Monet’s Fatal Flowers

The bulimic Grégoire Bouillier, among other adventures as an obsessive investigator, attempts here to unravel the mystery of the large panels of the Water lilies, Monet, at the Orangerie. It is sometimes arbitrary, too quick to meander through analogy, to hasty speculations, all azimuths, but it is often successful.

Bouillier starts from the impression that a first vision of the Water lilies. As if this raw perception managed to break through the wall of codes and discourses that cover the immense work. We know that abstract painters adored this painting almost without pattern, gestural, infinite. Revolutionary.

Also readThe Time of the Impressionists: Once Upon a Time There Was the Revolution

Paved in the pond of Giverny, Bouillier breaks the myth of a pure ecstasy of painting to say directly what he feels: a malaise, a sadness, a parade of funereal images. This supposed triumph of Eros, Water Lilies-nymphs, fills him with an anguish of death.

Dark Waters Funeral Myth

Should I confess that, during my lifelong visits to the Orangerie, I have always felt The Water Lilies