CLAUDE MONET

water lilies
 Ann Temkin and Nora Lawrence

CLAUDE MONET
water lilies

The Museum of Modern Art

NEW YORK
 fig.l
HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON
Untitled (Monet’s water lily pond in Givemy), c. 1952
Gelatin-silver print

fig. 2
CLAUDE MONET
Water Lily Pond, 1904
Oil on canvas, 35 3/8x36 ‘/Z' (90 x 92 cm)
Musee des Beaux-Arts de Caen, France
 Historical Note
Claude Monet rented a house in Giverny, France, in 1883, purchasing
its property in 1890. In 1893 he bought an additional plot of land, across
a road and a set of railroad tracks from his house, and there embarked
on plans to transform an existing small pond into a magnificent water
garden, filled with imported lilies and spanned by a Japanese-style
wooden bridge (fig. 1).
This garden setting may well signify “nature,” but it was not
a purely natural site. Monet lavished an extraordinary amount of time
and money on the upkeep and eventual expansion of the pond and
the surrounding grounds, ultimately employing six gardeners. Itself
a cherished work of art, the garden was the subject of many easel-size
paintings Monet made at the turn of the new century and during its first
decade. Beginning in 1903 he began to concentrate on works that dis¬
pensed with the conventional structure of landscape painting—^omitting
the horizon fine, the sl^^, and the ground—and focused directly on the
surface of the pond and its reflections, sometimes including a hint of the
pond’s edge to situate the viewer in space (see fig. 2). Compared with later
depictions of the pond (see fig. 3), these paintings are quite naturalistic
both in color and style. Monet exhibited forty-eight of these Water
5
 fig-3
CLAUDE MONET
Water-Lilies, Reflections of Weeping Willows, 1914-26
Oil on canvas, 51 fl" x 6' 3/4" (130 x 200 cm)
Private collection

Lilies in a highly successful exhibition at Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris

in May 1909.
As early as 1898 the journalist Maurice Guillemot reported
that Monet had plans for “a circtdar room in which the walls above the
baseboard would be covered with [paintings of] water, dotted with
these plants to the very horizon. * Reporting on Monet’s 1909 show in
Paris, another critic wrote of the artist’s idea for a dining room contain¬
ing only a table “encircled by these mysteriously seductive reflections.”"'
But Monet’s path toward fulfilling this vision met with setbacks. The
next fewyears were a time of infrequent artistic activity and significant
personal hardship for Monet. Floods in 1910 submerged the water lily
pond. His wife, Alice Hoschede, died in 1911, as did his son Jean, in 1914.
In 1912 Monet was diagnosed with cataracts, and for the rest of his life
he would struggle with failing eyesight. When World War I began, most
of Monet’s family members and friends left Giverny, but he stayed,
saying that his painting helped distract him from the horrible news
of the war.
Indeed, Monet began construction on a vast new studio in 1915.
It was utterly utihtarian in design, with a concrete floor and glass ceding;
6
Monet lamented that for the sake of his art he had added an eyesore to
the property. Thereafter, the artist would work in two stages: in the sum¬
mer he would paint outdoors on smaller canvases, and in the winter
retreat to the studio to make paintings some six-and-a-half feet tall and
up to twenty feet wide. Monet worked on several panels at once, going
back and forth among them. These works, which he referred to as grandes
decorations, took the artist to pictorial territory he had not visited in more
than fifty years of painting. The compositions zero in on the water’s sur¬
face so that conventional clues to the artist’s—and the viewer’s—^vantage
point are ehminated. The shimmer of light on the water and the inter¬
mingling of reflections of the clouds and foliage overhead further blur
the distinctions between here and there. The paintings were sufficiently
radical that Monet often doubted their worth, and he destroyed some
canvases along the way. He made more than forty of these large paint¬
ings, reworked over the course of several years.
At the close of the war, Monet decided to donate two panels
to France in celebration of the nation’s victory. His good friend Georges
Clemenceau, who was prime minister of France from 1906 to 1909 and
again from 1917 to 1920, persuaded Monet to expand the gift. Eventually,
the state received twenty-two panels, forming eight compositions. The
gift was contingent upon Monet’s right to approve the venue and instal¬
lation plan for the paintings. After much discussion, Monet and govern¬
ment officials agreed to create a permanent exhibition space at the
Orangerie, in the Tuileries garden in Paris. It opened to the public in 1927,
the year following Monet’s death.

NOTES
1. As quoted in Paul Hayes Tucker, Claude
Monet: Life and Art (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1995), 198.
2. Ibid., 197.

7
 fig-4
Installation view of Water Lilies, 1914-26,
at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, c. 1959
 MONET’S
water lilies
at
The Museum of Modern Art

Claude Monet’s monumental compositions known as the Water Lilies

occupy a unique position among the thousands of paintings in The
Museum of Modern Art’s collection (see fig. 4). From the moment the
first Water Lilies painting arrived in 1955 they have claimed a place
apart, most notably in their longtime home in a gallery on the second
floor of the Museum’s east wing, overlooking the Sculpture Garden
(fig. 6). Installed from time to time in the thick of the procession of
galleries, or in combination with work by other artists, they have
fared less well. What might be the reason for their distinction?
There are many answers to this question. The most obvious
is that these paintings were part of the artist’s ambition to create a
panorama that enveloped the viewer, an environment that in today’s
parlance would be called an “installation” (see fig. 5). In his day Monet
called them grandes decorations and painted them in a vast studio
built expressly for this purpose on his property in Givemy, France (see
fig. 7). He imagined the canvases permanently installed on curving
walls, as free of edges and corners as water itself Monet embarked on
this remarkable project in 1914, at seventy-three years of age, and
the task of painting the many mural-size panels in this series governed
his remaining days. After his death in 1926, twenty-two panels were
installed at the Orangerie in Paris, a gift from the artist to the French
9
 CLAUDE MONET
Water Lilies (details), 1914-26
(see fig. 5, inside flaps)
 fig-5
CLAUDE MONET
Water Lilies, 1914-26
Oil on canvas, three panels, each 6' 6 3/4" x 13' 11 ‘/V
(200 X 424.8 cm); overall 6' 6 3/4" x 41' 10 (200 x 1,276 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund
 nation (fig. 8). Others, such as those now
belonging to The Museum of Modern
Art, eventually found homes elsewhere,
fig. 6
singly or in small groups. Even when the
Installation view at The Museum of Modern Art, paintings are encountered one at a time,
New York, c. 1985, showing Water Lilies, 1914-26 (left),
and The Japanese Footbridge, c. 1920-22 the artist’s environmental vision is appar¬
ent in their size, and, more important, in
their scale vis-a-vis an individual’s perception. Focusing tightly on the
surface of the water, Monet succeeded in making paintings that convert
the viewer’s role from observation to immersion. Thus the Water Lilies’
claim on the viewer differs from that of an easel-size painting to be
looked at in the company of others. From the outset, the artist envis¬
aged them as all-encompassing.
There are other explanations for the Water Lilies’ special status
at MoMA, less particular to Monet’s paintings than to the structure
of the Museum’s collections and their display. Itself an artifact of the
modernism to which it was dedicated, the Museum generally has
presented a trajectory of art devoted to innovation. The Painting and
Sculpture galleries long have been designed as a procession of break¬
throughs highlighting the “invention” of Cubism, of Futurism, of
Surrealism; the unspoken analogy might be the course of scientific
progress. The modernist idealization of originality—Ezra Pound’s pro¬
verbial make it new —resulted in a strong emphasis on beginnings
within the span not only of a decade or a century but of an artist’s life.*
Monet’s large Water Lilies, however, are quintessential late
works, made in the last decade of the long life of this nineteenth-
century artist. Their power is that not of a stroke of inspiration, but
of a deeply enduring passion, both for the artist’s subject and for his
vocation. These paintings stand at far remove from Monet’s 1872 paint¬
ing Impression, Sunrise, the work that legend associates with the term

12
 fig-7
Claude Monet in his studio, 1922

fig. 8
Installation view of
Water Lilies at the Musee de
I’Orangerie, Paris, 1930
 fig-9
CLAUDE MONET
Impression, Sunrise, 1872
Oil on canvas, 18 ^/s x 24 ^/s" (48 x 63 cm)
Musee Marmottan-Claude Monet, Paris

“Impressionism,” and that declares as its hallmark the spontaneity

of glance and of touch (fig. 9). In contrast, the Water Lilies advertise the
long duration of their making with surfaces that are thick with mul¬
tiple layers of paint. The months and years during which the grandes
decorations were continually reworked represent the decades of experi¬
ence that informed the artist’s way of seeing and mark-making.
The late Water Lilies richly demonstrate the often astonishing
gap between the personal chronology of an individual artist and that
of a history of art movements. The conventional charting of the innova¬
tions of each new decade that characterizes the history of art is incom¬
patible with that of individual lives. A single artist, for example, does
not start out an Abstract Expressionist in the 1950s, become a Pop artist
in the 1960s, and convert to Conceptualism in the 1970s. Generally,
artists maintain the principles and methods they define at the outset
of their careers, modifying and expanding them over the years accord¬
ing to a largely internal logic. Already, at the point when Monet began
his grandes decorations, Pablo Picasso and Georges Bracjue had devised
the language of Cubism and Marcel Duchamp had begun a corpus of
“readymade” sculptures by setting a bicycle wheel atop a kitchen stool.
14
Before the Water Lilies were finished, Piet Mondrian had conceived Neo-
Plasticism and Kazimir Malevich had painted White on White. Giverny
was but an hour from Paris, but as a gentleman in his late seventies and
early eighties Monet was content to work in a way coolly oblivious to
the ongoing march of modern art.

During the first twenty years of The Museum of Modern Art’s history,
the Water Lilies did not figure in founding director Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s
thinking for the Museum. Nor did Monet, or still more generally, the
Impressionists. The Museum’s opening exhibition in November 1929 pre¬
sented the work of Paul Cezanne, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, and
Paul Gauguin. The names of these four artists would also be arrayed at
the top of Barr’s chart of “The Development of Abstract Art” that accom¬
panied his 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art. But during the 1950s,
exceptionally, Barr would make retroactive room for Claude Monet, and,
specifically, for the artist’s last paintings. What was to happen provides
an extraordinary example of how the appearance of new art can bring to
the surface older art that has been previously dismissed or ignored.
In this case, it was the advent of large-scale painting by the
Abstract Expressionists that excited Barr’s interest in Monet’s work at
Giverny during the 1910s and 1920s. In the late 1940s, in the wake of
World War II, the artists who would come to be known as the New York
School developed an approach to painting radically distinct from that
of their immediate predecessors in either Europe or the United States.
Work that its makers claimed to be fatherless—in Emersonian fashion,
a self-reliant American painting—made room for the entrance of a puta¬
tive precedent. Monet’s Water Lilies, as free of polemic as the Americans’
work was a clarion call, would come to take on a prominent role. For
countless commentators, and completely in spite of themselves, these
15
 fig- 10
CLAUDE MONET
Grainstack (Snow Effect), 1891
Oil on canvas, 251/4x36 fa" (65.4 x 92.4 cm)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Gift of Miss Aimee and Miss Rosamond Lamb
in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Horatio Appleton Lamb

works of an elderly man were transformed into fresh young things. Such
was the alchemy of art critics and historians who could turn something
that was an ending—Impressionism half a century after its baptism—
into a beginning, a forecast of mid-century American painting.^
When the Water Lilies first caught Barr’s attention, Monet’s
late works enjoyed none of the glory that they do today. Despite their
now-beloved status and jaw-dropping market values, these paintings
were the victims of gross neglect for two decades following Monet’s
death. This situation represented a dramatic reversal in fortune for the
great Impressionist. While Monet was workirlg from Giverny in the
1890s, his wealth and popularity attained new heights. His works painted
and exhibited in series—such as Grainstacks (see fig. 10), Poplars, or
Rouen Cathedral all sold rapidly. The apparent repetitiveness of the
serial paintings, rather than diminishing their perceived worth to
collectors, increased the fervor to own one (or more). Monet’s exhibi¬
tion of easel-size Water Lilies canvases at Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris
in 1909 was no exception—it attracted crowds, enticed eager buyers,
and won the artist new accolades.
16
 But when Monet devoted himself
to following where these paintings led, he
outpaced the tastes of his audience. The
late paintings, which were largely a stu¬
dio secret, struck viewers who finally saw
them as confusing and messy. The artist’s
failing eyesight was blamed for illeg¬
ible composition and an unruly palette.
Soon after the grandes decorations were installed in the Orangerie, they
were met with indifference. Much to the dismay of Monet’s heirs, and
despite their protests, over the years the paintings were left to endure
in rooms supplied with little light or heat. Water leaked through the
dirty skylight of the exhibition space and onto the face of the panels;
during World War II bits of shrapnel from the Allied bombings lodged
themselves in the canvases (fig. ii). Since Monet had stipulated that
the panels never be moved, on at least one occasion another exhibi¬
tion was hung directly in front of his work.^ The American artist Jack
Youngerman, a visitor to the Orangerie after the war, recalls that
the security guards—generally the only people in the rooms besides
himself—were disabled veterans of the First World War, their evident
trauma exacerbating the gloom he found in the atmosphere.'^
The situation changed following the end of World War II. In
1952 handsome renovations to the Orangerie were completed, and the
Surrealist artist Andre Masson pronounced the galleries “the Sistine
Chapel of Impressionism.”^ The artist’s son, Michel Monet, in the mean¬
time began to receive inquiries about the related works, which long
had languished in the studio at Giverny. In 1949 he lent five large paint¬
ings to an Impressionism exhibition at the Basel KunsthaUe, and another
group of five was shipped to the Kunsthaus Zurich in 1952 for inclusion
in a Monet retrospective exhibition. In the foreword to the exhibition
17
 catalogue, museum director Rene Wehrli lauded the underappreciated
Water Lilies as precursors of abstract art/ Zurich acquired three paint¬
ings, and a number of private collectors also made purchases. The first
American to do so was the automotive heir and adventmous art collector
Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., who bought a large panel in 1950.
The Museum of Modern Art’s participation in this wave of
purchases was preceded by the acquisition of an earlier Monet: in 1951
Barr accepted as a promised gift from the collection of William B. Jaffe
and Evelyn A. J. Hall the painting Poplars at Givemy, Sunrise, 1888 (fig. 12).
The artist Barnett Newman, an admirer of the Impressionists, noted
the acquisition with interest and wrote to Museum President William
Burden to ask if this meant the Museum no longer believed that the
“modern” began only with Post-Impressionism. He regretted that the
Museum had not announced Poplars as being the first painting by
Monet or any Impressionist to enter the collection: “Why the silence?
Is the institution that has dedicated itself for a quarter of a century
to the false art history that modern art began with Cezanne afraid now
to admit that it is changing its position?”^ Barr did not view the acquisi¬
tion as a shift in policy. His letter of thanks to the donor emphasized that
the painting nicely complements the Museum’s “Post-Impressionist”
works and was especially apt “because of the interest in Monet’s later
work among the younger artists today.”®
But it was even later Monet—twentieth-century Monet—that
was the real object of desire for Barr. At the April 1955 meeting of
the Committee on the Museum Collections, Barr reported that Walter
Chrysler had informed him that several of Monet’s late paintings
might still be available for sale at Giverny. It was agreed that James Thrall
Soby, chairman of the committee, and Dorothy Miller, curator of
museum collections—both in Paris at the time—would visit the studio
to choose a work for the Museum.
18
 fig. 12

CLAUDE MONET
Poplars at Givemy, Sunrise, 1888
Oil on canvas, 29 '/s x 36 '/j" (74 x 92.7 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The William B. Jaffe and Evelyn A. J. Hall Collection
 •ig- V5
CLAUDE MONET
WvU^r lilifs,
Oil on canvas. t>* 6 */*" x iS' 5 'js" (ioo x spi-t* cm)
Formerly Tire Museum of Movlern Art. New York
.Mrs. .'Jimon Gus^enheim Fund

The pvtintings extraordin.ir\' size wms an immediate issue in

the selection process. While in principle Barr w-as enticed bv the size of
the Water Lilies paintings, as the director of a collection that \ras then
housed in an already overcrowded building in midtowTi Manhattan, he
was also realistic. Writing that he did not 'Vant to limit whatever you
and Dorothy m.iy decide, Barr admitted to Sobv, “You know our space
probleni as well as I do. Anything over 20 teet would be impractical in
our current galleries and perhaps out of scale in relation to other things
in the Collectioir but I certainly agree with you that a considerable
size may be highly desirable, though possibly B or 10 feet would do.""
A tew days later barr received a telegram trom Sobv. alerting him that
the paintiiLg Soby and Miller tavored was sub.stantially larger: “BEST
NtONETz B\ 5 METERS PRICE FOUR NtILLION FR.ANCS DOROTHY
AND 1 RECOMNVEND CABLE YOUR DECISION REGARDS=SOBY.”‘^'
The next day, barr wired his approwil tor the cighteen-and-a-half-foot-
wide canvas (fig. 13). “BUY MONET IF YOU DOROTHY REALLY LIKE.”"
The issue of size was very’ much on Barr s mind precisely
because of the demands that contemporary New York paintings were
making on him. What made the Monets problematic also made them rel¬
evant. While the Monet would be the widest painting the Museum had
20
acquired in its twenty-six year history, contemporary abstract paint¬
ings made at this scale were much in evidence at Fifty-seventh Street
galleries such as Betty Parsons and Sidney Janis. Nevertheless, Barr
had only ventured as far as acquiring Jackson Pollock’s eight-and-a-half-
foot-wide Number i, 1548, and No. 10, a seven-and-a-half-foot-tall Mark
Rothko of 1950. Works equal in width to the Water Lilies painting.
Pollock’s One: Number31,1950 and Barnett Newman’s VirHeroicus Sublimis,
1950-51 (figs. 14 and 15), would not be acquired until 1968 and 1969,
respectively. In 1955 the few large-scale paintings in the Museum’s col¬
lection Justified their magnitude within a tradition of populist mural
painting. Picasso’s famous protest painting, Guernica, 1937 (fig. 16), an
imposing twenty-five feet wide, had been on extended loan to the
Museum since 1939. Like other large-scale political art in the collection,
such as Jose Clemente Orozco’s eighteen-foot-wide fresco Dive Bomber
and Tank, 1940, Guernica’s narrative content set it apart from contempo¬
rary abstraction.
The inevitable need to create space in the galleries for a new
type of painting was manifest, if not in the collection, in the Museum’s
temporary exhibitions, which showcased large-scale abstraction sooner
than the acquisitions program did so. Dorothy Miller’s 1952 exhibition
15 Americans featured large-scale works by Abstract Expressionist art¬
ists Bradley Walker Tomlin, Clyfford Still, Rothko, and Pollock (includ¬
ing his seventeen-foot-wide Autumn Rhythm: Number30,1950; see fig. 17).
Art critic Henry McBride, who wrote about the exhibition for Art News,
told Miller of his surprise at being confronted by “acres of canvas with
so little on thern.”*^
It is this environment that conditioned Barr’s acceptance of the
Water Lilies painting selected by Soby and Miller, a work that also could
be perceived, mistakenly, as having “so little” on it. As Barr explained
in a letter to Michel Monet, and as he would repeat in several published
21
 fig. 14
JACKSON POLLOCK
One: Number 31,1950,1950
Oil and enamel paint on unprimed canvas,
8' lo" X17' 5 s/s" (269.5 X 530.8 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Sidney and Harriet Janis
Collection Fund (by exchange)

fig-15
BARNETT NEWMAN
Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51
Oil on canvas, 7' iii/s" x 17' 9 ‘/V (242.2 x 541.7 cm)
The Museum of Modem Art, New York
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ben HeUer

fig. 16
PABLO PICASSO
Guernica, 1937
Oil on canvas, 11' 5 '/f x 25' 5 "/is" (349.3 x 776.6 cm)
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid
 statements to follow, “Interest in your
father’s work has been considerably revived
in this country by our younger artists who
are much influenced particularly by his

fig-17
late work.”‘3 While we do not know exactly
Installation view of 15 Americans at The Museum what Barr had in mind, it is certain that he
of Modem Art, New York, 1952, showing
Jackson Pollock’s Number5,1948,1948 (left) and
was linking late Monet not just to big paint¬
Autumn Rhythm: Number30,1950,1950 ings, but to the phenomenon of abstraction,
which had become the dominant approach
in American art. The precedent of Cezanne worked well for the subse¬
quent development of Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubism, Mondrian’s Neo-
Plasticism, and the sort of geometric abstraction derived from them.
But the all-over compositions of a Rothko or a PoUock needed to come
from elsewhere, a place that seemed as indifferent to organized struc¬
ture as the new painting did. Newman’s fierce objection to a sole focus
on Cezanne as a father figure for his generation was a plea for recogni¬
tion that the new abstraction came from sources beyond those charted
in Cubism and Abstract Art.
This was not the first time that Monet had been enlisted in the
service of abstraction. In his memoirs Vasily Kandinsky, one of several
pioneering voices in abstract art during the years just prior to World
War I, credits his encounter with a painting by Monet—on exhibition
in Moscow in 1895—with his first awareness that art need not directly
represent the visual world:

Suddenly, for the first time, I saw a picture. That it was a hay¬
stack, the catalogue informed me. I didn’t recognize it. I found
this nonrecognition painful, and thought that the painter
had no right to paint so indistinctly. I had a dull feeling that
the object was lacking in this picture.... It was all unclear to
23
 me, and I was not able to draw the simple
conclusions from this experience. What
was, however, quite clear to me was the
unsuspected power of the palette, previously
concealed from me, which exceeded all my
dreams. Painting took on a fairy-tale power
and splendor. And, albeit unconsciously,
fig. i8
VASILY KANDINSKY
objects were discredited as an essential ele¬
Picture with an Archer, igog ment within the picture.^
Oil on canvas, 68 ^/s x 57 ^/s" (175 x 144.6 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift and bequest of Louise Reinhardt Smith Kandinsky’s recollection paid tribute to
Monet’s inspiration in providing an independent
role for the emotional impact of color, quite apart from any cormection
to what it denoted. Kandinsky’s own belief in the spiritual power of
color, and the expressive gesture in his painting (see fig. 18), resonated
strongly with mid-century art. Barr’s written statements in fact often
did link Kandinsky to current painting. But in a museum, and a culture
at large, oriented more to France than to Germany, the French tradition
as represented by Monet was the primary focus of attention.
Monet’s Water Lilies painting came to the Museum and was
accepted for the collection in June 1955. Like many of the panels in
the Orangerie, it was a composition whose cefiter was dominated by
bright areas describing the reflections of clouds overhead, intermin¬
gling with a horizontal procession of water lilies across the water’s
surface. It was first displayed at the end of the year as a highlight of the
exhibition Recent Acquisitions (Painting and Sculpture). The Museum’s
press release for the event mentioned in its first sentence “the first
showing in this country of one of Monet’s famous large water lily
paintings.”*^ While the exhibition presented nearly fifty newly acquired
works of art, Monet’s canvas was honored with a dramatic installation
24
 at the end of a cul-de-sac. An exhibition
photograph shows that it was theatri¬
cally framed by a set of floor-to-ceiling
drapes and illuminated against a dark
wall (fig. 19). The solitary setting was
in keeping with the desires of Michel
Monet, who had written to art historian
John Rewald, “The painting is indeed
beautiful; I hope that it will be well-presented, isolated.”'®
Of the new acquisitions on view, the New York Times singled
out the Monet as “the biggest surprise, and the greatest triumph for
the museum,” noting that the painting “shimmers like an impression¬
ist’s vision of paradise.”'^ A. L. Chanin, writing for The Nation, selected
the Monet as “the major addition to the collection” and pronounced
it “paradoxically... at once the most old-fashioned, the least fashion¬
able, and the most daring of the acquisitions.”'® Some two months after
the Water Lilies painting first went on display, Barr wrote to Honorary
Trustee Mrs. Simon Guggenheim, whose funds enabled the purchase
of the composition: “I am a little surprised, but very pleased to know
that the Monet has been one of the most generally and enthusiastically
admired paintings we have acquired in many years.
This excitement soon translated into additional purchases.
When Barr traveled to Paris in June 1956, he visited the exhibition Les
Grandes Evasions poetiques de Claude Monet at the gallery of Katia Granoff,
the dealer who had first brought Walter Chrysler to Giverny in 1950.“
Barr returned from Paris having reserved not only another Water Lilies
canvas for the Museum’s consideration, but several others for Museum
Trustees and donors, among them a Water Lilies painting now in the
collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 20). For the Museum
he chose a six-foot, nearly square-format painting, with sweeping tall
25
 fig. 20
CLAUDE MONET
Water Lilies, 1914-26
Oil on canvas, 51 'ji," x 6' 7" (130.2 x 200.7 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Louise Reinhardt Smith, 1983

fig. 21

CLAUDE MONET
Water Lilies, 1914-26
Oil on canvas, 71" x 6' 7" (180.3 x 200.7 cm)
Formerly The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Grace Rainey Rogers Fund
grass painted in brisk strokes toward the bottom and a concentrated
area of lily pads and flowers above (fig. 21).
Also that summer Barr reserved The Japanese Footbridge at
M. Knoedler and Co. in New York (fig. 22). This painting depicts the
arching wooden bridge that Monet had built at the northern end of the
pond as a place to stand and observe the lily blossoms below. Monet’s
first series of paintings of the pond in the late 1890s had focused on the
footbridge; this painting was among the last of this subject, made in
1920 to 1922. That group featured a fiery palette—maroons, rusts, and
oranges—unique within Monet’s work, as well as agitated passages
of paint ranging from staccato jabs to dense swirls and long skeins of
color. Both The Japanese Footbridge and the Museum’s second Water
Lilies painting were acquired in 1956, and were described as “supple¬
menting” the large panel purehased the year prior.
The appreciation for Monet noted in Barr’s letter to Mrs.
Guggenheim was part of a larger phenomenon in which the Museum
played a central but by no means isolated role. A veritable who’s who
of art writers addressed the topic of late Monet during the mid-1950s,
in mass media as well as in academic publications. In July 1955 Vogue’s
art director, the artist Alexander Liberman, gave the magazine’s readers
a photographic tour of the studio in Giverny.^ Leo Steinberg’s February
1956 “Month in Review” column for Arts praised (and reproduced) the
Museum’s acquisition, describing how “it is wonderful to look at for an
hour or so at a time,” and detailing the possible revelations when one
does.^3 That October in Art News, Thomas B. Hess glowingly reviewed an
exhibition of Monet’s late work at Knoedler, admitting that it overcame
a critic’s innate skepticism toward anything so fashionable.^'^
Clement Greenberg tackled “The Later Monet” in Art News Annual
in 1957, claiming, “Today those huge close-ups which are the last Water
Lilies say—to and with the radical Abstract Expressionists—that a lot
27
 fig. 22

CLAUDE MONET
The Japanese Footbridge, c. 1920-22
Oil on canvas, 35 x 45 ^/s" (89.5 x 116.3 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Grace Rainey Rogers Fund
of physical space is needed to develop adequately a strong pictorial idea
that does not involve an illusion of deep space.”'‘5 Taking an approach
more emotional than formalist in an article entitled “The Big Canvas” in
Art International in 1958, E. C. Goossen cited Monet’s “greatness of spirit,
which could only be expressed through greatness of size.”^®
David Sylvester, a young critic in London, reviewed a Monet
retrospective at the Tate Gallery for the New York Times in October 1957.
He called the artist “the art world’s most newly resurrected deity, the
painter whose standing has risen more than that of any other as a result
of post-war movements in taste_Monet has become so eminently
respectable that he has almost taken over from Cezanne as modern art’s
father-figure.

Of the three paintings by Monet to arrive at the Museum in 1955 and

1956, only The Japanese Footbridge is part of the collection today. While
still newcomers to the Museum, the two Water Lilies panels were to
suffer the sort of fate that haunts the dreams of museum directors and
curators. On April 15,1958, a fire broke out in The Museum of Modern
Art. It started inside a work zone on the Museum’s second floor, where
a contract crew was repairing the Museum’s air-conditioning system.
The Neu; York Times reported that a painter’s drop cloth had caught fire,
perhaps because “workmen had been smoking near piles of sawdust.”"'®
When the fire reached several open cans of wall paint, the paint appar¬
ently ignited and fed the growing blaze. An electrician was killed and at
least twenty-five other people were treated for injuries. While approxi¬
mately 550 paintings were exposed to smoke or water, nearly all of the
2,000 paintings in the Museum were saved.
Two exceptions were the large Water Lilies panel acquired in
1955 and the smaller one that Barr had added in 1956. Like the other
29
 damaged or lost paintings, the large scale of these works
had made it impractical to move them to other parts of the
Museum, as had been done with all the other works on the
second floor. The large Water Lilies panel was left installed
on a wall built in front of the Museum’s row of windows
overlooking Fifty-third Street, with a makeshift hard-
hoard box built around it. After the fire. Museum officials
fig- 23 returned to find the painting buried under a pile of debris
Photograph from Life magazine, on the ground; firefighters had unknowingly destroyed
April 23,1Q5S. Original caption:
“Alter lire, the remains of
it while breaking through the windows into the building
•Monet's 'M ater Lilies' lie (see fig. 23). The smaller Water Lilies painting, on the other
submerged beneath debris of
hand, had succumbed to flames that reached its location in
walls and gUtss,"
the stairwell between the second and third floors (see fig. 24).
Pollock’s Number 1,1548, installed above it on the third
floor landing, was damaged but successfully conserved.
The rapid response of the New York City Fire
Department saved the collection from far greater destruc¬
tion. Barr and his team, in turn, performed heroic work in
guiding both paintings and Museum occupants to safety.
Museum employees were photographed—men in suits
and ties, women in pencil skirts and heels—passing paint¬
ings hand over hand in order to get them off the premises,
sometimes working at cross-purposes to the firefighters,
fig. 24
M'ho M^ere trying to evacuate everyone. A “Talk of the Town”
Photograph from the NVu- Vorlb
Herald Tribune. .■Vpril 16,195S. piece in the New Yorker, written by a staffer who happened
Onginal caption: “E-vamining
to be lunching in the Sculpture Garden when the fire began,
Damage—Monroe Wheeler
ot the .Museum of Modem .^rt, marveled at the incongruity of the Museum officials’ sudden
looking at the tire'damaged new roles: “As we approached the front door, we came on a
painting by Claude .Monet
entitled 'Water Lilies.' after
fireman M'^ho looked like Nelson Rockefeller [the Museum’s
the tire \’esterdav.“ chaimian], and sure enough it luas Nelson Rockefeller.
30
 The public was riveted by the dramatic story of the fire, and out¬
pourings of sympathy filled the Museum’s mailroom during the spring
and summer of 1958. Many of the Museum’s Trustees and patrons pro¬
vided generous funds for reconstruction, and many smaller donations
arrived unsolicited. A host of artists, collectors, scholars, and layper¬
sons from New York and around the world expressed their condolences
regarding the fire, and many specifically mentioned their sadness at the
loss of the large Water Lilies painting (the Museum did not declare the
smaller Monet a total loss until late in i96i).3° Typical in its passion was
a letter from a young Dan Flavin, who within a decade would secure his
place as one of the leading artists of the Minimalist generation. He wrote,
“I wiU so miss the large picture but any portion of it which can be saved
will be enough for me. My heart still aches over the loss.”^' Many other
writers, with more than a touch of the macabre, asked if they might
receive fragments of the ruined Monet painting as keepsakes.
Within the Museum, the sense of horror surrounding the loss
of the two Monets rapidly transformed into a commitment to replace
them. Curator Dorothy Miller was in Switzerland at the time of the fire,
and Barr had immediately cabled to apprise her of the extent of the
damage.3^ Within ten days, he was writing her again—although she was
now on vacation—to ask for help in finding another Monet. Miller tele¬
phoned Michel Monet at Giverny, whose wife informed her that the stu¬
dio was now empty—all the paintings having been sold to Katia Granoff
in Paris. Before long Miller was in Paris, and she and Granoff went to
the studio of the painter Rene Demeurisse, where Granoff was storing
four large Monet paintings, one a single panel (fig. 25) and the others a
triptych (fig. 5). Barr knew the works from a previous trip, but followed
up on Miller’s visit in June and confirmed the desire to have both the
triptych and the single panel come to New York for the Committee on
the Museum Collections’ consideration. As a buyer, the Museum now
31
 ClAODE MOXET

TV Vltts«un^ ot Xk\km Art> Nirt. Yoik

Mrs. ^vn Ou^^etxheim Hmd
would suffer the effects of the revolution in taste it had helped spur. A
rapid succession of sales to private collectors as well as museum pro¬
fessionals had created a situation of acute scarcity and escalated prices.
Whereas Michel Monet had charged the Museum four million francs
(then $11,500) for the large painting bought in 1955, just three years
later the triptych cost the equivalent of $150,000 and the single panel
$83,000.^3

Barr presented the canvases to the Committee in December

1958. Members encountered, in the triptych, an expanse of painting
nearly forty-two feet wide. Clouds painted in pink, violet, and shades
of cream fill its center panel (see fig. 26). They are punctuated by small
explosions of blossoms on the surface of the water, itself an almost
Caribbean turquoise. In the two side panels the palette shifts to a darker
key of deep blues, greens, and purples denoting the shaded water,
scribbles of green lily pads, and spots of flora.
The single panel, almost twenty feet wide, features a lighter
palette and a more diffuse composition. As always, there is no indica¬
tion of the horizon or pond’s edge, but here the viewer is treated to
an exceptionally harmonious expanse of painterly reverie. Softly flowing
passages of cloud reflections, overhanging foliage, lily pads, and water
share the space without dramatic incident. The thickly scumbled sur¬
face unifying the whole covers countless layers of magnificent painting
now invisible to view.
Barr reported later to Mrs. Simon Guggenheim, who had been
unable to attend the meeting:

The Committee looked at the two compositions for a long

time, not so much because of doubt as to which we should get,

fig. 26
CLAUDE MONET
Water Lilies (detail), 1914-26
(see fig. 5)
 fig-27
InstaUing Water Lilies, 1914-26, at
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, c. 1959

but because they hold the eye with such fascination. All agreed
that in spite of the additional cost and the problem of space,
we should acquire the triptych. At the same time, all agreed
that if possible, a donor should be found for the twenty-foot
canvas so that ultimately both compositions could be shown
in one room, the triptych at one end, the single panel at the
other. This is a wonderful dream which just possibly might
come true.... I think I have rarely seen the Committee in a
more excited state. They were deeply impressed, indeed I could
fairly say spellbound.^'^

Ultimately, Mrs. Guggenheim provided the funds for both the triptych
and the single panel.
Both new purchases required extensive conservation work
before being put on display—the triptych at the end of 1959, and the
single panel a year later (see fig. 27). The twenty-five years of neglect in
the studio, combined with the rigors of subsequent travel, had taken a
heavy toll. In the course of the process conservators removed the origi¬
nal warped stretchers from the paintings so that they could attach more
structurally sound supports. Miller, unwilling to throw away what she
36
 fig. 28
Installation view of Americans at The Museum of Modern Art,
New York, 1959-60, showingJackYoungerman’s Aztec ffl, 1959 (left);
Palmyra, 1959 (center); and Big Black, 1959 (right), with
works by Robert MaUary in background

appreciated as marvelous artifacts, offered the triptych’s three original

stretchers to the artists Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, and Fred
Mitchell. All three artists made large-scale paintings, and she felt they
would be able to make good use of them.^s She probably realized that
Kelly and Youngerman, both of whom had shown in her i6 Americans
exhibition in 1959 (see fig. 28), had spent time in Paris in the early 1950s
and even had visited Givemy.
Indeed, a generation of artists slightly younger than the
Abstract Expressionists could be said to offer closer comparisons to
Monet than those artists who provoked the initial renewed attention
to his work. The actual resemblance between Monet’s paintings and
those of such figures as Newman, Still, and Pollock was limited. While
the all-over composition and of course the fact of their size made the
comparison somewhat relevant, Monet’s frame of reference was the
mural decoration of nineteenth-century architectural interiors rather
than autonomous paintings. Moreover, Monet’s manner of painting
had virtually nothing in common with that of these painters—just as
their own manners of painting had little in common with each other.
Monet’s Water Lilies paintings were fundamentally based on the obser¬
vation of nature. The artist worked outdoors to make the paintings
37
 fig. 29
CLAUDE MONET
Agapanthus, 1914-26
Oil on canvas, 6' 6" x 70 '/V (198.2 x 178.4 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Sylvia Slifka in memory of Joseph Slifka
from which he would develop the grandes decorations; the plants, the
trees, and the reflections were his sources of inspiration. Works such
as Agapanthus, 1914-26 (fig. 29; given to the Museum in 1992), vividly
portray the lily plants along the banks of the pond. Such a practice is
far removed from the mentality of the Abstract Expressionists, who in
their various ways all felt that everything they put on the canvas came
from deep within themselves, as an emanation of the artist’s psyche.
Pollock summed it up concisely when Hans Hoffman asked him about
the role of nature in his work: “I am nature,” he snapped.^®
The next generation was different. American painting was
beginning to look more and more like Monet’s late Water Lilies. While
few of the older Abstract Expressionists had had the opportunity to go
to Europe, younger artists were far more apt to travel. French paint¬
ing again became a feasible model for artists such as Sam Francis and
Joan Mitchell (see fig. 30), both of whom went to live in France full-time
(Mitchell’s property included a gardener’s cottage that Monet had once
occupied).37 The extravagant lushness of the brushwork in paintings
by Philip Guston suggested the comparison as well. The Museum of
Modern Art acquired his painting The Clock, 1956-57 (fig. 31), at the
same meeting at which it bought Monet’s triptych. By the latter half of
the 1950s, the term Abstract Impressionism was frequently invoked to
describe the successor to Abstract Expressionism.

In the spring of i960 the events of the last decade found their culmi¬
nation at The Museum of Modern Art in Claude Monet: Seasons and
Moments. The exhibition, which presented landscape paintings from
the 1860s onward, was organized by Princeton art historian and adjunct
curator William C. Seitz, who had gone to France in the late 1950s to
visit the places that Monet had painted. Seitz’s photographs of these
39
 JOAN MITCHELL
Ladyhug,1957
Oil on canvas, 6' 5 ^/s" x 9' (191.9 x 274 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Purchase

fig-31
PHILIP GUSTON
The Clock, 1956-57
Oil on canvas, 6' 4" x 64 '/s" (193.1 x 163 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Mrs. Bliss Parkinson
 fig- 32
Photograph by William C. Seitz of
Monet’s water lily pond, Giverny, 1957-58

sites, shot from vantage points as close as possible to those chosen

by the artist, were displayed in the exhibition to illuminate the close
relation between site and painting (see fig. 32). It would seem that this
approach—positioning Monet as a recorder of visible reality—might
disprove the argument that he anticipated mid-century abstraction.
But Seitz was able to make his method a paradoxical reinforcement
for that viewpoint, proposing that the paintings’ abstraction is all the
more wondrous precisely because of their photographic veracity: “It is
surprising how little ‘aesthetic distance’ separates these images from
photographic actuality; yet in their isolation from other things, and
because of the mood they elicit, they seem, like pure thought or medita¬
tion, abstract.”^®
As John Canaday recognized in his review of the exhibition
in the New York Times, “The intention of the exhibition at the Museum
of Modern Art... is to confirm Monet’s new position as a painter of
the twentieth century rather than an anachronism.” He went on to
astutely identify the misreading that had taken place over the prior
decade, arguing that “this painter who was concerned with neither
abstraction nor symbolism now appears as the precursor of a school of
41
 contemporary art that has rejected the visible world.”39 The popularity
of the exhibition exceeded all expectations, and the attendance levels
were such that the Museum added evening hours.'^” Soon thereafter,
Michel Monet completed a three-year restoration project in Giverny,
aiming to return his father’s water garden to its former glory/'
By this time, however. New York was host to the next wave of
art, one that would replace the abstract painting into whose service
Monet had been pressed. As Neo-Dada and Pop took hold in the gal¬
leries, Abstract Expressionism suddenly became old-fashioned. Andy
Warhol later remembered the Monet exhibition at the Museum for
having been the death knell of the movement: “Don’t you remember
the Monet retrospective at The Museum of Modem Art and what that
did to Abstract Expressionism? The galleries had been full of Abstract
Expressionists and Impressionists. And then, it was as if somebody
said, ‘Why, look at Monet, that sweet old man, he was doing all these
wild things before you were born.’”4^ Ayoung artist was better off pur¬
suing subject matter in the supermarket or in the tabloids.
Nonetheless, Monet’s late paintings were now an inevitable
reference point for contemporary artists. Pop’s cultural climate may
be the furthest thing from the gardens at Giverny, but Monet comes to
mind when one thinks of how in 1964 Warhol himself would fill the Leo
CasteUi Gallery in New York (and then the Sonnabend GaUery in Paris)
with dozens of Flower paintings made in several sizes and colors (see
fig- 33)- James Rosenquist followed Monet’s example when he installed
the panoramic F-111 in the CasteUi Gallery in 1965, wrapping the panels
around four walls to immerse the viewer in its imagery (fig. 34).«
In the decades since, the Water Lilies have remained touch¬
stones, and countless artists have entered into dialogue with Monet
m unexpected ways. It is the mark of great art that it encourages such
re-readings, that its potential is far richer than the artist’s conscious
42
 fig-33
Installation view of Andy Warhol: Flower Paintings
at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, 1964

fig-34
Installation view of James Rosenquist: P-111
at Leo Castelli GaUeiy, New York, 1965
 IL J -1-nn
figs. 35 and 36
Installation views of Water Lilies
at the Musee de I’Orangerie, Paris,
after renovations completed in 2006
intentions or efforts could ever have defined. And it is the responsibil¬
ity of the museum to make this work available for all that will be born
of it in the future. But the artist’s intentions stay relevant as weU. Monet
knew the pleasure that his art and his garden gave him, and he wished
to extend it to coming generations. He wanted to provide a respite from
an increasingly urban, commercial, and technological world. Nearly
one hrmdred years later that world is exponentially more so, and viewers
in the midst of the city continue to venerate Monet’s evocation of
nature’s beauty (see figs. 35 and 36). Whereas a museum is a place that
charts history, and with it time, it is also a place to pretend that time
stands stiU, or at least moves as slowly as a cloud passing over a shim¬
mering pond.

45
NOTES

The authors thank Paul Hayes Tucker for 8. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. to William H. Jaffe,
his generous advice and critical reading February 6,1952.
of this text. 9. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. to James Thrall Soby,
April 13,1955.
1. See Ezra Pound, Make It New (London: 10. James Thrall Soby to Alfred H. Barr, Jr.,
Faber and Faber, 1934). April 17,1955.
2. For an extensive discussion of this 11. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. to James Thrall Soby,
history, see Michael Leja, “The April 18,1955.
Monet Revival and New York School 12. Quoted in Lynn Zelevansky, “Dorothy
Abstraction,” in Monet in the 20th Miller’s ‘Americans,’ 1942-63,” in The
Century, ed. Paul Hayes Tucker (New Museum of Modem Art at Mid-Century:
Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), At Home and Abroad. Studies in Modem
98-108. Art 4 (1995): 74-75- Original in Dorothy
3. On the Water Lilies’ early years at Canning Miller Oral History, Archives of
the Orangerie, see Romy Golan, American Art, Smithsonian Institution,
“Oceanic Sensations: Monet’s Grandes Washington, D.C., transcript of inter¬
Decorations and Mural Painting in views conducted by Paul Cummings,
France from 1927 to 1952,” in Monet in May 26,1970-September 28,1971.
the 20th Century, 86-97. 13. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. to Michel Monet,
4. Ann Temkin telephone interview with April 26,1955.
Jack Youngerman, March 2009. 14. Vasily Kandinsky, “Riickblicke,” in
5. Andre Masson, “Monet le fondateur,” Kandinsky, 1901-1913 (Berlin: Verlag
Verve 7, no. 27-28 (1952): 68. Der Sturm, 1913). Reprinted in English
6. Rene Wehrli, Claude Monet (Zurich: as “Reminiscences,” in Kandinsky:
Kunsthaus Zurich, 1952), 6. Complete Writings on Art, vol. 1, eds.
7. Barnett Newman to William A. M. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo
Burden, July 3,1953 (copy). Museum (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1982), 363.
Collection Files, Department of 15. Press release dated November 30,1955.
Painting and Sculpture, The Museum 16. Michel Monet to John Rewald,
of Modern Art, New York. (All sub¬ November 14,1955. Translation from
sequently cited correspondence is French by the authors.
from these files unless otherwise 17. S.P., “About Art and Artists,” New York
noted.) Reprinted as “Open Letter Times, November 30,1955.
to William A. M. Burden, President 18. A. L. Chanin, “Art,” The Nation,
of the Museum of Modern Art,” in December 24,1955, 563.
Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and 19. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. to Mrs. Simon
Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill (New Guggenheim, February 9,1956.
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 38-40.

46
20. Daniel Wildenstein, Monet: Or the 28. Sanka Knox, “Violations Listed in Eire
Triumph of Impressionism, catalogue at Museum,” New York Times, April 17,
raisonne in four volumes, vol. IV 1958.
(Cologne: Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 29. “Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker,
1996), 1,030. April 26,1958, 24.
21. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Painting and 30. The Museum donated the smaller
Sculpture Collections, July 1,1955 to painting’s remains to the New York
December 31,1956,” The Bulletin of University Conservation Clinic, which
The Museum of Modem Art 24, no. 4 was under the direction of Sheldon
(Summer 1957): 3. Keck. With his wife, Caroline, Keck was
22. Alexander Liberman, “Monet,” Vogue a frequent conservation consultant
126 (July 1955): 64-69,106. for the Museum. This material is now
23. Leo Steinberg, “Month in Review,” located at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts.
Arts 20, no. 5 (February 1956): 46-48. 31. Daniel N. Flavin to Alfred H. Barr, Jr.,
Reprinted as “Monet’s Water Lilies,” in April 16,1958, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers
Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations [1.303], The Museum of Modern Art
with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Archives, New York.
Oxford University Press, 1972), 235-39. 32. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. to Dorothy Miller,
24. Thomas B. Hess, “Monet: Tithonus at April 15,1958.
Giverny,” Art News 55, no. 6 (October 33. Sarah Rubenstein, comptroller, to
1956): 42,53. Betsy Jones, secretary of collections,
25. Clement Greenberg, “The Later September 9, i960.
Monet,” Art News Annual 26 (1957): 34. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. to Mrs. Simon
132-48,194-96, quote p. 196. Reprinted Guggenheim, December 22,1958.
in John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg, 35. Authors’ telephone interviews with
The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4 EUsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, and
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Ered Pajerski, nephew of Fred Mitchell,
Press, 1986-1993), 3-11. March and May 2009.
26. E. C. Goossen, “The Big Canvas,” Art 36. Jackson Pollock as quoted by Lee
International 2, no. 8 (November 1958): Krasner in oral history interview with
45-47, quote p. 46. Reprinted in Geoffrey Krasner, November 2,1964-April 11,
Battcock, ed.. The New Art (New York: 1968, Archives of American Art,
E. P. Dutton & Co., 1973), 57-65. Smithsonian Institution.
27. David Sylvester, “London Ponders 37. Klaus Kertess, Joan Mitchell (New York:
Monet as a Modernist,” New York Times, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1997), 181-82.
October 6,1957. Reprinted in Sylvester, 38. William C. Seitz, Claude Monet: Seasons
About Modem Art (New Haven: Yale and Moments (New York: The Museum
University Press, 2002), 74-76. of Modern Art, i960), 43.

47
39- John Canaday, “Art: Monet Exhibition. 42. Andy Warhol, “Warhol Interviews
Comprehensive Landscape Show Bourdon,” 1962-63, previously unpub¬
Opens Today at the Modern Museum,” lished; in Kenneth Goldsmith, ed.. I’ll
New York Times, March 9, i960. Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol
40. Letter to lenders sent by Monroe Interviews (New York: CarroU & Graf
Wheeler, Director of Exhibitions and Pubhshers, 2004), 14.
Publications, The Museum of Modern 43. AnnTemldn, interview with James
Art, and Richard R Brown, Chief Rosenquist, March 2009. Rosenquist
Curator of Art, Los Angeles County invoked Monet while discussing the
Museum of Art, August 30, i960. role of peripheral vision in painting:
Curatorial Exhibition Files [Exh. #660], “Monet stood in a circle of his own
The Museum of Modern Art Archives, paintings so that he could only see his
New York. Many thanks to Michelle own colors.” “P-111,” undated artist
Harvey, Associate Archivist, for her statement. Museum Collection Files,
generosity in sharing this information. Department of Painting and Sculpture,
41. IZIS and Jean Saucet, “Claude Monet: The Museum of Modem Art, New
lejardin des chefs-d’oeuvre,” Paris York. P-111 is now in the collection
MATCH, no. 606 (November 19, i960): of The Museum of Modem Art.
72-85.

48
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Georgel, Pierre. Claude Monet: Nympheas. Spate, Virginia. Claude Monet: Life and
Paris: Hazan, 1999. Work. New York: Rizzoli, 1992.

Hoog, Michel. Musee de I’Orangerie: The Stuckey, Charles F. Monet Water Lilies. New
Nympheas of Claude Monet. Paris: Editions York: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, 1988.
de la Reunion des musees nationaux,
2006. -. Claude Monet, 1840-1926.
Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago;
Moffett, Charles S. Monet’s Water Lilies. New York: Thames & Hudson, Inc., 1995.
New York: The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, 1978. Tucker, Paul Hayes. Monet in the 20th
Century. New Haven: Yale University
Moffett, Charles S., and James N. Press, 1998. With essays by John House,
Wood. Monet’s Years at Givemy: Romy Golan, and Michael Leja.
Beyond Impressionism. New York: The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978. -. Claude Monet: Life and Art. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
Rey, Jean Dominique, and Denis Rouart.
Monet Water Lilies: The Complete Series. Wildenstein, Daniel. Monet: Or the
Catalogue raisonne simultaneously Triumph of Impressionism. Catalogue
published in French as Monet: Les raisonne in four volumes. Cologne:
Nympheas. Paris: Flammarion, 2008. Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1996.

Seitz, William C. Claude Monet: Seasons

and Moments. New York: The Museum of
Modem Art, i960.

49
Published in conjunction with the Copyright credits for certain illustrations
exhibition Monet’s Water Lilies, organized are cited on the following page. All rights
by Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josee and reserved
Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting
and Sculpture, at The Museum of Modern Library of Congress Control Number:
Art, New York, September 13,2009- 2009929588
spring 2010 ISBN: 978-0-87070-774-2

The exhibition is made possible by Distributed in the United States and

®HANJIN SHIPPING Canada by D.A.P./Distributed Art
Publishers, Inc., 155 Sixth Avenue,
Produced by the Department of 2nd floor. New York, New York 10013
Publications, The Museum of Modern Art, www.artbooks.com
New York
Distributed outside the United States and
Edited by Jennifer Liese Canada by Thames & Hudson Ltd,
Designed by Amanda Washburn 181 High Holborn, London WCiV 7QX
Production by Christina Grillo www.thamesandhudson.com
Printed and bound by Oceanic Graphic
Printing, Inc., China Front and back cover:
This book is typeset in Dolly Claude Monet
The paper is 140 gsm Golden East Matte Water Lilies (detail), 1914-26
Artpaper Oil on canvas, three panels, each
6 63)4" X13' 11'/4" (200 X 424.8 cm); overall
Published by The Museum of Modern Art 6' 6 3/4" X 41' 10 3)8" (200 X 1,276 cm)
11 West 53rd Street The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
New York, New York 10019-5497 Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund
www.moma.org
Inside cover flaps:
© 2009 The Museum of Modern Art, Claude Monet in his studio, 1922
New York
Frontispiece:
Claude Monet in his garden, n. d.

Printed in China

50
CREDITS PHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS
The Bridgeman Art Library: fig. 10
Individual works of art appearing in this Bridgeman-Giraudon / Art Resource, NY.
book may be protected by copyright in the Photograph by Henri Manuel: fig. 7, inside
United States of America or elsewhere, and back flap
may not be reproduced in any form without Courtesy Leo CasteOi Gallery: fig. 33, fig. 34
the permission of the rights holders. In Giraudon / Art Resource, NY: inside front flap
reproducing the images in this publication, Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY: fig. 9, fig. 16
the Museum obtained the permission Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art:
of the rights holders whenever possible, fig. 3, fig. 21
hi those instances where the Museum Musee de I’Orangerie, rights reserved: fig. 11
could not locate the rights holders or the Musee Marmottan-Claude Monet, Paris: fig. 7
photographers, notwithstanding good- Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art /
faith efforts, it requests that any contact Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
information concerning such rights holders Photograph by Soichi Sunami: fig. 20
be forwarded so that they may be contacted Museum Collection Files, Department of
for future editions. Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of
Modern Art, New York. Photograph by
COPYRIGHTS Soichi Sunami: fig. 4
© 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), The Museum of Modern Art, New York,
New York / ADAGP, Paris: fig. 18 Digital Imaging Studio: fig. 5, fig. 14,
© Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos: fig. 25, fig. 30. Photograph by John Wronn:
fig-1 fig. 22, fig. 26. Photograph by Paige Knight:
© 2009 The Estate of Philip Guston: fig. 31 fig. 29. Photograph by Thomas Griesel:
© Estate of Joan Mitchell: fig. 30 fig. 12, fig. 15. Photograph by Mali Olatunji;
© 2009 Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists fig-31
Rights Society (ARS), New York: fig. 15 The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New
© 2009 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists York. The Dorothy C. Miller Papers [III.18].
Rights Society (ARS), New York: fig. 16 Photograph by Terence McCarten: fig. 24.
© 2009 PoUock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Photographic Archive: fig. 13. Photograph
Rights Society (ARS), New York: fig. 14, by Kate Keller: fig. 6, fig. 18. Photograph
fig-17 by Soichi Sunami: fig. 17, fig. 19, fig. 28.
©James Rosenquist / Licensed by VAGA, Photograph by RoUie McKenna: fig. 27.
New York, NY: fig. 34 WiUiam C. Seitz Papers, 1.(9): fig. 1, fig. 32
© 2009 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Private collection: fig. 8
Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), Reunion des Musees Nationaux / Art
New York: fig. 33 Resource, NY. Photograph by Herve
© Jack Youngerman / Licensed by VAGA, Lewandowski: fig. 35, fig. 36. Photograph
New York, NY: fig. 28 by G. Blot / C. Jean: fig. 2
© Time Life Pictures: fig. 23 Roger-Viollet, Paris / The Bridgeman Art
Library: fig. 8
Snark / Art Resource, NY: frontispiece
Time Life Pictures / Getty Images.
Photograph by Ralph Morse: fig. 23
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