From L’instant précis où Monet entre dans l’atelier, which was published in 2022 by Éditions de Minuit. Translated from the French in May by Pauline Cochran.

I was so taken by my satanic work that as soon as I awoke, I dashed to my studio.

—Monet

I’d like to capture Monet there: the precise instant he opens the door to his studio in the gray dawn of early morning. It’s the time of day I like best, this blessed hour when work awaits us. The dawn is fresh, the sharp air pricks our cheeks. It’s just after six-thirty, not a sound inside the slumbering house, just a few birds chirping in the garden while the trees are as still as the silence. It’s a typical morning in Normandy, one that happens every day in those villages along the river Eure and the Seine. It’s the summer of 1916. For a few months now, Monet has taken up a large studio that he had built overlooking his garden so he could work on the vast canvases of the Water Lilies.

I’d like to capture Monet there: the precise instant he enters the studio, as he crosses the border between the life he leaves and the art he joins. Preparing to enter this place where he paints the Water Lilies, his massive body facing the studio, he abandons life in his wake, life and its miseries, life of the body and soul, life that for several months has taken on the terrible form of war. What are the events of the world to the artist at work? A faraway and invisible torment. An awful rumor, overwhelming and untimely. During the war, more than ever, Monet finds refuge in his art. The Water Lilies studio will be the peaceful haven where he’ll resort to his thoughts to escape the day’s tragedies. But how not to feel shame for studying minor questions of form and color while so many people suffer and die on the battlefield? And yet, pictorial questions alone occupy Monet’s mind. Minuscule, meticulous, torturous, and incomprehensible to most mortals. Every morning, as soon as he enters the studio, he takes leave from the world. He passes the threshold and on the other side, still invisible and immaterial, art awaits him.

I’d like to capture Monet there: the precise instant he enters the studio. The building is still in shadow. Reigning in the room are smells of plaster, damp glue, cold tobacco, and linseed oil. In the gray morning mist of the silent studio, the half-light of day, there’s a voluminous, thronelike sofa with a dressing gown, a hat, a vest, and a black cape thrown over it. In some jars, a bouquet of paintbrushes in bloom. In other jars scattered around, other brushes, smaller ones. On the floor, several canvases lay side by side in a circle. These nature studies were completed a few months ago. The more recently finished canvases are not yet fixed onto panels, the monumental kind on which he works. Most panels are incomplete. It’s often a long time after one is begun that Monet returns to it. He uses a platform, a sort of low, large table upon which he hoists himself. Palette in hand, he spends many hours on this makeshift scaffold. Monet toils in uncertainty. He has no idea that, one day, what he’s painting will have an iconic name: Nymphéas. He can’t conceive that the whole world will venerate the piece now before his eyes. There’s no way for the artist to know, day after day, faced with obstacles, with the material dilemmas of the hand and the brush, that this will be the project over which he will stumble and falter, amend without end, in infinite pursuit, one regret after another, in an illusory quest for perfection.

I’d like to capture Monet there: the precise instant he enters the studio and finds the unfinished panels, the ones he’s been working on for months, in the dim light against the wall. The year is 1916 or 1917. It doesn’t matter much which day. The haze, the mist, the transparent waves. Blue everywhere, blue mixed with pink, pale blue and deeper blue, cobalt blue, midnight blue. Here and there, a brief flame of contrasting gold, a blaze of yellow. The panels accumulate, stacked against the walls, each two meters tall and of varying widths. For months, Monet will refuse to relinquish his realm. He won’t go far from his studio, nor will he receive any visitors. He no longer associates with collectors and buyers, he won’t do any business with his contemporaries. For Monet, solitude isn’t a bitter retreat, but a precondition of his art. In the waning light of evening, he walks the paths of his water garden, sensing a remarkable calm pass over the natural world. He drags on his pipe and observes a far-off rustling in the riverside weeds, a breath in the branches, a fugitive light vibrating on the pond’s surface—and there he contemplates his work. It’s not so much oily pigments he leaves on the soft canvas, day after day. It’s life itself in its infinite variations transmuted into painting. That’s what happens, what occupies the last years of his life, the transfiguration of an ephemeral, palpitating essence into a purely pictorial design.