All language subtitles for Water.Lilies.of.Monet-The.Magic.of.Water.and.Light.2018.1080p.WEB-DL.AAC.2.0.x264

[orchestral music]

[Lasowski] There is a story that begins in a garden,

and in a garden it ends.

It is the scenario of the imagination

a man built by himself to nourish his art.

It is the garden of the painter Claude Monet,

the most famous artist of all France.

The man whose formidable eye enchants the world.

In this garden, his art has come to an end.

[orchestral music]

Claude Monet stares at the surface of a water lily pond,

imprisoned by its dark and marshy waters.

The great master is weakened by age and blindness,

paralyzed by mourning,

deafened by the noise of a war

that is raging just beyond the walls of his gardens.

[vocalization]

And yet, despite these overwhelming strains,

he picks up his brushes for one last time.

Alone in his garden,

he is confronted with his last

ambitious challenge,

His ultimate masterpiece,

La Grande Decoration.

[orchestral music]

[gentle music]

[gentle music]

nArtists are very special humans.

They dig their own trenches with dedication,

and fight in them, and for them, with all of their passion.

[waves crashing]

[serene music]

Monet's passion...

well, he...

His passion was to paint, to try to paint

water, light, and air.

And I think he knew, somehow, that it was...

Like an unattainable goal. But...

But he basically dedicated his whole life to trying to do that.

He was actually born in Paris and then they moved to Le Havre

when he was four or five, and...

he used to skip school sometimes,

just to come and sit by the sea.

[melodious piano music]

As a young boy he used to go by his first name, Oscar.

And he was a bit of a rebel, and he wanted to paint,

and he used to...

He started drawing caricatures

of the people that lived in the city,

and he had no interest

in landscape painting.

But he discovered landscape painting with Boudin, who...

I mean, Monet said that he had literally opened his eyes,

and that...

and that he started to see nature.

[melodious piano music]

This was one of his favorite spots that Monet painted

times and times again.

This is where he discovered water,

and he fell in love with it.

[melodious piano music]

Normandy is a special place because this is where the Seine,

the river Seine dives into the sea.

And if you follow the river Seine,

which is quite a curvy river,

you literally follow Monet's path

because he chose to live near that river his whole life,

following the water.

[bright music]

He loved it so much that he told a friend

that he wanted to be buried in a buoy

so he could float for all eternity.

In 1859, he was 19, Monet left Normandy

ndetermined to become a painter.

Along the way, this independent-minded artist

crossed paths with a group of young artists

who shared a similar passion for painting outdoors,

immersed in nature.

nThis was no easy path to follow,

searching for fertile ground to keep his imagination alive,

Monet would have to go through very barren times.

The pursuit of happiness and personal happiness

is always something

that he tries to convey in his paintings.

And that is what leads him to making a definite choice

to use nature and the countryside

as the primary subjects in his paintings.

He often moves house,

which is partly driven

by financial problems,

but wherever he moves he ends up living

alongside the banks of the Seine.

So he lives in Argenteuil, in Vetheuil, in Poissy.

[melodious piano music]

And so in a way the Seine becomes the backbone

of his entire life.

[melodious piano music]

Nature, light, and water were Monet's genuine passion.

But soon they became torment.

[de Wilde] I think Monet fell in love with the water

because it's like when you fall in love with someone,

it's often someone that confronts you

with the things that are most difficult.

Your biggest challenges arise within this relationship.

I think that was his relationship to the water.

As an artist, as a photographer, or a painter,

when you're working on a specific subject,

whether it be the same subject all the time,

like in Monet's body of work,

water was the core element of his work,

or it be a different subject you're chasing all the time,

what you're trying to develop is your vision,

and your way of framing it.

[ringing music]

To translate a reality, or visually researching,

you do have to immerse yourself in it to become part of it.

And I think Monet was trying to create an experience

for the viewer.

He creates a bubble

in which he can, you know,

set the elements to really convey his personal message.

[serene music]

He needed to also immerse himself in that experience.

That's why it was so important for him to become part of nature

and to become part of what he was painting.

[Lasowski] Monet set up his studio on a boat,

that way he could sort of pick the locations

that he wanted to paint, and be closer to water.

There's a famous Manet painting of Monet on his studio-boat

painting away.

He was obsessed with painting water,

and that way he could be a lot closer to it,

and actually paint while he himself was on water.

[de Wilde] He used nature as a mirror to translate what,

you know, what was living inside of him.

He's portraying the exterior,

but actually, at the same time, portraying the interior.

And he takes more steps towards really creating

his own atmosphere, his own world,

his own space and time,

but also, literally, his place in the world.

He moves to a place in France

that then becomes the set to his paintings.

[Lasowski] Monet lived with Camille,

who will later give birth to their son Jean,

and become his wife.

Nature was his atelier,

but it was anything but welcoming.

Monet had to put up with all kinds of weathers

to be able to paint.

When they moved to Argenteuil,

and it was just painting, painting, painting,

it was quite a happy times,

but he would also be extremely affected by the weather,

and how much it changed,

and it would send him into fits of rage

if he couldn't keep working outside.

He had a very bad temper.

[dramatic music]

[thunder rumbles]

He was so eager to capture the right moment,

that at one point he flung himself and his canvases

into the Seine.

"I was stupid enough," he said,n"to hurl myself into the water."

[dramatic music]

[King] He was incredibly prolific in the early 1870s.

It looked as if he was on the brink

of really beginning to achieve

everything that he'd been dreaming of

for the last decade or more.

But Monet was unable to sell paintings,

and he began having financial difficulties.

And really, those would dog him for the rest of the decade.

And so Argenteuil,

which began so happily for him,

then ended with a certain amount of disappointment.

[orchestral music]

[Lasowski] He always felt he had financial issues,

he was never happy about the weather,

there was just always something that wasn't quite going right.

You know?

Nature was turning into a nightmare.

The only thing that seemed to keep on growing

was his compulsion to paint,

which was becoming unhealthy,

like a spreading disease.

[lively music]

[water bubbling]

His wife Camille died, and he was by her deathbed,

and the only way he could deal with grief

was to start painting.

[ringing music]

And as he started to paint,

he found that the grief was taken over

by...

the light that was changing on her face,

by the colors that he was seeing,

and his focus went into the paint.

And...

it scared him so much, actually,

to feel that somehow he was detaching,

and was starting to see her just as a subject,

as opposed to a person,

and his wife that he had loved and just lost,

that he wrote to a friend and said,

"Please, have some compassion for me,

because I am an animal who only knows how to do one thing."

And I think that was a huge moment in his life.

[ethereal music]

But no matter how feverishly he painted,

he was becoming Le Grand Refusé.

The images just didn't convince anymore.

Critics didn't particularly adhere to them,

I think the wider public probably didn't get them.

If he couldn't get in through the front door,

he'd get in through the window,

which he eventually did, actually.

Monet was already 34 when,

with other artist rejects like himself,

he put up an exhibit in Paris

which marked a clear departure from traditional art.

[deep orchestral music]

[deep orchestral music continues]

[playful music]

During the group show

of the Société Anonyme des Artistes,

which also included Renoir, Degas, and Cezanne,

among others,

nMonet showed for the first time

"Impression, soleil levant",

a painting that would soon attract the critic's interest.

[vocalization]

[upbeat piano music]

There was an art critic that came to the exhibition

and who didn't like it,

and so he ironically, in his review,

paraphrased the title of Monet's painting,

"Impression, soleil levant"

and ended up writing in his review,

"Je suis impressionee,"

which means "I am impressed."

And the irony of this is that out of this negative critique,

the Société Anonyme Was finally able to find its name:

"Les Impressionists".

And thankfully,

not all of the critics were that bad.

It took a prominent French intellectual

and fierce politician to offer a new interpretation

of these innovative works:

Georges Clemenceau.

From that moment on,

he became Monet's most passionate advocate.

According to Clemenceau,

the world needed to have a new vision,

and he felt that the only one capable of doing that was Monet.

[deep orchestral music]

If you look at Monet's life,

he's always setting new challenges for himself,

and actually, it's those challenges

that seem to have kept him alive,

and so he's always looking for new goals.

[lively music]

With his new family, now that he was in his 40s,

he needed new terrain for his regeneration

and wilderness to shape.

It had to be close to water.

The first root always seeks water.

[flute music]

Monet was on a train going to the countryside.

At that point he was looking for a new place to live.

The train suddenly stopped because there was...

there was a wedding going on alongside the tracks,

and there was a great violinist.

[church bells ring]

And Monet says he looked outside the window at this wedding party

and decided that this is where he was going to settle,

in Giverny.

In reality, it was probably the lights on the water

that attracted him.

As usual. See?

[playful music]

So they moved here, and they were a big family,

ten of them,

in a village that only had about 200 people.

And they really stood out.

They wore eccentric clothes.

And then, of course, Monet was living with Alice,

who was a widow,

and rumors started to spread.

It's not something that was really done at the time,

quite a clash with the villagers.

[thunder rumbles]

[gentle music]

[gentle music]

Monet was a passionate gardener, and in fact,

there are records that he created his own hybrids.

He talked about painting with flowers,

and, in a way, that's what we're doing here,

we're building up layer and layer of flowers,

one after the other, successive.

Something that Monet specifically demanded

was that the garden be immaculate all the time,

and so he was constantly going around removing the dead flowers

as they went.

Now we're about ten full-time gardeners,

and we also have some volunteer help,

because there are so many we have helpers to do that

for us and with us.

[serene music]

When Monet arrived, the garden was an allotment,

and an orchard,

and Monet started to take

that structure to pieces

and to replace it with flowering plants,

which was unheard of at the time.

You know, people grew...

People cultivated the land for food,

not for flowers.

That created hostility and misunderstanding, really,

of who he was and what he was doing.

Profusion of flowers,

that was the essence of the garden for him.

Flowers everywhere, all the time.

[gentle music]

After he spent years chasing nature,

moving along the Seine painting in all sorts of weathers,

he set a new challenge for himself,

which was to bring the landscape to him,

create in his garden the nature that he wanted to paint,

create a vegetal architecture in Giverny.

[orchestral music]

[King] Monet developed what became known as a reputation

for savagery with various of his neighbors,

many of the farmers in the area.

And maybe it was inevitable that there be a kind of conflict

between and among them.

But the situation was also exacerbated by the fact

that the farmers didn't necessarily

want him walking through their fields.

Of course, as a landscapist,

he needed access to the grounds around,

and they began doing things,

such as charging him to enter their fields,

and, in some ways, making money

out of Monet's artistic enterprise.

And in many cases,

this led to a kind of misunderstanding

between Monet and the local farmers.

And at one point, in fact, he had to purchase

the poplar trees that he was painting

in order to make sure that he finished

these beautiful grain stacks

that he was doing in the late 1880s and 1890s.

It's easy, and I think quite natural,

to think that Monet was a very happy man.

After all, who wouldn't be happy living in a place like this?

[somber music]

But, in fact, Monet was a very tortured individual.

And again, and again in his paintings,

he says that painting makes him suffer.

He says, "How I suffer. The pain it causes me."

[thunder rumbles]

One of the problems being the weather.

He painted in all weathers.

And he would rage, a bit like King Lear,

or King Canute, at the elements.

There are many stories of people turning up

here in Giverny,

or watching him painting on the coast,

and discovering him jumping up and down on his canvases,

taking a pen knife to a canvas,

or even burning them.

You would turn up and there would be a bonfire

of Monet's canvases here in the garden.

[dramatic music]

And if you think about it, what he was trying to do,

was to capture things that are impalpable,

like reflections, the clouds in the sky,

reflections on the water,

glimmers of sunlight,

flowers as the seasons change, all of these things.

And he was trying to freeze them in an instant

and capture them for eternity.

And, of course, that's impossible.

Which, as I say, he frankly admitted.

[lyrical guitar music]

[Marron] Monet wanted to bring color into the garden,

and you can see, there's color everywhere.

So this part of the garden we call the paint boxes.

We have a sequence of 19 beds on each side of a path...

that follow a gradation of color.

So at the bottom of the garden, we have the warmer colors,

which are being enhanced by the evening sun

which hits the bottom part of the garden.

And we move up to the top with the cooler colors,

which is exposed to the morning sunlight

coming from the east,

and that really enhances the cool colors up here. He wanted a maximum of color to be able to play around,

and see how the light interacted with the color.

And so he created this garden

as a collection of light, perhaps.

[lively music]

[de Wilde] So he's creating his own décor,

he's inviting you to step into that landscape

and then find yourself lost there,

and having to find you own way again,

and merging your own perspective with his.

He's presenting you with a first step,

and then you take the next.

[lively music]

Monet is decomposing this image that he's creating of reality,

like you do in a photo,

like you see everything in pixels,

like you can see everything in the stroke of a brush.

And invites the viewer to put that image back together,

to see everything as a whole again.

Almost as if he had magical qualities,

as if he could see light different,

as if he could see more colors than other people could.

So the eye was really the essence of his being.

Imagine being an artist and this is your tool,

this is the essence of who you are,

is how you see things.

[lively music]

[King] One of the things that was said about Monet

was that he had the greatest eye in the history of art.

Clemenceau said that Monet had an eye

that could penetrate the husk of appearance

and see the reality that underlay the surface.

And Monet's other friend, Paul Cezanne,

said, "Monet is only an eye, but my God, what an eye!"

[lively music]

[Lasowski] Clemenceau used to say that Monet had eyes

that could see beyond the surface.

A super eye.

And as his esteem for Monet grew,

so did their friendship.

They both shared a passion for gardening.

Clemenceau will soon be appointed Prime Minister,

leading the nation during difficult times.

And yet, his bond with Monet,

and the time they spent together,

was one of the things her cherished the most.

So Giverny, for him, started to become a safe haven,

a place where he could escape...

from all the political brawl.

[dark music]

He lived near water his whole life, he needed it.

And he realized that the one missing element

in his garden was water.

And in order to bring it to him, to his property,

he had to deviate a river.

And although he knew

that that would probably create a lot of fights,

he was entirely determined to do it.

[dark music]

When they heard that he wanted to put water lilies

in the water,

they were very weary thinking that maybe that would create

some sort of pollution in the water,

which would then impact their agricultural land.

And so there was massive resistance against his project.

[up-tempo music]

[King] He said to hell with the farmers,

to hell with the people in Giverny,

to hell with the engineers who tell me that it can't be done.

This is something I'm going to do.

And in fact, he got all of the permissions that he needed

in order to carry it through.

If the two things that Monet liked to paint

were water and flowers,

he now had his profusion of flowers.

And what he wanted to do then was to domesticate the water,

to domesticate this element that he had been painting

with such great success

for the previous couple of decades.

To bring it into his home environment

so he could work on it multiple times

on numerous canvases.

And that's why, therefore,

that he began in the 1890s working on this,

what would become over the course of a decade or so,

the water lily pond.

[uplifting orchestral music]

[Lasowski]As soon as the first water lilies

nreached the surface of the pond,

he started to paint them.

In a way it was like he had found his muse,

a flower that could harmonize water and light.

It was the beginning of a love story

that would turn into an obsession until his death.

[Marron] So the water lilies are planted in mud,

which is essentially the substrate

that is in the water garden, in the pond.

As the initial stems emerge

they have this journey to go up to the surface

so that they can then unfold and finally reach the sunlight,

which will give them the energy for their blooming

and for the growth.

We can imagine that that's possibly where the idea

of his future paintings germinated at that point

when he's seeing, for the first time,

these incredible flowers blooming

in the pond that he has created.

[solemn music]

[solemn music]

To decide where to place the water lilies,

we had to go back to the paintings

to see where they were painted

to sort of determine what features they were close to,

to place them again.

[King] In 1909 he put on exhibition in Paris

48 paintings that he had done of the water lily pond,

and it created a sensation.

He had now, on the verge of his 70s,

had the most successful exhibition of his career,

doing paintings of something that he himself had created,

painting his own landscape,

and having enormous success with it.

[lively piano music]

[piano music continues]

[piano and orchestral music]

[piano and orchestral music continue]

[Lasowski] At that point he became

one of the greatest painters in France,

and was known as "Le peintre du Bonheur".

But then, things suddenly changed.

It took years to meet the right conditions

for each blossom to flourish.

Beauty requires time and toil.

He had time and was a hard worker.

But now that his career had bloomed,

everything was going to be washed away.

[reporter] The Grand river overflows its banks

and inundates thousands of acres.

The entire region is virtually paralyzed by the flood,

which arrives without warning.

Row boats are pressed into service.

After the deluge comes the mopping up

as the river slowly recedes.

[Lasowski]There was a very big storm

nin 1910 in the north or France,

and the Seine inundated the fields.

And in Monet's gardens the ponds overflowed.

[somber music]

[Marron] The pond came out of its embankments

and just...

it destroyed a lot of the planting.

And, you know, the whole thing was then covered

with a bed of mud.

[somber music]

He loved water so much,

and he must have felt...

like it was sending him some kind of warning sign,

because things started to get very difficult for Monet.

[foreboding music]

[King] Monet was the most famous painter in France,

but despite this huge reputation he was now desperately unhappy

for a number of reasons.

[foreboding music]

[Lasowski] His second wife, Alice, died of leukemia,

which made him a widower for the second time.

[foreboding music]

And then, the final blow to his morale came

with the death of Jean, his eldest son,

who died after long-suffering.

And then, as he was trying to deal with the grief

by painting, as he always did,

he started to realize that his eyes,

those very precious tools he had,

were starting to fail him.

He went to the side of the pond on a beautiful July day

and began work, but made a terrible discovery,

and that was that his eyesight was beginning to fail him.

And that was a terrible shock to Monet

because of the fact that he was known for his...

the acuity of his vision.

He effectively retired from painting,

and this was widely reported in all of the news media.

And I think everyone who knew Monet

believed that the end had to be near

if he had stopped painting.

[sorrowful music]

[lively violin music]

[Lasowski] There was a very big election in France in 1914,

and reporters were looking for Clemenceau

to get his opinion on the situation,

but he was nowhere to be found.

[King] And it seemed very curious

that a political animal like Clemenceau

would absent himself from the political fray,

or the political scene, at this very critical time.

And there was much speculation about where he had gone

and what he was doing.

What actually happened was that

he was escaping the political fray,

which he often did by going to Giverny.

But in fact, he had a very important mission that day,

and it was to get his friend back to his easels.

[uplifting orchestral music]

[King] And so what happened on that fatal Sunday in April

is that Clemenceau and Monet, after the lunch,

they ended up down in the cellar,

probably to look at some very old paintings

that Monet had done,

as many as a dozen, 15 years earlier.

Works he had done before the garden,

before the water lily pond had reached it definitive form.

And these, of course were his firs essays,

his first attempts at painting the water lilies.

There was a eureka moment for Clemenceau.

He later said he didn't think a lot about these paintings

in terms of their artistic quality.

He knew Monet had done better work than this,

and could do even better work, again.

[peaceful music]

[Lasowski] Clemenceau didn't think

that they were particularly good,

but in a way he was ready to do anything,

even lying to his friend,

to just get him to get back to painting,

so he encouraged him.

What then happened threw him off completely because

not only did he get back to painting,

but he also embarked on one of the greatest

and most ambitious projects of his life.

[peaceful music]

[boat rumbles]

Three weeks after Clemenceau's visit,

there is a record of a letter Monet wrote to him saying,

"I'm back at work again."

[peaceful music]

[gunshot rings]

[dramatic music]

[cannon booms]

It was a terrible irony that Monet got his ability,

and his will, and his desire to paint back

at exactly the same time

that France descended into the First World War.

[marching band music]

[crowd cheers]

[marching band music]

And it's at this point

that the two friends started to go their separate ways.

Monet started to work ceaselessly

in his peaceful garden,

and Clemenceau was later going to become Minister of war.

[sorrowful music]

All French citizens were called to action.

Trains packed with soldiers started to leave the cities.

Giverny was no exception.

They set up a field hospital in Giverny,

and Monet could hear the dying and the wounded

from his garden.

His gardeners left, they all left to the front,

and yet, he had no intention to leave, and he stayed.

He wanted to stay in this garden that he had created.

[dark music]

And he once said,

"If the barbarians want to kill me,

they can do so in front of my canvases."

[dark music]

[King] He painted maniacally over the next year.

And so it's interesting that out of

the sort of personal tragedies he'd experienced,

out of the health defects he'd had with his eyes,

and then, finally, out of the political difficulties

of the war,

he somehow brought

all of these things together

and overcame them

to begin these gigantic paintings

which were, quite literally,

like nothing not only he had ever done before,

but like nothing anyone else had ever done before either.

[dark music]

The war should have only lasted a few months,

but it keeps going year after year.

The German armies have some very big victories,

there's a lot of losses for France,

and Georges Clemenceau,

who was the minister of war at this stage,

published in his newspaper...

a text in which he said that France

may have to sacrifice its children,

and unfortunately it wasn't just words,

and that's what happened.

[men singing]

[muffled singing]

[suspenseful music]

[gunfire rings]

[bombs burst]

[suspenseful music]

[marching footsteps]

[suspenseful music]

[intense orchestral music]

[flames crackle]

War had the flesh and bones of his son Michel.

Going back to Giverny,

he brought with him the smell of death and gunpowder.

It mixed with the scent of flowers and oil colors.

It were almost like he was bringing the war

to Monet and to Giverny.

[vocalization]

[King] We often think of Monet's paintings of his water lily pond

and his garden quite rightly as very peaceful scenes,

but in fact, the war inhabits them,

and inhabits every inch of them

because they were painted during the war.

But in fact, many of them do reflect very directly

Monet's visions about the war.

[vocalization]

[Lasowski] Monet's eyesight kept deteriorating,

but instead of putting his brushes down,

this time he embraced the illness,

making it part of a new artistic vision.

[uplifting music]

One of the things he said

when he was asked what and how he was doing

his painting and his approach was,

"Imagine you're blind,

and you're trying to see the world anew,

juxtaposing shapes and colors in a different way."

[uplifting music]

And, quite ironically,

the fact that his eyesight deteriorated,

in a way enabled him to see the world anew,

as he once said,

"By seeing shapes and colors in a different way."

Somehow what this new failing eyesight did was

it helped him to reinvent a vision,

and became a strength,

because it helped him to create

an entirely new body of work.

[ethereal music]

The world became a real blur.

nHis garden became otherworldly.

Flowers swayed like wraiths.

The water looked eerie.

And yet, he found his own way to portray the landscape

once again.

[ethereal music]

The Japanese bridges he painted in those years

are dripping blood,

the blood of the soldiers who lost their lives in battle.

What he did by painting a simple feature from his garden

was try to represent the pain of an entire nation.

[gentle music]

Just a few steps away from the water lilies,

he found something else to paint,

[gentle music]

which became a new symbol.

The weeping willows became a self-portrait.

They became the portrait of an old tortured man

somehow bent by the burden and the pain of war.

[orchestral music]

[mystical music]

His brush mimicked the swarming of the soldiers at the front.

It was as restless as his tormented soul,

but it made him feel impotent nonetheless.

So the act of painting the water lilies

became his act of nonviolent resistance

against the abominations of the war.

And the more intense the war got,

the more intensely he started to work

on his canvases.

And he started to call this project La Grand Decoration.

The two old friends went down parallel paths.

They had different goals, but the same growing commitment.

One was heading towards peace,

the other was inciting war.

Despite his age,

Clemenceau kept going to the front

to encourage the soldiers to resist.

And from his newspaper columns,

he did the same with the French civilians.

Many of them were starving.

And he started to become known as Pere de la Victoire,

the father of victory.

[melodious organ music]

The violence of the world around him was too much to bear.

His response would be an act of peace.

A reminder of the cruelty of men.

[melodious organ music]

Monet had painted a huge number of canvases in his garden,

but what he intended to do with them

didn't become clear until after the war.

[lively piano music]

[water rushing]

[solemn violin music]

[man]The army cannot wait another 48 hours.

The allies could grant the armistice

or fight on to unconditional surrender.

Georges Clemenceau, the war time French leader,

urged that the Allies should march triumphant into Berlin.

Our own General Pershing said,

"Complete victory can only be obtained

by continuing the war

until we force unconditional surrender."

nBut the world would not listen.

So golden was the thought of peace

nthat the armistice was granted.

We celebrate,

not only because the war was over,

but because it seemed that we had put an end

to German militarism forever.

[melodious piano music]

[Lasowski] After the war,

Monet decided to donate

some paintings to the state,

and he would do so.

He'd hand them over on the day after the armistice.

Clemenceau wanted those paintings

to become a symbol of hope and peace,

and he managed to secure an entire museum

to exhibit La Grand Decoration.

And I think in his old age,

Monet understood that this offer

was probably the last opportunity he had

to be remembered.

[melodious orchestral music]

La Grand Decoration was his last

great experimental work.

He wanted to create, which was a groundbreaking idea,

a sort of virtual reality.

And he designed the space in such a way

that the paintings would surround the viewers,

creating an immersive experience.

They also oriented the space east to west

so that natural light could move

in the same way it would have moved in his garden

hitting the water lily ponds,

so that when you saw those paintings,

you could just see the light shift.

Monet at last was going to have a public space

entirely devoted to his art.

[vocalization]

So the paintings had to be perfect,

and he kept painting, and painting, and painting.

[vocalization]

He probably knew that somehow, when he finished the paintings,

that...

His life would cease to have any meaning,

and so he kept pushing the deadline forward.

Clemenceau felt betrayed by his friend,

and he wrote to him,

"If I love you it's because

I gave myself to the person I believed you to be.

But if you're no longer this person,

then I shall continue to admire your paintings,

but we shall no longer be friends."

[dark music]

Georges Clemenceau did go to Giverny one last time in 1926.

His old friend Claude Monet had passed away.

It was probably a good thing that Monet had died

by the time the exhibition opened

at the Orangerie in May 1927,

because the reviews were terrible.

One critic said that Monet had been buried twice,

once in Giverny and once in the Orangerie.

[sorrowful music]

I guess it must have been heartbreaking

for Clemenceau to read those reviews

because he had shared this ambitious dream of Monet

and had followed him from the very beginning.

[sorrowful music]

And he knew, well, he believed that those pieces,

that the paintings were masterpieces.

[sorrowful music]

And then the Orangerie became known

as a desolate place in the heart of the city.

[lively orchestral music]

But if Monet was buried at the Orangerie,

fortunately for him,

that's also where he had his resurrection.

[lively orchestral music]

[man] Pollock was a dominant force,

even before his sudden death made him a hero.

Exploring pure paint with an epic private vision.

Total physical immersion in the painting process.

Pollock embodied the vigor

and set the pace for the New York School.

[lively orchestral music]

[Lasowski]Just like the most resilient seed keeps traveling

nuntil it finds the perfect soil,

Monet's art had to cross a much larger pond to flourish,

landing over the Atlantic Ocean.

In the middle of the 1950s,

a group of young painters

was shaking the art world

by its roots.

Their physical approach to the canvas,

the obsessive repetition of a subject,

and the large scale of their works,

owed much to the old master of impressionism.

And thanks to these artists,

Giverny's gates opened

to a new generation of young pilgrims.

Oddly enough, the man who had spent his entire life

chasing nature in its truest form,

to the point of becoming its slave,

was elected as the forerunner of the new abstract movement,

extending his legacy into modern art.

[serene music]

[ethereal music]

[grand orchestral music]

As we step inside his last masterpiece,

we get a glimpse of what he has achieved.

His artistic testament.

The culmination of his life-long quest.

These majestic canvases enclose the entire universe

in a small detail,

capturing time and space within a frame.

nIn just a portion of his world,

we find the seed of a vision we are all familiar with.

Through blindness he loosened the reins of perception,

caressing the truth.

His piercing gaze leaves us powerless,

prey to the absolute.

Carried away from reality, we dive into a reflection,

a phantasm of water and light.

That light, his light, is ours at last.

[grand orchestral music]

And when our eyes, filled with his art,

finally drift away,

time steps in,

nmaking everything new... again.

[grand orchestral music]

[grand orchestral music continues]

[vocalization]

[wind rustles]

[upbeat piano music]

[piano and orchestra music]

[melodious piano music]

[melodious piano and orchestra music]