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Lot Essay
“The edges of the pond are thickly covered with irises of every kind,” the famed horticulturalist Georges Truffaut wrote in 1913, describing the magnificent water garden that Monet had fashioned on his property at Giverny, by then the exclusive subject of his art. “In the spring, there are Iris sibirica and Virginian irises with their long petals and velvety texture; later on the Japanese irises and the Kaempferi irises grow here in quantity” (quoted in D. Wildenstein, op. cit., 1996, p. 864).
Over the next decade, from 1914 until 1925, Monet painted twenty views of the splendid irises that Truffaut had so admired, each canvas a meter or more high. Together with his iconic late Nymphéas, the Irises form part of the untrammeled outpouring of creativity that marked the artist’s valedictory years. As younger generations of the French avant-garde increasingly heeded the wartime and post-war “call to order”, with its emphasis on rationality and restraint, Monet staked out an antithetical and unabashedly personal path, steeped in a yearning for beauty and a desire for abandon. This brazen, visionary body of work affirms that the senior statesman of Impressionism, by then venerated as a founding father of the modern movement, had not lost his revolutionary instinct—nor his art its vital, transformative character—even as he entered his ninth and final decade.
The earliest of Monet’s Iris paintings (Wildenstein, nos. 1823-1833), painted in 1914-1917, were part of a sustained, exploratory enterprise in which the artist tested out ideas for his Grandes décorations, his ensemble of twenty-two mural-sized canvases on the theme of the water garden. A photograph of the murals in progress shows that Monet initially considered including irises in the imagery; ultimately, though, he opted to pursue his study of these gloriously showy blossoms independently, liberating him to explore a variety of different formats, vantage points, and color harmonies. The later Iris canvases (nos. 1834-1842), painted when the Grandes décorations were closer to completion, are autonomous compositions in which Monet delved further into the expansive, decorative language and life-affirming theme of the mural cycle, which represents the culminating achievement of his long career.
The present painting is among the most freely worked, radically simplified, and assertively modern from this latter group. A half-dozen bright yellow irises, their stems tall and supple, stand out against a plane of intense azure blue, which gives way at the corners to moody mauve. One stalk of iris remains in bud, an emblem of organic potency and new life; the other five have achieved full flower. Monet seems to have selected an uncommonly low and close vantage point, showing the irises soaring up, larger than life, toward the sky; or perhaps he is looking down on the blossoms from high above, in which case the blue ground represents the reflection of the sky in the mirror-like surface of the lily-pond. Traditional perspective has been eliminated, space compressed into a single plane. The extraordinary, mythic height of the irises underscores the vital energy of the burgeoning plants, which is echoed in Monet’s vigorous application of paint, here utterly unfettered by convention.
Monet painted the present Iris in 1924-1925, in the midst of his final, intensive campaign of work on the Grandes décorations. Indeed, his friend Georges Clemenceau, the noted statesman and twice the Prime Minister of the Third Republic, who had sponsored the mural commission, complained that Monet was devoting too much time to independent easel painting, as an excuse to put off the deadline that had been set for the completion of the twenty-two decorative panels. With their tall, resilient stalks unfurling triumphantly, the irises here are a proxy for Monet’s own irrepressible creative force, following a successful series of operations in 1923 to remove cataracts that threatened his vision. “I am working as never before,” he exulted in the summer of 1925, “am satisfied with what I do, and if the new glasses are even better, my only request would be to live to be one hundred” (quoted in Monet in the Twentieth Century, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1998, p. 83).
Monet in fact died the next year at the age of eighty-six, long past the life expectancy for men of his generation. With the exception of the Grandes décorations, which were installed in the Orangerie and opened to public view in May 1927, almost all the work from his final twelve years—an intensive and ongoing exploratory initiative, well ahead of its time—remained in the studio at his death. It was only after the Second World War that contemporary audiences, schooled in Abstract Expressionism, came to recognize the greatly daring poetry of these late canvases. “Monet taught me to understand what a revolution in painting can be,” proclaimed the surrealist painter André Masson, who spent the war years in New York and was instrumental in championing Monet’s late achievement. “Only with Monet does painting take a turn. He dispels the very notion of form that has dominated us for millennia. He bestows absolute poetry on color” (quoted in Monet and Modernism, exh. cat., Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich, 2001, p. 242).
Over the next decade, from 1914 until 1925, Monet painted twenty views of the splendid irises that Truffaut had so admired, each canvas a meter or more high. Together with his iconic late Nymphéas, the Irises form part of the untrammeled outpouring of creativity that marked the artist’s valedictory years. As younger generations of the French avant-garde increasingly heeded the wartime and post-war “call to order”, with its emphasis on rationality and restraint, Monet staked out an antithetical and unabashedly personal path, steeped in a yearning for beauty and a desire for abandon. This brazen, visionary body of work affirms that the senior statesman of Impressionism, by then venerated as a founding father of the modern movement, had not lost his revolutionary instinct—nor his art its vital, transformative character—even as he entered his ninth and final decade.
The earliest of Monet’s Iris paintings (Wildenstein, nos. 1823-1833), painted in 1914-1917, were part of a sustained, exploratory enterprise in which the artist tested out ideas for his Grandes décorations, his ensemble of twenty-two mural-sized canvases on the theme of the water garden. A photograph of the murals in progress shows that Monet initially considered including irises in the imagery; ultimately, though, he opted to pursue his study of these gloriously showy blossoms independently, liberating him to explore a variety of different formats, vantage points, and color harmonies. The later Iris canvases (nos. 1834-1842), painted when the Grandes décorations were closer to completion, are autonomous compositions in which Monet delved further into the expansive, decorative language and life-affirming theme of the mural cycle, which represents the culminating achievement of his long career.
The present painting is among the most freely worked, radically simplified, and assertively modern from this latter group. A half-dozen bright yellow irises, their stems tall and supple, stand out against a plane of intense azure blue, which gives way at the corners to moody mauve. One stalk of iris remains in bud, an emblem of organic potency and new life; the other five have achieved full flower. Monet seems to have selected an uncommonly low and close vantage point, showing the irises soaring up, larger than life, toward the sky; or perhaps he is looking down on the blossoms from high above, in which case the blue ground represents the reflection of the sky in the mirror-like surface of the lily-pond. Traditional perspective has been eliminated, space compressed into a single plane. The extraordinary, mythic height of the irises underscores the vital energy of the burgeoning plants, which is echoed in Monet’s vigorous application of paint, here utterly unfettered by convention.
Monet painted the present Iris in 1924-1925, in the midst of his final, intensive campaign of work on the Grandes décorations. Indeed, his friend Georges Clemenceau, the noted statesman and twice the Prime Minister of the Third Republic, who had sponsored the mural commission, complained that Monet was devoting too much time to independent easel painting, as an excuse to put off the deadline that had been set for the completion of the twenty-two decorative panels. With their tall, resilient stalks unfurling triumphantly, the irises here are a proxy for Monet’s own irrepressible creative force, following a successful series of operations in 1923 to remove cataracts that threatened his vision. “I am working as never before,” he exulted in the summer of 1925, “am satisfied with what I do, and if the new glasses are even better, my only request would be to live to be one hundred” (quoted in Monet in the Twentieth Century, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1998, p. 83).
Monet in fact died the next year at the age of eighty-six, long past the life expectancy for men of his generation. With the exception of the Grandes décorations, which were installed in the Orangerie and opened to public view in May 1927, almost all the work from his final twelve years—an intensive and ongoing exploratory initiative, well ahead of its time—remained in the studio at his death. It was only after the Second World War that contemporary audiences, schooled in Abstract Expressionism, came to recognize the greatly daring poetry of these late canvases. “Monet taught me to understand what a revolution in painting can be,” proclaimed the surrealist painter André Masson, who spent the war years in New York and was instrumental in championing Monet’s late achievement. “Only with Monet does painting take a turn. He dispels the very notion of form that has dominated us for millennia. He bestows absolute poetry on color” (quoted in Monet and Modernism, exh. cat., Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich, 2001, p. 242).