Once again, it is time for the Defector staff to go into seclusion for our annual company meetings and fall frolic. This year we are gathering in Atlantic City, America’s abandoned playground. We decided to hold a mini theme week to keep the site robust and full of blogs while we’re in meetings. This year’s theme: Risk!
I never would have seen the paintings that probably changed the trajectory of my life if it hadn’t been for a ridiculous, almost unbelievable, amount of luck. In the Fall of 2007, I went to a Dallas Stars hockey game. It was early in the season. My hair was still stained pink from a Manic Panic decision you can only make at 16, and when we walked in the arena an older woman made eye contact with me. They were handing out the kind of gimmicky give-away that is mainly an advertisement: novelty airplane tickets. I would probably have misplaced mine but the woman was so focused and insisted that I keep track of it, that this ticket would be important. And it was. At some point in the game, I won: my ticket flashed on the screen, and was magically transformed from a piece of shiny garbage into two free tickets to anywhere American Airlines flew in the world.
So in December of that year, my mom and I went to Paris. Neither of us had ever left the country before. We had to get passports and new luggage and a book to tell us where things were.
My mom and I both have terrible memories. We forget things like it’s an Olympic sport. We don’t remember the names of songs we’ve loved for decades. We don’t remember most of our childhoods. We don’t remember most of that trip. What we can manage to dredge up from the past are a series of images completely separate from each other—the smell of chestnuts cooking on the street, the shock at how small the Mona Lisa was, the rose light reflecting off my mom’s cheekbones from the stained glass in Sainte-Chappelle, the terror of trying to communicate in a language we didn’t speak.
And we remember every single second we spent in the basement of the Musée Marmottan Monet.
The Musée Marmottan is barely in Paris. The museum is in the 16th arrondissement near the Bois de Boulogne, on Paris’s westernmost border, on the other side of a lovely park. In a previous life the museum was a lodge for some duke, and now it’s a mansion with a sweeping staircase, three levels of art and very high ceilings. The first time I visited, I was stressed.
I was a teen and enrolled in fine arts high school, and I wanted desperately to find meaning in the world and attach myself to it. So we went. The Musée Marmottan holds one of the most important paintings in modern art: Monet’s Impression, Sunrise.
As a teen I felt the tug of a kind of string that tied me to Impression, Sunrise. I needed to see it in person. When I picked Paris, it wasn’t just for Impression, Sunrise. I also wanted to see the Winged Victory, and the Venus de Milo, and Liberty Leading the People, and Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss. I had dreamt for years of seeing the Van Gogh paintings in the D’Orsay, and of The Floor Scrapers (which is one of my favorite paintings now). But Impression, Sunrise was different.
I learned about the painting in a basic art history class and even in the blurry reproduction projected on the screen, it felt like seeing an old friend. It wasn’t that I loved the painting, so much as I needed to connect with it, to understand it. How did this one little painting change the course of art history?
The answer, realistically, is that it didn’t. Impression, Sunrise was made by Monet in 1872, and displayed publicly two years later in Paris at what later became known as the “Exhibition of the Impressionists,” a kind of debutante ball for the rebellious painters in Paris at the time. They had been rejected from the beautiful fancy Salon for exhibiting new paintings. They had been rejected by the elite fancy-pants judges, and so (like many painters before them) they would host their own exhibition.
Critics did not understand the The Exhibition of the Impressionists in 1874. The name for the movement, for the exhibition, came from a satirical review of their paintings, specifically of Impression, Sunrise. The painting I loved was just one of dozens of paintings that were exhibited together and of the same mind. But history is reductive, and Impression, Sunrise was the painting that had given the movement its name, and the exhibition its name, and so it became the father of Impressionism, the strange, muted vision of a port and an ominous orange ball of sun.
The Musée Marmottan has tons of works by impressionists. Monet’s son bequeathed his personal collection of his father’s work to the museum, and Berthe Morissot’s family collection is also stored there. I remember as a teen, feeling nervous that whole trip.
I remember how nervous I was to find this painting. It was like meeting someone you’ve loved online for the first time in real life. The inherent risk in that interaction is not danger but disappointment. What if, when presented with the thing I claimed to love so much, it falls short of my expectations and then I felt embarrassed? Had I dragged my own mother way out to this weird little museum, and then regretted it? It is always a risk to love a piece of culture, but here I was: 16 and terrified over art.
The first floor was all strange Napoleonic works collected by whoever’s bad taste led them there in the mid 1800s, but there was a sweeping staircase, and we climbed it. I remember the tug of the string I imagined in my chest and it led me right to the framed Impression, Sunrise. It was so much lighter than the photos I’d seen on screens. The muted blues almost fading into the canvas, the greens of the water muddied by the reflections of the orange sky. The paint was thin, and I could see the texture of the canvas through it. Only the sun and its trickling reflection in the water had a saturation that drew attention. Only the boaters on the water had enough contrast to pop.
I stood in front of that painting for so long. Long enough that I knew my mom was ready to move on. The rest of the paintings could not hold our attention. A few of them were enough to pique our interest, but none of them were enough to sustain it. I remember telling my mom that I had thought there would be more, that it just didn’t make any sense for there to be this important painting that meant so much to me and nothing else that made us feel anything.
Later, I bought a print of Impression, Sunrise in the gift shop which hung framed above my bed for the last three years of my childhood, and we were still standing there on the first floor discussing our mild disappointment in the rest of the collection, when we saw a man headed downstairs. A basement? We didn’t know there was a basement! And it was down there in the basement where everything changed.
For more than a decade, I have talked about the basement of the Musée Marmottan with a kind of reverence I reserve for very little. How do you explain to someone, anyone, that a room changed your life, reset your expectations of the future, made you realize something about the way an artist worked that fundamentally shifted something within you? Like a broken record, I have repeated over and over again to people that as Monet aged, he developed cataracts, and the cataracts made it hard for him to see. He continued to paint. He had to paint. But the blurriness of his earlier work, which was intentional and careful and set, became something wilder. He used thick, menacing blobs of paint. The colors became more vibrant, more exciting.
You can see, in the Musée Marmottan and in many other museums around the world, the result of this bodily change: the same scenes Monet always painted, but darker. Here is the classic bridge at Giverny over the lily pads, but you can no longer see the lily pads. They are made of a purple so vibrant and dark that they get lost in the other smudges of paint. The sky behind the bridge is on fire with reds and oranges. It feels demented, a broken version of what had come before, but something also more beautiful.
My mother and I sat in that basement for what felt like hours. We gasped and gaped and pointed. Look here, see how he left this corner all black? Look at how this canvas wasn’t even primed and now it is just bare in the corners, the roses he painted floating in the middle of an uneven space. It would feel unfinished if it didn’t feel so important. On and on we went. By the time we emerged from the basement of the museum and back out into the winter air, it was dark. We walked through the park to the subway in silence. There’s a kind of gluttony that exists in a museum, where the need to consume can overfill you until you are stuffed, until there is so much art inside of you that you feel uncomfortable, unwieldy, dizzy.
What we did after the museum is irrelevant. I don’t remember it, and my mom doesn’t remember either. I imagine we were mostly quiet. “They felt very chaotic and I am drawn to that more in painting than calmness,” my mom said when I asked her what she remembered about this trip. That was also what stuck with me: the chaos of them. For my much of my life, I had looked at art as something that could be right or wrong, something that could be perfect or incomplete. Maybe that’s being a virgo, or being type-a, or being a child, but I did not understand until I saw those paintings that the goal of many paintings is not what is on the canvas but what stirs inside the person looking at them. It’s a relationship. Art sometimes exists in the before and after; the act of being seen becomes a transformation.
I had already begun writing at the time, and writing is an art that requires an audience more than painting. As a creator, you need someone else on the other side of the words, reading them, thinking about them, even disagreeing with them. That awareness can paralyze any creator. But what the late Monet paintings taught me was that the awareness is irrelevant. You cannot control the way people interact with art.
I came to the Marmottan for one thing, and left with another. But the new thing was scarier. Inspiration is a terrible monster. She comes and goes as she pleases. She never announces her arrival. She is so fleeting that if you do not run to greet her, she may disappear. I still wanted to be a visual artist then, and I went back to school renewed. I began to take more risks in my work. I moved into sculpture and stayed there for three years. Later, I would leave visual arts entirely, but the change had already taken place.
At the end of last month, I went back to Paris. It was my first time back as an adult, but after writing earlier this year about the Winged Victory of Samothrace, I became obsessed with returning. If so many works of art that were important to me existed in a single city, why would I not prioritize seeing them again and again as many times as I could before I die? Who knows how long I will be here! The art will live long after me, but I will not have many chances to be the person staring back at it.
And so we went. Every day there was another museum, and every day a new surprising favorite. I have learned from my mistakes over time. I do not think you can swallow a museum whole. The best you can do is take a few small bites: see enough to feel tired and then stop. And so we did this every day. But I saved the Musée Marmottan for our final day. It was important to me. I wanted to take my partner out there to see these paintings that loomed so large in my imagination, that had changed me as a teen. They mattered to me and so I wanted to share them.
Again, I felt the same nervousness. I was again approaching a titan in my mind. In the past it had been Impression, Sunrise, and now it was this legendary basement. We arrived at the same strange mansion on the end of the park, just as I remembered it. But this time Impression, Sunrise was gone. It is currently on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. This was an irony for which I was not prepared. I was here on the other side of the Atlantic, and one of the pieces I wanted to see was a mere two hour train ride from my house.
But that was fine, I reasoned. What mattered was the basement. We would go to the basement.
And so we descended down the stairs to a strange landing where some swords were displayed. I had no memory of this! We blew past them. The life-changing art was just this way, I promised. One more flight of stairs, and your mind will be blown!
We emerged in a large octagonal room with giant square Monet paintings on the wall, and I felt my stomach drop. They were smaller than I remembered. They were less vibrant. I had seen bigger versions of them at other museums since, and I was stunned into silence. These were supposed to be all-time great pieces of art. These were supposed to be the kind of art that could move me to tears over and over again regardless of how long it had been since I’d seen them. Like the Winged Victory of Samothrace, my stomach was supposed to flip in their presence. But it didn’t. I felt nothing.
I should have expected it, in a way. My relationship with Monet has changed. Prominent curators have argued—along with several prominent exhibitions at major museums—that these works by Monet were a guiding force and accelerant for abstraction and abstract expressionism, that the change in one artist’s eyes helped to inspire a whole generation of young artists to create their own movement. That makes sense, it happened for me too. I had moved on: to Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan. The daughters of those paintings in the basement in a way.
Monet is the kind of artist that everyone loves now. The bridge paintings are slapped on magnets and printed on tote bags. Even Emily in Paris went to his home at Giverny in the most recent season. “Claude Monet: The Immersive Experience,” a VR version of the artist’s work is currently on display in multiple cities in the U.S. His art has been so commercialized that people forget that all of his work was once very rebellious and terrifying. “If anything, Monet now stands for gardens and domestic coziness and knowing that the same things will be in the same places tomorrow—the kind of comfort, you could say, that matters most to someone for whom things often weren’t,” Jackson Arn wrote in The New Yorker. Monet is a comfort artist now. He is not made to challenge anyone anymore.
It was riskier than I knew to revisit the museum, to encounter a version of myself I thought still existed. Why was I surprised at my own evolution from that 16-year-old so fiercely in love with Impression, Sunrise? At first I felt devastated that Monet had become this to me, that I no longer felt the drama and the excitement of inspiration when confronted with his later works. I wanted the thing I had always loved to continue to be important to me. I wanted the culture I had talked about for more than a decade to mean something. But as we ate dinner on our last night in Paris, I realized that actually, to be granted the time to evolve out of the meaning of a work is a privilege and a gift. To realize that something once so meaningful had become less significant is part of the joy of age.
We all evolve eventually, time promises that. Monet’s eyes transformed his works and birthed a movement. The art itself may not have changed, only I have. We are given no guarantees with age, the only promise offered is change. Maybe I’ll return to Musée Marmottan one day, another time and another me, knowing Monet could transform me once more. It’s a risk, but one that feels worth taking.
