fifteen cities hosting or vying to host “Claude Monet: The Immersive Experience,” in which you put on a headset and step into the artist’s shoes. The show’s Web site includes a picture of two women taking the V.R. tour “together,” i.e., inches apart but lost in their own screen-worlds. One faces away from us; the other covers her mouth.

It’s a familiar twenty-first-century moment, a little utopian and a little dystopian. The easy thing would be to call it a total perversion of a great artist, but Monet made bright, oddly bleakish moments something of a specialty. An early painting of Camille sitting on a park bench shares more of its mood and composition with that photograph than anybody has a right to expect. Flowers float over Camille’s right shoulder; over her left, a gentleman in black stares at her staring at nothing. This was in 1873, not long after the Monets had returned to France. They finally had their garden, and a six-year-old Jean to share it with, but it was also the year that Camille lost her father. The wall text next to the painting, which hangs at the Met, suggests that the scene “telegraphs sadness,” but “uncertainty” might be fairer: two people, cocooned in a place built for their pleasure, almost erotically close but goggled by unknown thoughts. Time flies and technology sprints. Aloneness and togetherness, which may be parts of the same modern itch, have barely moved at all.

When it comes to artist biographies, one rarely hears about form echoing content—if there are Cubist lives of Picasso or Expressionist lives of Munch, I haven’t had the pleasure. Jackie Wullschläger’s “Monet: The Restless Vision” (Knopf), on the other hand, could be called an Impressionist biography of the central Impressionist. Some important events are done in smudged glimpses, but the over-all shape of his eighty-six years is clear. Every few chapters, a sudden nub of detail robs you of your breath.

All biographies are a little Impressionist in this sense, Monet’s unusually so. “Only a single eyewitness report of Monet, other than his own,” we learn in the first chapter, “survives from before the age of seventeen.” Little information survives about how he met Camille. He insisted that military service in Algeria was integral to his artistic growth, but the work he made there has yet to be tracked down. Later, when he was rich, popular, and buddies with the Prime Minister, a fog thicker than any he painted grays his life. The handful of times he suffered interviewers, he told them half-truths: he served in Algeria for two years, though really it was one; he exclusively painted en plein air, though really he maintained a studio; his mother, Louise, died when he was twelve, though really he was sixteen. He seems to have gone decades without mentioning her, and, if she is anywhere in the thousands of letters he sent, nobody’s found her. He destroyed almost every letter he received.

We know that he was born in Paris in 1840 and grew up in Le Havre. His merchant father, Adolphe, wanted him to go into business, but Louise seems to have encouraged his artistic dreams. Some of his earliest works were caricatures of strangers he saw by the water. (He was good at noses.) At seventeen, he befriended the landscape artist Eugène Boudin, who showed him how to paint straight from nature, sometimes by sitting next to Monet and painting the same view. In 1858, Monet completed his earliest surviving canvas, “View from Rouelles”; judging from his mentor’s version, Monet emptied the scene of buildings and animals. You might think he was only trying to make things easier, but fifty years later he was doing much the same thing: simplifying in the interest of intensifying.

Decades on, Monet still spoke of Boudin as a creative father, the antithesis of his biological one. Adolphe did, at least some of the time, send his son rent money, though Monet claimed that he had paid his way by selling caricatures—an especially slippery fib, but also a useful one, judging from the number of artists who’ve told versions of it. The bigger twist is that Monet did grow up to be a kind of businessman: a workhorse who spent gruelling hunks of his twenties painting from five in the morning to eight in the evening; who conferred with his primary dealer about how to nudge up sales; who snubbed this dealer when he learned that a rival one could net him more money; and who completed something like two thousand paintings, not counting the hundreds he knifed apart.

The rat scuttles of prices and commissions are rarely interesting to the general reader. “Monet: The Restless Vision” may be the first artist biography I’ve encountered in which this kind of thing isn’t just readable but sexy. What others treat as mundane context Wullschläger, an art critic for the Financial Times, turns into full-on characterization. She quotes from a letter in which Monet, having received twenty-five hundred francs for a “Haystack,” begs the buyer to tell everybody that the figure was five thousand, and right there, as though accompanied by violin plucks, is our guy—mischievous, cocky, positively gleeful about the fine art of selling fine art. She is equally sharp on her hero’s day-to-day: at Giverny, where he spent decades, he would rise at dawn, paint for hours, eat like a starved animal, get back to work, and keep at it until dinner at seven. Sleeping, eating, painting, haggling, and selling, all stages of one vigorous process.

It is easy to forget how many of the key Impressionist images—of theatregoers, garden strollers, eaters, boaters, slouchy picnickers—were made by people with almost no leisure time of their own. The chapters of “Monet: The Restless Vision” on his early adulthood in Paris have a palpable grime: he sweats to finish paintings on time, working in studios so tiny that some of the bigger canvases can’t fit; he sneaks out of hotels with the bill outstanding; he borrows recklessly and, when he can’t repay, slashes his own art rather than surrender it to creditors. Camille, seven years his junior, shows up over and over in paintings from this period, in part because he was falling in love with her but also, surely, because she was an economical sitter. In 1867, after she gave birth to Jean, Monet’s family cut him off. The wedding was three years and hundreds of frantic painting hours away.