I am falling. I am drowning in beauty. Perhaps this is what it feels like to teeter on the edge of a black hole. Except it’s art that is pulling me into the void. Claude Monet’s Agapanthus Triptych (1916-19) reaches out to embrace the viewer in a shimmering world where soft reflections move on a bankless pond; a vast mirrored universe with lilies like supernovae.
The Royal Academy proved the radicalism of Monet’s late art with its 1999 exhibition, Monet in the 20th Century. You’d think we’d know by now that Monet is rivalled only by Matisse, Picasso, Pollock and Rothko as a modern painter. They rival him. They don’t beat him. Yet, when this new blockbuster was announced, jaded connoisseurs moaned about yet more Monet – that old cliche of the “chocolate box” artist, soft and bourgeois, still depressingly current. Well, come and see. Let Monet rock your world.
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This exhibition digs deeper into his garden. When Monet finally achieved success after the struggles of his early career, he spent the money on a natural wonderland to ravish his eyes. The garden at Giverny became his second artistic project; gradually it fused with his paintings, providing endless inspiration, subject matter and reverie.
Monet was not the only artist in the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries to find gardens fascinating. You think a garden is a quiet refuge? It’s a laboratory of light and colour. This exhibition is full of riotous red poppies, dazzling fruit orchards, darkling mazes. Henri Matisse paints a pink marble table whose pinkness fills and perfumes your mind. Women lie languidly in the sensual daydreams of Pierre Bonnard. Flowers flame aggressively in the expressionist visions of Emil Nolde.
But it all starts with the impressionists in the 1860s and 70s. Long before Monet started to create his own famous garden, he already loved to paint them. Men and women meet in his early garden scenes, nature kindling desire as it had in pastoral paintings since the Renaissance. Renoir’s gardens are even lusher, while Camille Pissarro sees them in a sadder, more sombre light. He notices the servants working on vegetable patches. Don’t wreck the fantasy, Camille!
In fact, this exhibition goes out of its way to escape the real world. It has a genteel middle-class garden by Van Gogh, but leaves out his more anguished paintings of the scrabbly plot at his asylum. Instead, we get a lot of intensely colourful and rapturous gardens by the likes of John Singer Sargent and Joaquín Sorolla. The curators clearly had a hell of a good time seeking out the most forgotten early 20th-scenes of Spanish courtyards and English blooms. What’s not to like? The light and shadow, greenery and bursts of violet are sheer bliss.
And just when it seems to wander off down the garden path, the show returns to Monet, both the story of his growing garden and his increasingly rhapsodic paintings of it. It is Monet who shows why pastoral art matters and will always matter. Near the end of the exhibition hang his Weeping Willows. He made these paintings to mourn the dead of the first world war. The hanging leaves of his garden become rivers of tears, floods of sorrow. Nature itself is stricken with grief.
Monet created a permanent war memorial in the heart of Paris: his mesmerising installation of curving lily pond paintings in the oval galleries of the Orangerie in Paris was conceived to mourn the great war’s tragedy. The tremendous Agapanthus Triptych here is part of the same cycle. Monet is an artist who always painted what he saw, yet in his late paintings, nature becomes unreal.
This artist who was “only an eye”, as Cézanne put it, created in his garden a philosophical, scientific, poetic drama so enigmatic, it opens boundless imaginative vistas with its honesty. One moment, the reflected clouds and changing light on water seem all surface; another moment, infinitely deep – because that’s what Monet saw. His faithful paintings reveal we live in a world much stranger than we think. We ourselves are shadows, lilies, memories.
Monet died in 1926. The 20th century had even worse horrors to come than the slaughter that made his willows weep and it’s in that shadow that his painted gardens matter. They are glowing islands of civilisation and hope in a modern world guilty of so much barbarity and violence. Monet is not just one of the world’s greatest artists, he is one of the most moral.
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