In September, , while Prussian soldiers were trying to starve Paris into surrender, Claude Monet was in Normandy with his wife, Camille, and their son, Jean, looking for a boat out of France. Every day, hundreds of people went down to the docks in the hope of escaping the Franco-Prussian War; only later would Monet learn that some of his best friends had shoved through the same crowd.
By November, he and his family had reached London, though they spoke no English. Months passed, and the Siege of Paris gave way to the Paris Commune and thousands of murdered civilians. In photographs taken in Amsterdam around this time, their eyes look a decade older than the rest of them. They bought pots for a garden they might grow when the killing stopped. He fled apartments to avoid creditors. He fled to the French coast to avoid the man whose wife he would marry.
After getting married, he fled Paris for the calm of the countryside. In the nearly hundred years since his death, Monet has become. No canvas has been left un-kitchen-magnetized, no sector of pop culture remains unconquered. One faces away from us; the other covers her mouth. The easy thing would be to call it a total perversion of a great artist, but Monet made bright, oddly bleakish moments something of a specialty.
An early painting of Camille sitting on a park bench shares more of its mood and composition with that photograph than anybody has a right to expect. This was in , not long after the Monets had returned to France. They finally had their garden, and a six-year-old Jean to share it with, but it was also the year that Camille lost her father.
Time flies and technology sprints. Aloneness and togetherness, which may be parts of the same modern itch, have barely moved at all. Some important events are done in smudged glimpses, but the over-all shape of his eighty-six years is clear.
