The words are those of a man at the end of his tether. “I must have undoubtedly been born under an unlucky star. I’ve just been turned out without even a shirt on my back from the inn in which I was staying. My family refused to help me any more. I don’t know where I’ll sleep. I was so upset yesterday that I was stupid enough to hurl myself into the water. Fortunately no harm was done.”
The year is 1868. The writer is Claude Monet. “That moment resonates,” says Phil Grabsky, director of I, Claude Monet, a new feature-length film that will air in more than 200 cinemas across the UK for one night on Tuesday. “It’s the same thing you see with Beethoven chasing his payments. The lack of money haunts Monet. It drives him. You can’t understand his art without understanding this.”
I, Claude Monet is part of the hugely successful Exhibition on Screen series, which provided detailed insights into popular exhibitions from the National Gallery’s 2011 take on Leonardo da Vinci to the recent acclaimed look at the work of Hieronymus Bosch at the Noordbrabants Museum in the Netherlands. This film, however, is different. There is no current or recent Monet exhibition. There is no biography. There are no talking heads.
Instead, for 80 minutes Monet’s light-filled paintings fill the screen while his letters – Grabsky had access to 3,000 thanks to the work of art dealer and historian Daniel Wildenstein, who collated them – are read by the actor Henry Goodman.
The effect is intense and intimate, pulling you into the artist’s world and making it feel as though you are walking alongside him in his small triumphs and louder despairs.
“In a sense I’m the curator of this exhibition,” says Grabsky. “Where the other films are based on successful exhibitions, this came about because after we’d made Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse [which covered the 2016 Royal Academy exhibition] I just thought there was so much more to be said about Monet, but I had to think about the right way to tackle it. And luckily we had access to all the letters, so I felt why not just have Henry read them over the images? The hope was that it would let audiences have a discussion about his work and come to their own different views about his personality.”
By stepping back, Grabsky allows Monet and his work to come into focus, and in doing so he gives us a rare insight into that moment when obsession bleeds into genius. “When I look at nature I feel as if I’ll be able to paint it all and capture everything … then it vanishes,” Monet laments, perfectly capturing that elusive gap between what you see in your mind’s eye and what ends up on the canvas. “I don’t think I’ve seen a film about him that’s as intimate as this,” Grabsky says. “If you sit in the cinema for 80 minutes and just have him talk to you, then not only do the layers of his personality unfold, the paintings themselves are revealed in different way.”
Art critic Jonathan Jones recently noted that “Monet makes all other art seem slightly false”, adding that the painter was “an unbeatable, unequalled artist whose popularity alone stops art snobs admitting that he is their favourite too”. It’s true that, as he and his fellow impressionists have been co-opted by the tourism industry, their work adorning everything from calendars to tea towels, so they have become increasingly dismissed as “chocolate box” painters. Yet, as Andrew Graham-Dixon pointed out in his recent series on French art, to sneer at these “pretty” works is to forget that when they were first shown they were “raw and shocking”.
“This was revolutionary, highly provocative work,” says Grabsky. “People physically fought at the early exhibitions. The impressionists started a debate about art.”
Nor does the film shy away from the more difficult parts of the artist’s personality. He writes begging letters to everyone from family to fellow artists, noting: “Although I’m getting on with my relations they’ve warned me that … if I need money then I have to earn it.” Later he adds a postscript: “Do try and send me a little more if only 100 or 150 francs. Please bear it in mind. Without it I’ll be in a very awkward position.” The next letter sounds a grumpier note: “Once again I’ve had to reach out to people I barely know and receive snubs from them.”
Those financial worries soon bleed into his concerns about the health of his first wife, Camille, and their children. “It is unbearable to see her suffering so much,” he writes, later adding: “I cannot hope to earn enough money. I am myself embittered and my wife always sick … I am … utterly without hope and see everything at its blackest and worst.”
Yet throughout it all the paintings keep coming. He leaves his ailing family alone for hours, then days, then weeks, driven by the need to paint. The results of that desperate, compulsive work, those luminous, sun-drenched paintings, fill the screen, their beauty made almost terrible by the tale of sickness and death unspooling by their side. “The story of Camille is a terribly sad one but we had to tell it as it is,” says Grabsky.
“He writes about how sick she is but he still goes away and paints for 12 hours at a time, or leaves her for weeks. She got a very rough deal.”
Famously, when she subsequently died after months of ill health, Monet painted her on her deathbed, in a work that is shot through with grief and fury. The camera lingers on the painting for some time, forcing us to consider what price genius extracts, not just from the artist but, more terribly, from all who surround him.
“He knows no other path – and I think that’s true of so many artists and composers I’ve made films about,” says Grabsky. “None of them are doing this for fame or fortune or celebrity. They’re driven by the desire to be as good as they can possibly be. Yes, they want basic financial security, and talk about how good contacts help but what they really want is respect from other painters. You read Monet’s letters and he never seems quite satisfied with his ability. It’s that which keeps him motivated, that sense that he could do better, that he hasn’t quite captured what it is he’s striving to catch.”
The Exhibition on Screen series has proved hugely successful with audiences – “We aired I, Claude Monet in Italy last night and 15,000 people came to see it, which was above La La Land for that evening” – and Grabsky sees it filling a hole television no longer caters for. “BBC4 does have some great stuff but the arts programming on Channel 4 is now minimal, Sky Arts have cut their channels from two to one, and Channel 5, where I used to make programmes with Tim Marlow, has abandoned it completely,” he says. “You speak to broadcasters and they say people aren’t interested in art – well you try getting into the Hockney exhibition at Tate Britain. I went to the National Gallery yesterday and you could barely move. Their attitude drives me nuts – people are fascinated by art.”
He sounds gloomy about the possibility of arts programming returning to television. “I’m realistic. On one hand if you are interested in the arts then there’s never been more access elsewhere. You can go online to YouTube and watch a film on Renoir. A lot of newspapers still cover a wide variety of exhibitions, art galleries are full and the success of event cinema like the National Theatre Live and Exhibition on Screen has helped the growth of independent cinema. But at the same time television doesn’t reflect this interest and not only could it reflect it better it could prompt it.”
His main hope, however, is that I, Claude Monet and the upcoming films in the series, including one on Michelangelo, which will air in June, continue to bring art to those who might not otherwise have access. “TV might not want to do it but now you can see films about art in cinemas, whether a large cinema or a screening at a local village hall, and that’s so exciting,” he says.
“People write to us and say: ‘I saw the film and now I’m going home to paint’, or ‘I took my son and daughter and now we’re going to a gallery’. The aim is to share the wonder of these artists’ lives – because Monet’s life, for all the struggles, is inspiring. He has to paint.
“Nothing stops him, not even the first world war. He can hear the noise of the artillery firing and he simply says: ‘They’re going to have to slaughter me here as I paint.’ The painting was everything.”
I, Claude Monet will screen in cinemas across the UK on Tuesday
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