Les Nymphéas at Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, France
Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, France
A hush falls over visitors as they enter the pristine white rooms that house French artist Claude Monet’s monumental water lily series. After decades of languishing under neon lights, the huge paintings are once more basking in daylight following a six-year renovation of Paris’ Musée de l’Orangerie, home to the impressionist masterpieces. The play of sky on the shimmering canvases inspires a mixture of awe and reverie.
“There is not really any equivalent in the history of art of such a body of work,” says Philippe Saunier, curator of the museum, which reopened in May.
Paintings from this group can be found in major museums, but the eight panels at the Orangerie are exceptional in scale—if placed side by side, they would span almost 300 feet. As with his other series representing haystacks or a cathedral facade, Monet attempted to capture the effects of light at different times of day.
The water lilies featured in the paintings, inspired by the pond in Monet’s garden at his Normandy home in Giverny, obsessed the painter for the last 30 years of his life. Prior to his death in 1926 at the age of 86, he struggled with poor eyesight as he worked feverishly on these Nymphéas, as the paintings are called in France. Monet built a vast studio to house the canvases, which were mounted on wheels so they could be moved.
The series was designed for the Orangerie, a building with large glass windows in the Tuileries gardens in central Paris, which was constructed in 1852 to house an orange grove. It lies on an east-west axis alongside the River Seine and Monet conceived the paintings for two adjacent oval-shaped rooms, with those representing sunrise in the east and sunset in the west.
“He organized the space according to the progression of the sun so that, in the end, his great decorative ensemble reflects the passing of time,” explains Saunier. “It is an unprecedented experiment which tries to go beyond Impressionism to push it to its limits. In fact, it is the culmination of his approach, of his work on series.”
Unveiled a year after the painter’s death, the paintings initially failed to attract a public that saw Impressionism as outdated. By the 1960s, when architects added a second floor to the museum to house the Walter-Guillaume collection—including works by Renoir, Picasso and Modigliani—the skylight above the water lilies was sealed off, depriving them of natural light and their original, intended stage.
With Impressionism back in vogue by the 1980s, visitors flocked to the Orangerie in numbers that would reach some 500,000 per year. In spite of—or perhaps because of—the vast numbers of people visiting the museum, it was decided that the 1960s-created space simply didn’t do justice to Monet’s panels and the museum was closed in 2000 for the extensive renovations that would return sunlight to the Nymphéas. Since the water lilies could not be detached from the walls, they were sealed inside protective casings and left in the midst of the renovations, managing to emerge intact despite playing neighbor to jackhammers and earth-movers for half a decade. The top floor was demolished and the Walter-Guillaume collection moved to a new basement gallery, where some paintings hang on exposed concrete walls. The small vestibule leading to the water lilies, which had been destroyed in the 1960s, has been restored.
“Monet explicitly conceived this as a transitional space, a sort of vestibule, like in a temple or a church,” says Saunier.
If Monet was feeling mystical, it was largely due to the context of the First World War, which was raging around him as he began work on the series.
“When he was painting these canvases, he had the feeling he was fighting for the values of beauty in the face of barbarity,” says Saunier. Now, this ardent celebration of nature can once more be viewed in its full splendor.
“We had to give justice to Monet and I think we succeeded,” Saunier says with a satisfied smile. Joelle Diderich
Ongoing • Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, France
33.01.44.77.80.07 • www.musee-orangerie.fr
Photo: View of one of two renovated rooms housing French artist Claude Monet’s monumental Les Nymphéas, May 2006. Photo by JC Ballot. Image courtesy JC Ballot/EMOC. Musée de l’Orangerie.
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