Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies - Ross King Audiobook

Written by Ross King
Read by Joel Richards
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 32 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
Release date: 09-08-16
Publisher: Audible Studios for Bloomsbury

Readers will rejoice at this critical and social “biography” of Monet’s stunningly ambitious final signature painting cycle, Water Lilies, a deeply impressive companion to the author’s memorable The Judgement of Paris.

Claude Monet is perhaps the world’s most beloved artist, and among all his creations, the paintings of the water lilies in his garden at Giverny are most famous. Seeing them in museums around the world, viewers are transported by the power of Monet’s brush into a peaceful world of harmonious nature. Monet himself intended them to provide “an asylum of peaceful meditation.

Yet, as Ross King reveals in his magisterial chronicle of artist and masterpiece, these beautiful canvases belie the intense frustration Monet experienced at the difficulties of capturing the fugitive effects of light, water, and color. They also reflect the terrible personal torments Monet suffered in the last dozen years of his life.

As the horrors of World War I came ever closer to Paris and Giverny, a new generation of younger artists, led by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, were challenging the achievements of Impressionism. By early 1914, French newspapers were reporting that Monet, by then 73 and one of the world’s wealthiest, most celebrated painters, had retired his brushes.

He had lost his beloved wife, Alice, and his eldest son, Jean. His famously acute vision—what Paul Cezanne called “the most prodigious eye in the history of painting”—was threatened by cataracts. And yet, despite ill health, self-doubt, and advancing age, Monet began painting again on a more ambitious scale than ever before. Linking great artistic achievement to the personal and historical dramas unfolding around it,

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 back stories 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.