Monet, Through The Iris | Defector
Claude Monet’s painting The Path through the Irises is hard to ignore. First of all, there’s the sheer size of it—the canvas stretches six and a half feet high and over five feet across. The Path through the Irises hangs center stage in its gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and if you have the time to linger, as I did on a recent Monday afternoon, you’ll notice the almost gravitational pull that it exerts over the room. No matter where someone entered, they almost always ended up in front of Path through the Irises, even if just for a few seconds. There’s just no getting around it.
It takes longer than that for the painting to resolve itself into a coherent image, or at least it did for me; the first impression I had was one of almost violent contrasts. The American visual artist George Condo described The Path through the Irises as possessing “some of the ugliest combinations of colors I’ve ever seen in my life: these polar opposite tones, like purple and yellow, those oranges and green mixed in.”
My pilgrimage to the Met was precipitated by a desire for a different sort of museum experience than the ones I’d most recently had. Those had all been squeezed into already busy weekends, journeys made with a specific purpose or exhibition in mind. Those visits have their own specific set of pleasures, but what I craved most on this dreary March day, at the end of a month-long break from work, was the sort of unhurried time I associated with my days as a student when my ID granted me free access to the Art Institute of Chicago and the shape of my life gave me endless hours to while away there.
With this taste for languor on my tongue and a 20 milligram edible beginning to take effect, I made my way to the Impressionist galleries in the Met. Despite almost nine (!!) years living in the city and my long held affection for Impressionism, before that day I hadn’t spent much time in those rooms. So maybe it was the edible hitting that made stepping into those galleries feel like a return. It was familiar at a level either above or below the familiarity that comes with repeat visits; I recognized at a glance the boulevards and parks of Paris, the flower beds of Giverny. Swimming in front of me, layered over those riotous colors and dense brushstrokes, were the hours I’d already spent admiring them elsewhere.
I wandered slowly through the gallery, taking my time to read every plaque. My lack of haste (and also the sativa strain working its way through my bloodstream) turned my fellow museumgoers into part of the scenery. I watched as tourists stuck their phones in front of my face to take photos of the paintings, racing through galleries as if they were being timed. I eavesdropped on the conversations between the energetic pod of Italian teenagers that, at one point, engulfed me; I understood none of the specifics, but I was pleased by how universal the gestures of adolescence felt. I sat and wondered if Pissaro or Van Gogh, having presumably been to countless galleries in their time, would recognize the scene in front of them, or if the presence of overhead fluorescent lights would render it fantastical.
This was when I realized that I was, inevitably, in front of The Path through the Irises. The crowd of Italian teenagers had moved on; something about the sudden, relative quiet made the image finally cohere for me. When it did, I felt my breath catch in my chest. I still find it hard to describe why; it is much easier to understand than express.
The Path through the Irises offers a birds-eye view of one of the many pathways that Monet, an avid horticulturist, had planted on his property at Giverny. It seems to have been painted from the vantage point of a now-iconic Japanese footbridge in the gardens, which itself had already served as a subject for an earlier series. Monet’s affinity for irises and the paintings that affinity later inspired, approximately 20 different views that he painted between 1914 and 1917, also owe a debt to his Japanese peers. Irises originated in Japan and proliferated in prints, including in one by the artist Hokusai that Monet owned.
I knew none of this when The Path through Irises revealed itself to me. From that mass of shifting, dynamic color, a path emerged offering entry into it. Suddenly, I wondered how I’d seen anything else. I moved closer; the painting’s monumental size imposed itself on me. An almost paradoxical effect took hold. The Path through the Irises, like most Impressionist paintings, makes the most sense when seen from a distance. Up close, already minimal details are revealed as quick, almost hasty strokes of color, bits of paint that look almost accidental. And yet, as I got closer, I could almost smell warm dirt and growing things. I could feel the heat of the sun on my skin.
“It looks like a three-year-old painted it.” I turned to look at the stranger who’d spoken to me. Something about him reminded me of the men I’d grown up with in Texas, his accent or maybe the conspiratorial way he smiled at me which suggested that any disagreement would ruin the fun.
A version of me would have laughed along. Instead, I said, “I still love it.”
He didn’t seem prepared for my earnestness. The man sputtered something about Monet being half-blind when he’d painted The Path through the Irises. Even as he walked away, he insisted that Monet’s earlier works were better. He was gone before I could tell him that those paintings had mostly bored me.
I hadn’t known until then, or maybe I’d forgotten, that Monet’s eyesight had faltered in the last years of his career. The Met describes this point in Monet’s career as one where he “dispensed with subtlety.” It’s funny to me then that this is also the point in his career where Monet emphasized the importance of waiting to start a painting—waiting, he said, “until the idea took shape, until the arrangement and composition inscribed themselves on the brain.”
This makes sense to me; the view in The Path through the Irises is one that, to me, seems as it had been viewed a thousand times before the artist sat down to paint it for the first time. It’s rendered so emphatically, so specifically, that I’m convinced that I’d immediately recognize the titular path if I were to see it in real life. Path through the Irises reminds me of the corners of my apartment and of my life that, if I had the technical capability, I could draw from memory. My cat, asleep atop a blanket I’ve had longer than he’s been alive. The mourning doves that sit in my kitchen window and call softly to me. A blossoming cherry tree dropping petals on the awning of one of the most garishly painted bodegas I’ve ever seen.
In the weeks that have passed since that day in the Met, I’ve returned to my interaction with that stranger who reminded me so much of home. Sometimes I continue the conversation in my mind. In that version, I wax poetic about what it means to be able to pull someone so easily into your world that it seems obvious, even juvenile, while your eyes fail you—you, an artist whose livelihood and legacy is built on how you see! But most of the time I return to my response, to the pleasure of the simplicity of I still love it. There’s not much else that needs to be said.
