In his splendid Mad Enchantment: Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies, Ross King brings to life the moving story of the aging artist’s last and most ambitious project ... In his inimitable style, art historian King takes a you-are-there approach to his subject, creating an intimate portrait of the imposing, often ill-tempered artist ... [a] stirring account of the last impressionist.
...a well-researched and in-depth account ... Unfortunately, as a narrative armature, the creation of Monet’s Grande Decoration isn’t sufficient to merit this 400-page account. King compensates with long digressions, many of them fascinating, into the larger social and political backstory. Of that, there is plenty ... The friendship with Clemenceau — who is one of the most colorful characters of any age — is the reader’s happiest reward in this book.
...an engaging and authoritative portrait of the aged artist and his travails ... The Monet who emerges from King’s pages is a sympathetic and vivid character — less the wizened patriarch of French Impressionism than a crotchety septuagenarian afflicted with toothaches ... The friendship between Monet and Clemenceau amounts to its own fascinating story and resembles an odd-couple comedy ... The book is short on analysis and fails to definitively explain the role played by Monet’s illness in the development of his late style. Nonetheless, Mad Enchantment offers a moving portrait of the artist as an old man.
King's account is full of tense moments in which the painter gave way to epic fits of rage in which he sometimes turned his anger against his own canvases. He described himself as 'at war with nature and time,' and Mad Enchantment captures that war with page-turning intensity ... Monet died on December 5, 1926, at Giverny, with his friend Clemenceau at his bedside, and in his final chapter, King does a quick and effective job of outlining the artist's steadily growing posthumous fame.
...[a] fine, fluent book ... a careful unpicking of cherished art historical narratives ... Readers of biography tend to require more than potted art history to keep them going. Above all, they like love affairs, and those are thin on the ground when the subject is over 80. Luckily for King, there is a candidate on hand for the role of Monet’s petit ami. It comes in the unlikely form of Georges Clemenceau.
Parts of this book make painful reading, such as the descriptions of 1920s cataracts surgery and of Monet smashing and burning his paintings. But King's approach, as in all his books, is good-humored, flavored by what used be called 'the human comedy.' Dealers, statesmen, admirers, resentful villagers and a much-abused family fill out King's portrait of the aging Monet ...King's marvelous storytelling draws us back to these sublime, timeless paintings, so remote from -- and yet, paradoxically, so necessary a part of -- our own unquiet times.
In fashioning his dramatic arc, Mr. King occasionally overreaches...Against the backdrop of war- and postwar suffering, this playful hyperbole trivializes the creative struggle of Mad Enchantment. Mr. King is marvelous on Clemenceau, an appealing and enlightened figure, his advocacy of backbreaking reparations at Versailles notwithstanding. On the other hand, I couldn’t decide whether the book’s potted history of the Great War in France was excessive or insufficient. Mr. King’s portrait of Monet—as driven, largely generous, sometimes petulant, never quite cruel—is finely balanced.
...[a] sensitive, deeply researched and altogether delightful biography ... Georges Clemenceau emerges as the indefatigable bright spirit of this biography and of Monet’s life.
