Water Lilies (Reflections of Clouds on the Water Lily Pond)
Claude Monet (1840 to 1926) · 1914 to 1926
Nearly thirteen metres of water fill the wall in front of you. There is no horizon, no bank, no sky, only the surface of Monet's pond at Giverny, where clusters of lily pads float on reflections of clouds and willow branches. The three panels are meant to be read as one continuous view, and the museum hangs them in a curve so that the water seems to wrap around you. Colours drift from lavender and pale blue in the reflected sky to green and rose in the flowers, with no clear line between what is on the water and what is under it.
Monet spent the last twelve years of his life on these grand decorations, working in a purpose built studio at Giverny on canvases too big to move easily. Look at how loosely they are painted: long dragging strokes for the reflections, thick dabs for the lilies, patches of bare canvas showing through. His eyesight was failing from cataracts, and he sometimes painted by the labels on his tubes, yet the harmonies are extraordinary. Step back to the far wall and the marks resolve into light and water; come close and they dissolve into pure paint.
Monet gave a set of these panels to the French state, installed in the Orangerie in Paris after his death. Others stayed in the studio and were only sold decades later, when Abstract Expressionism made his late work look suddenly modern. MoMA bought this triptych in 1959, four years after a fire destroyed an earlier Monet in the collection. Alfred Barr saw in it a bridge between Impressionism and the all over canvases of Pollock hanging one floor below.
Did You Know? The museum's first large Water Lilies panel was destroyed in a fire in 1958, and this triptych was acquired the following year to replace it.
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