A Season At Monet's Garden by CSF Publishing

This is a preview of the 72 first pages of the book by Claudia TOUTAIN-DORBEC

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A Season At Monetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Garden

This edition copyright © 2011 CSF Publishing, New Mexico, USA Photographs copyright © 2010 by Claudia Toutain-Dorbec Introduction copyright © 2011 by Nicole Zapata-Aubé Published in 2011 by CSF Publishing, New Mexico, USA ISBN-13 978-0-9802432-1-5 ISBN-10 0-9802432-1-1 Web: csfpublishing.com E-mail: info@csfpublishing.com 505 747 1177 Limited edition prints of the photographs in this book, signed by the photographer, are available. Address inquiries to info@csfpublishing.com or visit csfpublishing.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, whithout permission in writing from the publisher.

For Jill, Amy, and Pierre with love

Photographs by

Claudia Toutain-Dorbec

A Season At Monet’s Garden

Introduction by

Nicole Zapata-Aubé

Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres

Claude Monet by Nadar, 1899

I would like to paint as the bird sings

Preface

by Claudia Toutain-Dorbec

My discovery of Claude Monet, the gardener, and his now-famous life in Giverny did not occur until I was an adult. Through this disclosure came a deeper understanding for the staggeringly beautiful, fleeting moments he captured on canvas. My lifelong passions also revolve around art and gardens. I repeatedly revisited Giverny; it became a small obsession. Monet’s garden is truly spectacular. An invitation from the Fondation Claude Monet in 2009, based on my American Southwest botanical work, to spend one week per month there for five months in 2010, with a private studio, could not be refused. From April to August, I was one of the privileged few watching the inside operations, working in Monet’s first Giverny studio (which is not open to the public), witnessing the sun coming up inside the compound and the morning mist disappearing on his water lily pond. My cameras recorded vignettes, passing fragments of time, and a few glorious moments that took my breath away. The project -- to express my vision of the garden in an exhibit, a book, and prints -- was difficult, but rewarding. It was a gamble of time, energy, and cost, weighed against finite opportunity to search for and find enough specimens to complete the work. Since not a single stem can be cut from the plants in Monet’s garden except by staff gardeners during routine maintenance, my botanical studio portraits are from trimmings, which were pruned with love and the skill of a surgeon -- jewels found in gardeners’ buckets and wheelbarrows, or delicately passed to me by an expert hand. I worked against time, handling each fragile specimen like rare treasure. My private garden time was limited to early morning, and I counted every hour before the crushing deluge of flower-adoring visitors. Many mornings, I found my basket empty, which meant no work for the studio and a precious day lost. Occasionally, I found pictureperfect samples and the reward I was seeking. Although traveling was arduous, summer housing unavailable, and the early morning commute often overwhelming, I anxiously awaited each return visit to Monet’s garden with renewed excitement. The logistics of repeatedly packing, storing, and hauling multiple cameras and heavy equipment, setting up and tearing down my portable studio, became tasks that Pierre, my husband, managed admirably.

Nymphéas, 1914-1915. Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon.

Each trip improved on our teamwork, and my time there became a remarkable life experience. I hope my amazement is captured in these images. The first time I saw a Claude Monet painting was in 1963, at the Portland Art Museum. I was fourteen, a summer art student. It captivated me, and I never forgot it. The fact that one of his 1914 water lily paintings ended up in Portland, Oregon, in the sixties still amazes me. Over time, I realized my extraordinary luck in seeing it at all. Perhaps, at that heady moment, a piece of my soul was given to the great artist -- or was there a brief unconscious premonition of things to come? It’s hard to say. I had no idea then who Claude Monet was or where he came from, and I could never have imagined seeing his home or his water lily pond, or recording my impressions of them in a book. This childhood memory reminds me of my own life’s journey as an artist and of the women who influenced me. My mother, a painter, whom I lost at eleven. My grandmother, who began to paint seriously only at seventy-five. And, my first museum art teacher, LaVerne Krause, who coincidentally became well known for her work, surprisingly reminiscent of that of Monet. These women encouraged me and changed my life in ways it has taken a lifetime to understand. Without them, I know I would not do what I do today.

Introduction

by Nicole Zapata-Aubé Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres

Giverny – a little French village on the banks of the Seine, at the far reaches of Normandy and the Paris region. A little village on cheerful hillsides far from the hustle bustle of Paris. A little village that became celebrated through the presence of Claude Monet. What was he seeking there? What mysteries buried in his works are revealed in the thrumming silence of the artist’s imagined garden? And you, Claudia, what were you looking for in Giverny when you decided to go there in the spring of 2010? The story begins with a property, a landscape, and an indefinable light. In 1845, when Monet was five, his family moved to a house at the mouth of the Seine in Le Havre. In 1872, he painted the Port of Le Havre at dawn just as the sun was making its first forays through the dense fog: “Impression Soleil Levant.” Later, in the land between sea and Seine, he preferred the riverbank’s verdant softness, soothed by sea breezes, snaking through green meadows all the way from Paris. Thus did he discover Giverny in 1882, and decide to make his home there. The milder air and denser light enhance what one sees beyond words. Those who have not traveled in Normandy cannot understand this light, which gives everything a special intensity; it is a land of painters and poets. Claudia, you have traveled the world, trading continents for this small village – such a long journey to stand in Monet’s footsteps. Embracing the same landscapes, breathing in the same air, and stirred by the same light, would you have approached the intimate vision of the water lily master? You followed in the tradition of American artists traveling to Giverny, begun by the painter Willard Leroy Metcalf. As he explored France, he arrived by chance one day at Giverny. Charmed by its natural springtime beauty and the apple trees in bloom, he decided to visit regularly, bringing along his American artist friends from the Académie Julian in Paris: Theodore Wandel, Bruce Taylor, and John Breck. Between 1890 and 1900, they all returned to the United States, but a trip to Giverny, like a new gold rush, became a tradition for American artists traveling to France for the first time. By 1890, Monet’s garden was expanding rapidly as the master of water lilies, a passionate gardener, pursued his dream of attempting to grasp the living force in each plant. Flowers were everywhere: hanging in bunches from trees, climbing paths, fading into the distance on lawns. In 1900, Monet created a pond that took advantage of the little stream crossing his property. Water lilies lingered lazily on the pool’s mirrored surface, where a small, wooden Japanese bridge was reflected. At this inexhaustible source of delight, the artist tried to capture the unbearable lightness of life. The breakdown of light and color on his canvases never ceases to move and fascinate us. Was a woman’s sensuality and sensibility necessary to grasp the very essence of Monet – an essence that emanates from Claudia’s work at Giverny? Did it take a female artist to move beyond the sweet garden flowers and grasp the anxiety of a painter who was trying to stop time, to freeze on a canvas life that was slipping away? The appearance of the landscape conceals a “still life” approach in which life is trapped

on canvas by the artist’s creative power, conveyed by his body and transmitted through his brush. Transcending the simple beauty of appearances – a gentle, scented representation of flowers – Claudia’s work reveals the human fragility, anxieties, and questioning that show through in their already faded features. Life awkwardly held, an evanescence that slowly wilts like forgotten flowers in a waterless vase. Monet struggled to retain this full, rich nature that he knew was gradually fading from his sight. Monet’s work betrays his worries about the loss of his eyesight: The landscapes, increasingly less precise, blend together, becoming nothing more than reflections in the water, with their coloring dominated by shades of violet. Artistic effects or distorted vision? The artist touches us with his boundless desire to seize the intensity of the light’s vibration, those special moments in the garden that he knew to be ephemeral. Underlying Monet’s work is a certain nostalgia, even suffering, related to the incalculable loss of vision and life. Would you, Claudia, have transcended such tempting appearances to penetrate the artist’s inner self and perceive the questions of being, understanding so rightly the passing of time, each person’s fate, and the finite nature of all life? Claudia, would you know, like the gardener, that a garden needs four seasons, and would you say, as French poet François de Malherbe did, “A rose, she lived as roses live, the space of a morning”? I want to thank you, Claudia, for offering me this opportunity, which gives me the great pleasure of talking about your work as well as a subject I care deeply about: Normandy and its landscape painters. As curator and director of a museum in Normandy from 1982 to 2006, I “suffered” Giverny’s proximity and the constant presence of a pictorial movement that overshadows any other form of expression. There are many followers of Monet who, believing they can paint, produce inferior versions of Monet, bled of any essence, any emotion, any sensibility, and without any pictorial quality. Breaking with tradition and classicism, Monet revisited the great pictorial themes, approaching the landscape with the symbolic power of still lifes. In the land of Monet, American painter Joan Mitchell took a new approach to the diffraction of light and color in her works. Your work, Claudia, addresses the major themes that were so dear to Claude Monet by taking an approach to the Impessionist master that is at the same time personal, novel, philosophical, and poetic. The flowers in the Giverny garden, thus cut, gathered, and photographed, enter into a dialog with the painted portraits, leading viewers to ask the right questions. It is rare to meet artists who, like you, have been able to grasp a work’s deepest essence with such accuracy and artistic quality.

Nicole Zapata-Aubé is Chief curator of the museums of Tarbes, France

Botanical Portraits

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