The Modern Art Specialist
A monumental Monet reveals the radical modernity of his late work and the foresight of two women who championed it.
By Thomas Bompard
Co-Head of Modern and Contemporary Art, Sotheby’s France
In the 1950s, when Claude Monet’s late canvases were still dismissed as the faltering efforts of an artist who had been losing his sight, two women saw in them the future of painting. Katia Granoff, a Russian-born dealer who opened a Paris gallery in 1926, had made her name promoting artists including Chaïm Soutine and Pierre Bonnard. Jeanne Schlumberger, an independent-minded patron who shunned Parisian society, was the widow of Marcel Schlumberger, a pioneer of modern oil exploration. She was assembling an intensely personal collection in the family’s townhouse on rue Las-Cases. Where critics saw decline, Granoff and Schlumberger recognized a vision that anticipated some of the defining developments of 20th-century art.
Today, Monet hardly seems like an artist in need of champions. Yet three decades after his death in 1926, his reputation remained firmly rooted in the 19th century. Celebrated as the great hero of impressionism, he had spent the 1910s and 1920s at Giverny producing ever larger canvases in which the natural world edged toward abstraction.
Few paintings better demonstrate the extraordinary daring of Monet’s imagination than “Iris,” created around 1924–25. Nearly six feet across, it is the largest of three horizontal-format iris compositions he made in the 1920s, and the only one still in private hands. Long, dark green leaves surge upward from the bank, punctuated by touches of violet and yellow. To the left, individual blooms can still be identified; farther across the surface, contours dissolve into vigorous strokes of pigment. There is no horizon to steady the eye. Behind the flowers stretches an expanse of blue that could almost be open sky.
But the blue is the sky reflected in water. For Monet, this was an old fascination: from “Impression, Sunrise” (1872), now at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, to the monumental “Nymphéas” (1914–26) at the Musée de l’Orangerie, he returned repeatedly to the unstable meeting of light, water and their reflections. In “Iris,” the flowers remain recognizable, while the space around them refuses to resolve into bank, pond or sky.
Although cataracts had seriously affected Monet’s vision by the time he created “Iris,” he was pursuing something beyond the fleeting impression: an almost timeless experience of the garden, in which scale and color could envelop the viewer. Here I see a kinship with the ambitions of abstract expressionists Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, who would likewise aspire to contain the cosmos within a single canvas.
So convinced was Granoff that she staked her own fortune on Monet’s neglected canvases. In 1950, she met Michel Monet, the artist’s son, who had inherited the canvases at Giverny. Six years later, he sold her a substantial group. Granoff mortgaged her assets and secured a loan from Schlumberger, who in turn had privileged access to the paintings. Jeanne chose “Iris.”
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, American museums and artists were beginning to recognize this other Monet. In 1955, Alfred H. Barr Jr., founding director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, purchased a monumental “Nymphéas” from the artist’s son, the first such panel to enter an American museum. Displayed prominently at MoMA, its loose, allover handling resonated with contemporary abstraction. Sam Francis, a California-born painter who settled in Paris in 1950, also visited Granoff’s gallery to study Monet’s late canvases. His vast, gestural paintings, suggestive of natural forms, exemplified the tendency known as “abstract impressionism.”
Among the works offered in our landmark Schlumberger Collection auction are two late Monets, “Iris” and “Saule pleureur” (circa 1918-19), alongside works by Cézanne, Gustave Moreau and Camille Claudel. Jeanne preferred to live with her collection rather than lend it for exhibitions. “Iris” remained on the walls of rue Las-Cases for decades, rarely moved or handled. Its canvas is still unlined, its surface unvarnished, with colors in places almost unmixed. Up close, we encounter the extraordinary freedom of Monet’s brushwork; step back, and the irises, water and reflected sky come into focus. For me, the great achievement of “Iris” is how far Monet takes painting without ever leaving his garden at Giverny.
—As told to James Haldane
