Monet’s Water Lilies: How World War I Inspired Monet to Paint His Final Masterpieces & Create “the World’s First Art Installation”

When one con­sid­ers which artists most pow­er­ful­ly evoke the hor­rors of trench war­fare, Claude Mon­et is hard­ly the first name to come to mind. And yet, once viewed that way, his final Water Lilies paint­ings — belong­ing to a series that, in repro­duc­tion, speaks to many of no more har­row­ing a set­ting than a doc­tor’s wait­ing room — can hard­ly be viewed in any oth­er. These eight large-scale can­vass­es con­sti­tute “a war memo­r­i­al to the mil­lions of lives trag­i­cal­ly lost in the First World War,” argues Great Art Explained cre­ator James Payne. Mon­et declined to include a hori­zon line in any of them, leav­ing view­ers in “a vast field of unfath­omable noth­ing­ness, of light, air, and water,” at once peace­ful and rem­i­nis­cent of “the bat­tle-rav­aged land­scape along the west­ern front.”

Those bat­tle­fields “had no begin­ning or end, and no hori­zons. Time and space was for­got­ten, as sol­diers were enveloped in a sea of mud, sur­round­ed by water­logged and sur­re­al land­scapes, which cov­ered their field of vision.” The Great War, as it was then known, still raged on when the sep­tu­a­ge­nar­i­an Mon­et began these works.  (“He could hear the sound of gun­fire from 50 kilo­me­ters away from his house in Giverny as he paint­ed,” notes Payne.)

By the time he fin­ished them, in the last year of his life, the fight­ing had been over for eight years. In a sense, these paint­ings may have kept him alive: “He was con­stant­ly ‘rework­ing’ them and seemed inca­pable of fin­ish­ing,” even though, by his own admis­sion, “he could no longer see the details or make out col­ors.”

When these Water Lilies were revealed to the pub­lic, mount­ed in their own spe­cial­ly designed gallery in Paris’ Musée de l’O­r­angerie (arranged by close per­son­al friend Georges Clemenceau), Mon­et was dead — which may, in part, explain the crit­ics’ will­ing­ness to deride them as the work of an artist who had lost his pow­ers. “Mon­et, reject­ed by crit­ics in the 19th cen­tu­ry for being too rad­i­cal, was now being crit­i­cized in the 20th cen­tu­ry for not being rad­i­cal enough.” It would take a lat­er gen­er­a­tion of artists — includ­ing Amer­i­can painters like Mark Rothko and Jack­son Pol­lock  — to see his last works as “a log­i­cal jump­ing-off point for abstrac­tion,” and the space that hous­es them as “the Sis­tine Chapel of impres­sion­ism.” World War I has passed out of liv­ing mem­o­ry, but “the world’s first art instal­la­tion” it inspired Mon­et to cre­ate has lost none of its pow­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Paint Water Lilies Like Mon­et in 14 Min­utes

Rare 1915 Film Shows Claude Mon­et at Work in His Famous Gar­den at Giverny

1923 Pho­to of Claude Mon­et Col­orized: See the Painter in the Same Col­or as His Paint­ings

1,540 Mon­et Paint­ings in a Two Hour Video

A Gallery of 1,800 Gigapix­el Images of Clas­sic Paint­ings: See Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Ear­ring, Van Gogh’s Star­ry Night & Oth­er Mas­ter­pieces in Close Detail

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.