WATER LILIES
CLAUDE MONET, 1914-26
Okay. First thing. Stop looking for the subject. There isn't one. Most paintings give you something to look for. A face. A boat. A saint. This one? Nothing. Forty-two feet of pond, and that's the whole deal. No horizon. No shore. No up, no down. Just water. And the clouds. They aren't above anything. They're on the water. Reflections. The whole thing is just surface, top to bottom. There's no bank to stand on. You're not looking at the pond. You're in it. Every other painting gives you somewhere to stand. This one pulls the floor out. Give it the usual museum walk-by, three seconds and a nod, and it's nothing. Expensive wallpaper. Stand here a minute, though, and it starts to open up. Just light sitting on the water, going on and on, with nowhere for your eye to land. Now here's the part that's hard to believe. When Monet made these, the art world had mostly moved on from him. Old man, off at his pond, painting the same water for the hundredth time. Behind the times. A has-been. These giant panels sat there for years, with a lot of people figuring he was finished. Then the 1950s. Pollock. Rothko. Newman. Huge canvases. No center. Color everywhere. Nothing in particular to look at. And people come back to these and stop cold. Oh. The thing they'd written off as an old man drifting turned out to be the future, thirty years early. He got there first. He didn't know what it would become. Turns out the future looked like a lily pond.