Starred review from June 15, 2016
Readers will rejoice at this critical and social "biography" of Monet's stunningly ambitious final signature painting cycle, Water Lilies, a deeply immersive companion to the author's memorable The Judgement of Paris. Here King (Brunelleschi's Dome) turns his mind, heart, and eyes to Claude Monet (1840-1926), his prolific oeuvre, his celebrated home, and his carefully curated gardens at Giverny in northern France. Beginning the story on the eve of World War I, King takes readers through the 1920s. He shows us an aging, ailing, yet determined artist, one of the last surviving impressionists in a time that celebrated the "wild beasts," aka les fauves, and monitored the seismic stirrings of the war, cubism, and abstraction. Monet desperately needed to make his final creative statement and longed to enjoy the enduring prestige of a museum (L'Orangerie) devoted to his purpose-made art. Portraying such iconic characters as Monet's friend/champion George Clemenceau, King is ever the brilliant docent murmuring the right, telling details and critical backstories in our ear as we move through space and time. He ultimately brings the man and his work into perfect focus while increasing his audience's interest in both all the more. VERDICT This work is essential. Expect strong demand.--Barbara Genco, Library Journal
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from June 1, 2016
Best-selling King (Leonardo and the Last Supper, 2012) consummately meshes biography with art history as he turns the creation of one resounding masterpiece into a portal onto the artist's life. His most recent inquiry, his seventh, is particularly affecting, perhaps because the legendary Impressionist Monet and his revolutionary paintings remain so radiantly vital and exquisitely evocative. Writing with a historical novelist's attunement to the interplay of place, temperament, and society, King brings readers to Giverny, where Monet designed his inspiring garden with its now immortalized pond, Japanese bridge, and water lilies. Right from the start, in 1895, Monet, age 55, envisioned a circular room with wall-filling canvases depicting the erratically shifting phantoms of light and color, a dream that precipitated 30 years of struggle. King sumptuously describes the pleasures of Giverny, from Monet's delight in food and wine to his close and sympathetic extended family, joys imperiled by WWI and Monet's terrible anxiety and depression and ever-worsening eyesight. Yet he persisted in painting dauntingly complex works in his mad striving for the impossible, sustained, as King reveals in unique and moving detail, by his profound friendship with the heroic prime minister Georges Clemenceau, who, after Monet's death, helped secure a permanent home for the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism. Never before has the full drama and significance of Monet's magnificent Water Lilies been conveyed with such knowledge and perception, empathy and wonder.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)
Starred review from July 1, 2016
A vivid account of Claude Monet (1840-1926) facing his greatest artistic challenge in the last years of his life.As King (Leonardo and the Last Supper, 2012, etc.) poignantly shows, neither failing eyesight, frail health, nor a raging war on his doorstep could stop the beloved painter. In the spring of 1914, with France on the cusp of World War I, Monet had fallen into depression after the deaths of his wife and, later, his son, but it was seemingly unthinkable that he would put away his brushes. Fortunately, his friend Georges Clemenceau, a politician and newspaper owner, convinced him to work again. In his 70s, Monet, esteemed for his paintings of haystacks, the Rouen Cathedral, and poplars, all "evocations of an essential Frenchness," began to work on his last and most ambitious project, a series of water lily paintings that continued to obsess him until his death at 86. The collection included "forty-five to fifty panels making up fourteen separate stories" (the total length was more than 200 meters), and many are now exhibited in museums worldwide. It was the apotheosis of "Monet's decades-long obsession," and he sometimes worked "on multiple canvases simultaneously," rotating them to capture a particular quality in the moment. Indeed, the novelist Proust described Monet as a painter of time. King effectively puts readers at the painter's side as he rails against the impossible task he set for himself, suffering the "tortures" of painting and slashing canvases. As in his superb The Judgment of Paris (2006), about the rise of impressionism, the author sets this fascinating portrayal of the larger-than-life artist--known equally for his "obstreperous temperament" and warm hospitality, for his love of gardening, family life, fast cars, and gourmet food--against a backdrop of the raging war, politics, history, and changing tastes in art. King elegantly reveals the soul of a great artist, the last impressionist standing at the end of one of history's most remarkable art movements.
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