THE FURIOUS ENERGY OF AGE
CLAUDE MONET, WEEPING WILLOW, 1918
(Columbus Museum of Art)
Titian’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes in Detroit. Pollock’s Guggenheim Mural in Iowa City. Picasso’s 1910 Hermetic Cubist still life in Cincinnati. The reduced second version of David’s Oath of the Horatii in Toledo. These are just four of the many great paintings that are virtually unknown to the public because they hang in regional art museums distant from America’s coastal metropolises. They are thus rarely reproduced in art history books (published in the metropolises), rarely discussed by well-known critics (who live and work in the metropolises) and rarely appreciated as the important works they are even by people who live nearby. These paintings and many others like them are the secret surprises of America’s small museums. After driving for hours on monotonous Midwestern highways and taking wrong turns in unfamiliar towns, I wander through the quiet, often deserted galleries of these museums, and suddenly, unexpectedly, I see something on the wall that grabs me and won’t let go. I call it the Wow Effect; it’s the aesthetic equivalent of love at first sight. I know immediately, almost irrationally, that I’m in the presence of a work of mind-altering greatness. Before I even begin to understand the painting I feel its power. I am spellbound, fascinated; I can’t stop looking. The Wow Effect isn’t limited to little-known paintings–I also felt it upon first seeing Rembrandt’s The Mill and Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa–but with a piece that’s less well-known the effect is more dramatic because it’s completely unexpected. It makes the early mornings, boring drives and bad McDonald’s breakfasts almost worth it.
The first time I visited the tiny Columbus Museum of Art–located in the city center, just a few blocks from the Ohio state capitol–I didn’t expect to see one of the greatest Monets in the world. But when I stepped into the Impressionist gallery and saw Weeping Willow, the painting hit me full-force and I might even have said ‘wow’ aloud. Dark, heavy, flat, thickly-painted, closer to Expressionism than Impressionism, Weeping Willow is one of those works that forces us to reconsider our understanding of the artist. This is not the Monet everyone knows: neither the creator of bright, airy, Impressionist prettiness, nor the quasi-scientific investigator of light and form, nor the great Zen-like, meditative painter of waterlilies. Painted during the same period as some of his most beautiful waterlily canvases and showing a willow tree that spreads its branches over that same lily pond, this is a very different kind of vision. The first thing we notice is the palette–darker than usual, with greens and greenish-yellows predominating. It even appears that all or part of the work is painted over a blue ground, further lowering the overall tone. Then the brushwork hits us. No Impressionist painting ever looked like this. Despite the slight recession into space on the surface of the pond at lower right, the painting strikes us as a solid wall of brushstrokes, as flat as a Japanese screen. Where the power of most great Monets seems a reflection of nature’s energy (sunlight shimmering on water, the play of colors across a summer field), this painting’s power lies first and foremost in its amazingly free brushwork. This is Monet’s late style. Curves and loops and S’s of paint are laid on the canvas in a way that strongly anticipates the abstract works of Mark Tobey. It’s a type of brushwork art historians like to call ‘calligraphic,’ but the primary meaning communicated by this writing is the energy of its own creation. Monet’s long strokes are descriptive–to an extent–of the foliage that falls from a willow tree, but they are also so obviously lines of paint dragged across a canvas that we are forced to read them as signs of painterly power, each stroke adding a little more force to the total effect of the work. Weeping Willow is a teeming dynamo of a painting, a perpetual motion machine, a rising and falling field of pure energy.
The motion begins at the lower left. The tree trunk rises like a charmed snake, emerging out of dark blue shadow and curving into a patch of bright, multicolored light. This motion is reinforced to the left of the tree, where brushstrokes curve upward and one long blue stroke (a color rhyme with the lower shadow) rises in a strict vertical. At the upper third of the canvas, the tree trunk tosses its branches to the right (while the trunk itself twists to the left in a balancing counter-movement). The green tendrils then fall down the right half of the painting in those thick, painterly strokes, descending to the purple surface of the pond which flows seamlessly into the blue foreground shadow from which everything began. And so it goes on, repeating like a natural cycle.
Slightly above the center of the canvas, in the middle of this swirling motion, Monet places a short, thin, broken, but unmistakable stroke of pure white. It looks so out of place among all the green and yellow that it’s visible from quite a distance, like a short, vertical knife slash in the middle of the canvas. What is it doing there? Why did Monet, in the midst of so much vigorous painting, pause to add a single stroke of white and then top it with the tiniest dab of dark red? I think the purpose is more compositional than descriptive. The stroke of white is the still point of the painting’s turning world, the axis around which everything moves. If we compare this work’s composition to Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (a bit of a stretch, admittedly), the white slash occupies the Jesus position. It is the central, immovable object in a field of continuous rising and falling.
A deeper and more interesting mystery is the meaning of the light on the tree trunk: the fiery patch of brushstrokes that curves up the tree and is restated in the purple flower near the top. Since the sunlight seems to come from behind the tree and is filtered through the translucent leaves, casting the foreground into deep shadow, where is the light on the trunk coming from? The longer I consider this question, the more convinced I am that this may be one of the least naturalistic and most symbolic passages that Monet ever painted. The tree seems to glow from inside. It is as if a furnace door has been left open and we can see the lapping flames. The passage is a fire, a source of energy in this painting that is nothing but energy. I see the tree as a symbol for Monet himself–solid, venerable, bowed with age but still moving, still painting. Even though partly lost in shadow (by 1918 the old painter’s vision had worsened and he would eventually undergo a series of eye operations), the painter/willow remains capable of unexpected eruptions of color and brilliance. He is an old man but he still has the fire, still glows from inside with a furnace of energy powerful enough to set this entire canvas in motion. This bright passage on the tree trunk is the painting’s boiler room, the source of all its energy, and thus it also represents the painter’s energy, the force that lies behind every single stroke of paint. It is an old man’s power, a defiant wildness like that which infuses the late poems of Yeats (and which the poet saw in the later works of Michelangelo):
Grant me an old man’s frenzy.
Myself must I remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till truth obeyed his call;
A mind Michael Angelo knew
That can pierce the clouds
Or inspired by frenzy
Shake the dead in their shrouds;
Forgotten else by mankind
An old man’s eagle mind.1
Every brushstroke is an affirmation of life, a protest against approaching death. Some may see in this work the painter’s protest at loss of sight or fear of blindness, but blindness for a painter is really a symbol of mortality, a trope for death. This painting is a moment–very rare in Monet’s work–of naked confession, pure Expressionism. At age 78 Monet is staring into the darkness, facing the reality of physical decline and fighting it.
Also rare for Monet, and similarly suggestive of mortality, is this painting’s shallow, Expressionistic space. Despite the defiant energy of the work, Weeping Willow is a claustrophobic painting. The walls of the world are closing in; illusionistic depth decreases to the ultimate limit of an abstract field of paint lying flat against the picture plane. A glance along the gallery wall at one of Columbus’s other Monets, the 1887 View of Bennecourt, provides an instructive comparison. In the earlier work, the view of the village is screened through a grove of trees, but the trunks are thin, the foliage light and nearly transparent, and the traditional landscape recession into depth is not greatly obscured. This is still a bright Impressionist place in which the eye can pleasantly wander. Jump ahead two decades to the 1907 waterlily paintings, and we are in an entirely different world. The artist’s gaze has turned downward; the horizon has disappeared. Our only illusion of depth is provided by the progressive foreshortening of the lily pads toward the top of the canvas, and even this illusion is undermined by the flat, mirror-like surface of the water, in which we see trees and sky reflected upside down. This reflective quality is what saves the best of the waterlily paintings from claustrophobic flatness. The reflections of sky, clouds, trees and all the colors of sunlight are like an escape hatch for the viewer. We pass through the flatness like Alice through the looking glass and find ourselves in a world turned literally upside down, the familiar made suddenly strange. What we thought was flatness becomes oceanic depth, as deep as the sky above, and we might lose ourselves in meditations on mirrors, representation and reality. A decade later, Weeping Willow provides no such escape. The water is relegated to the bottom corner of the work, and reflections are minimized. We face a solid wall of branches and leaves that blocks our view and cuts off the sunlight, leaving us in the shadowed foreground. The world before us is veiled; we can neither see the future nor move forward into it. In an amazing union of opposites, this image of constantly moving painterly energy is also an image of the loss of vision and death.
Life and death are united here, but not in harmony. The painting is a constant battle. One interpretation sees it as a more literal kind of ‘battle piece,’ a war memorial in which the willow laments the deaths of the First World War. While I would usually dismiss out of hand such an obvious and sentimental reading, I’m almost willing to accept this one, with the condition that it is only part of the painting’s story and that it may have been proposed by Monet himself to deflect attention from the deeply personal, darkly confessional nature of the work. While Monet seems to find some consolation in the waterlily canvases that become larger and ever more ethereal as he approaches his end, Weeping Willow offers no such opportunities for transcendence. It is all about death, the fear of death and the vital necessity of resistance. In the face of death, Monet paints like a Yeatsian wildman. Every movement of his brush is an expression of being, a sign of life. In Weeping Willow he is still fighting, still living, still working with an old man’s frenzy, raging against the dying of his light.
NOTES
1. Yeats, "An Acre of Grass," Collected Poems, 301.