When I first entered university I was registered as an Art History major (before trying out History, Environmental Science, Plant Genetics, Botany, Political Science and then landing on International Relations). I believe I fell in love with art while wandering the galleries of the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg Russia as a junior in high school. The other students I was with rushed through the halls, irritated that we had to find a way to kill the next three hours. I was simply grateful for the reprieve from the endless tours of churches and set myself apart from the group to wander the galleries at my own leisure. I was as interested in the courtyard views presented from the palace windows, until I entered a room dedicated to Impressionism. Here I made my first contact with Monet.
I have often said that I always feel as if I am going home whenever I enter the foot of a mountain. This for me is where I feel at one with myself and my surroundings. And suddenly, I found myself with those same emotions in 1994-Russia. As I studied the water-color canvas of this Impressionist master, although I had never studied art previously, I understood the impact these pieces were intended to have. I recognized their departure from the previous styles, and I understood why these were considered masterpieces. I felt that despite the focally distorted landscapes, these paintings resonated a truth. Truth is light and these paintings showed truth in all its forms. Truth in the morning, midday, evening. Winter, spring, summer and fall. Sunset and sunrise. I spent three hours lost in these paintings.
The magnitude that first experience held has dwarfed every museum experience since - nothing compares. Just before we moved to Paris I read that after a $36 million-six year renovation, l'Orangerie museum was finally opening again to the public. Housed in l'Orangerie are "les Nympheas" a series of eight paintings of enormous scale: each measures 6.5 feet tall and if lined up side by side would measure 298.5 feet in width.
In 1897 Monet had the idea of creating a vast decorative ensemble into the impressions of which the spectator would be plunged. This idea progressed further and further in the Monet-Giverny-Nympheas epic. In 1918, he made a gift to France of the entire work of the Nympheas in its final form, in gratitude for the sacrifices of the war. The paintings were destined to be placed in a special gallery, the Orangerie, in the beautiful historic centre of Paris. Monet developed cataracts in both eyes. It was with this diminished vision that he reworked, destroyed or finished the huge mural decorations of the " cycle des Nympheas ".
The renovation's intention was to expose les Nympheas to natural light, thus altering the mood of each painting depending on weather conditions and time of day. Les Nympheas are arranged in two oval shaped galleries, one gallery evokes scenes at sunrise, the other at dusk.
When we visited, we were lucky enough to avoid crowds. and seized this opportunity to indulge ourselves in the meditative moments these works naturally yield, a dream-like state which I found myself loathe to abandon.
Beneath the Cathedral de Monet is housed the Walter-Guillame collection, with an additional 144 Impressionist paintings. The combination of all this recaptured my imagination and left me awestruck to be experiencing something again, for the first time.
Monet: “Les Nymphéas”
BY W. D. SNODGRASS (1960 Pulitzer Prize winner)
The eyelids glowing, some chill morning.
O world half-known through opening, twilit lids
Before the vague face clenches into light;
O universal waters like a cloud,
Like those first clouds of half-created matter;
O all things rising, rising like the fumes
From waters falling, O forever falling;
Infinite, the skeletal shells that fall, relinquished,
The snowsoft sift of the diatoms, like selves
Downdrifting age upon age through milky oceans;
O slow downdrifting of the atoms;
O island nebulae and O the nebulous islands
Wandering these mists like falsefires, which are true,
Bobbing like milkweed, like warm lanterns bobbing
Through the snowfilled windless air, blinking and passing
As we pass into the memory of women
Who are passing. Within those depths
What ravening? What devouring rage?
How shall our living know its ends of yielding?
These things have taken me as the mouth an orange—
That acrid sweet juice entering every cell;
And I am shared out. I become these things:
These lilies, if these things are water lilies
Which are dancers growing dim across no floor;
These mayflies; whirled dust orbiting in the sun;
This blossoming diffused as rushlights; galactic vapors;
Fluorescence into which we pass and penetrate;
O soft as the thighs of women;
O radiance, into which I go on dying ...
