The secret visibilities in Monet's 'Water Lily Series' and Tarkovsky's 'Solaris'
Well, now that we have seen each other," said the unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you.”
On 21 June, 2024 I had my first encounter with a Monet. Actually, not one but a modest five vignettes from a behemoth series of two hundred and fifty paintings, also known as Nymphéas in French. This body of work, created from the years of 1896 to 1920 are considered to be the artist’s magnum opus, eked out in the closing years of his life. It is said that Monet worked on these paintings nearly to his own undoing, yet stubbornly refused to sell them. He began painting the water lilies after the death of his mistress Camille Doncieux, a period in which he was reportedly inconsolable. Even more remarkable, is that he continued to paint despite developing cataracts and losing sight in his right eye. After his death, the works were donated to France and twenty-two panels were installed on curved walls in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris as per the artist’s request; keeping true to his vision of having them live as an immersive circular installation that would envelop the viewer in a “flowery aquarium1”.
A lover of nature, beauty and excess, Monet spared no expense in cultivating the lily ponds in his estate in Giverny, situated in the northwestern part of France. He imported many species of lilies which were not indigenous to Europe, accumulating different varieties and hybrids which he painted obsessively until his death. It is said that the process of producing these paintings was a prolonged ordeal for the artist, who was notorious for his delicate and unpredictable temperament. This tempestuousness would sometimes lead him to destroy large amounts of his own work.
Throughout his career, Monet’s core fixation was on the ephemeral conditions of light and its effects on colour, his impressive water garden which he devotedly cultivated was the perfect subject of study. A visitor once chanced upon him working on twelve separate canvases simultaneously next to his lily pond, which he rotated according to the light. Everything changes, even stone,” … “I am chasing a dream,” he admitted ... “I want the impossible.2” What the artist was singularly trying to capture was “the instability of a universe transforming itself every moment before our eyes3”. Moreover, as recounted by certain visitors, Monet's lily pond was not just an ordinary garden; it was described as “an orgiastic melee of vegetal violence4”, the artist was trying to paint its abundance, its tumultuous transformations.
Since objects changed their color and appearance according to the seasons, the meteorological conditions, and the time of day, Monet hoped to capture their visual impact in these brief, distinctive, ever-changing moments in time. He concentrated not only on the objects themselves but also, critically, on the atmosphere that surrounded them, the erratically shifting phantoms of light and colour that he called the enveloppe.
Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies, Ross King
I claim this one instance to be my first "tuchē" with a Monet. "Tuchē" (τύχη) being a Lacanian word that refers to an encounter with the real—an unexpected, disruptive event that exposes the limits of one’s comprehension. The "tuchē", a moment of unanticipated reality (chance), upends our sense of what is real and rewires our existing frameworks of understanding. Chancing upon these paintings was an “eye-opening” experience, pun intended; a breathtaking instance in which I beheld the ecstatic richness of the impossible, impressed onto surface.
Vision is the meeting, as at a crossroads, of all the aspects of Being.
The Primacy of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Funnily enough, during my time in New York City in my twenties, I often visited the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where a monumental triptych of Monet’s water lilies was permanently exhibited, yet a work of that scale has escaped my memory entirely.
Unfortunately, a diminishing aspect of contemporary life is a kind of habituated tendency towards absolution, that dulls our capacity to perceive of the breadth of existence. This Cartesian way of looking defaults the gaze and assigns things an imaginary order, which renders most of what we see as a “wide field of unconcerned desire5”. The MoMA, with its blockbuster roster of artworks drew my attention away from the Monet or perhaps I just wasn’t quite in the mood for looking.
My recent revelatory encounter with these paintings could also have been intensified by the fact that I experienced them in the "Claude Monet room," constructed in the underground Chichu Art Museum (地中美術館, Chichū Bijutsukan) on the scenic art island of Naoshima, during a period where I was very "hungry for art." Specially designed to house the Monets, the height and size of the room’s ceiling had been exactingly decided upon by the museum’s architectural team via a series of controlled experiments, to determine the optimal amount of natural light in the room. The philosophy of the Benesse Art Site or what has been coined the Naoshima Method is that “it's not just about looking at art, it's about what you can see through art6, a holistic ethos aimed at promoting public well-being. As I padded through the Monet Room in white leather indoor slippers provided by the museum (required footwear for entering the room), I luxuriated in a analgesic sense of “well-being”; derived from the immense pleasure of crossing an ocean of 700,000 unique Bianco Carrara Italian marble cubes lining every inch of the floor. Each piece, measuring 2cm by 2cm, had been carefully hand-placed, creating a soft, hazy patchwork of textures and subtle tonal variations that gently diffused the focus of the eye.
For the walls and floor of the exhibition room, in order to preserve the texture and oil of the paintings, they considered not only colour, but materials as well. Coarse plaster was applied evenly to every wall, and the floor was covered with 2cm square pieces of marble with no sharp corners.
Source: Archive series 11st : the Claude Monet room in the Chichu Art Museum
Designed by renowned Modernist Japanese architect Tadao Ando, the Chichu Art Museum is essentially a large elegant bunker dedicated to the pristine viewing of “high-art”. Although astonishingly beautiful, the Chichu Art Museum carried an subcurrent of sanctimony that irked me slightly as I stood gawking at my distorted reflection in a giant sphere, the grand centrepiece of the impressive Walter De Maria installation housed in the museum's bottom chamber. Imposing planes of concrete flank you on every side as you make your way through the museum. The efficacy of the Monet room can be attributed to how it was the only room in the museum without hard lines or cut edges, offering a restorative or humanistic contrast to the stark minimalism of the building. I also wonder if this philosophy of well-being includes those in the public who lack the privilege or social standing to access museums and view works of art.
Upon entering the room, one is met with a lush panorama of paintings that initially appear as a tangled mess of lines and colours. Yet, on closer observation, the paintings start to reveal their secret visibilities, as eye begins to process image.
The harshest critics of the Impressionist movement regarded Impressionist paintings as sloppy and incomplete, dismissing them as "an insult to painting." Yet, as the Impressionists were acutely aware, this criticism was a moot point, an oversight rooted in the one’s own failure to attune to the modulations of depth and perspective. As I embed some images of the paintings in the writing, I find it amusing that, when viewed at a smaller scale, these masterpieces look more like blotchy crayon sketches than intricate works of art.
The Impressionist style also contains a topographical dimension, characterised by visible brushwork and the technique of impasto, which involves applying thick layers of paint to the canvas. Often painting directly or with minimal planning, the Impressionists aimed to capture the immediacy and spontaneity of the moment. In line with this practice, Monet also selected canvases that had a pronounced weave, he would then enhance additional layers with painterly techniques to create a vibratory and visceral effect. He then further worked the surface of the canvas to add textures that captured the rippling of the water and the movement beyond its depths.
The largest piece in the collection, “Water Lily Pond” was disorienting at first glance, obscured by reflections from the surrounding environment on the protective glass and indecipherable up close. However, after adjusting my coordinates, I was able to enter into the dense swathes of unfathomable darkness dispersed throughout the entire field of the painting, like bruises flowering on the surface of the canvas.
By adjusting one’s position when looking at an Impressionist painting, one becomes privy to a complex scenography that sits somewhere between realism and abstraction. I found myself doing a light dance, stepping forwards, backwards and sideways, enjoying the painting’s transformations in dialogue with my body. The brushstrokes, initially appearing unintelligible and lacking in refinement, revealed a deliberate and nuanced approach to capturing light and movement.
An impressionist painting is an entirely relational experience that induces a joy in looking. By adopting different vantage points, the interplay of colours and shapes become more apparent, highlighting the acumen of the artist’s gaze and the innovative techniques that defined the Impressionist genre.
Acknowledging that vision is an embodied experience, phenomenologist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty captures this idea eloquently, describing the body as “an intertwining of vision and movement7” and painting as “a series of appropriately mixed, instantaneous glimpses along with, if a living thing is involved, attitudes unstably suspended between a before and an after8”, —an imprint meant for the spectator to interpret through the act of seeing. This leads to my central premise of seeing as an active engagement, which demands a total involvement of the body.
Since things and my body are made of the same stuff, vision must somehow come about in them; or yet again, their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body by a secret visibility.
The Primacy of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
What I love about Monet’s water lilies is their inscrutability, which I think contains an immanent refusal, that liberates them from a “mundane descriptive function9”. Throwing all perspectival rules out the window, Monet dispensed entirely with the horizon line, rendering pictorial space ambiguous and lateral in nature.
In "Camera Lucida", Barthes describes the image as an “laminated object, whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape”. Barthes was referring to the photograph, but this description is relevant to anything that involves visual representation. Instead of trying to distinguish between discrete parts, Monet embraced the unknown and boldly painted the abyss over and over again; contending with the murky mysteries of the lily pond.
In the anime-manga "Blood Blockade Battlefront", there is a special ability known as The All-Seeing Eyes of the Gods (神々の義眼 Kamigami no Gigan). Those who possess these eyes can perceive 'The Truth' of the world. These eyes endow their wielder with heightened visual senses that allow them to perceive movements imperceptible to normal human eyes and look into the past and future. Nonetheless, acclimatising to this powerful capability is difficult because of the large amount of visual information that the user needs to process. In the story, extended use of the eyes may cause them to overheat and explode, with the holder at risk of losing their life and eyesight completely.
Proponents of the Impressionists believed that they possessed perceptual acuity more advanced than the average human; a more evolved form of sight, not unlike the The All-Seeing Eyes of the Gods. Detractors believed that what they saw was from the perspective of lunatics or the mad. Personally, I consider the Impressionist eye not as a gifted superpower, but as a latent faculty to be activated. Opening up this capacity however, can be more of a burden than a blessing due the overwhelming amount of stimuli that one is exposed to and conundrum of how to express it.
Endeavouring to paint the perceived boundlessness of nature was a formidable undertaking that nearly drove Monet and maybe some of his other peers to the brink of insanity. Additionally, many hours of staring at the iridescent surface of his lily pond worsened Monet’s eye condition, in which he was forced to take intermittent breaks and paint other subjects, such as baskets of eggs. Like the myth of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, I wonder if we can consider the Impressionist agenda as valour or hubris.
I’m chasing the merest sliver of colour. It’s my own fault, I want to grasp the intangible. It’s terrible how the light runs out, taking colour with it. Colour, any colour, lasts a second, sometimes three or four minutes at most. What to do, what to paint in three or four minutes? They’re gone, you have to stop. Ah, how I suffer, how painting makes me suffer! It tortures me. The pain it causes me!”
Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies, Ross King
Shinigami Eyes (死神の目, shinigami no me), also known as Shinigami Eyeballs or Eyes of the Shinigami in the popular anime "Death Note" are eyes bestowed onto humans by Japanese death gods, the Shinigami. They allow the user to see both the names and lifespans of humans floating above their heads in exchange for half of their remaining lifespan. With the death of many of his peers, such as Rodin and Cézanne, Monet became increasingly haunted by the spectre of his own waning mortality and the inexorable march of aging. Much like the holder of "Shinigami Eyes" who could literally see the finite and temporal nature of life, Monet seemed to be acutely aware of his dwindling lifespan. “I’m at an age where I can’t afford to lose a minute.” Like a shark that would drown if it stopped swimming, Monet seemed to believe that he would die if he stopped painting10. Furthermore, as his eyesight continued to deteriorate, he was even more resolute to complete his paintings before he lost his vision entirely.
The alluring quality of these paintings brings me one of my ultimate cinematic fixations, "Solaris" by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, adapted from the titular novel by Polish science fiction writer Stanisław Lem. The alien-ocean Solaris is revealed to the audience via vague vistas of swirling technicolor and mist-covered landscapes of an unsettling and otherworldly beauty.
I get a sense that both Monet and Tarkovsky were fascinated with liquid and mutable surfaces because of their elusiveness. Hidden underwater depths feature as a common motif in both the paintings of Monet and the films of Tarkovsky. Monet’s lily pond and the alien ocean Solaris possess an obscurity that echoes the indeterminate nature of the subconscious. French art critic Gustave Geffroy once wrote that Monet’s “paintings revealed “the states of unconsciousness of the planet, and the suprasensible forms of our thoughts.” What I really love about these paintings is that, they also depict the mysteries inherent within them as ubiquitous, as a kind of “as is”, defying the need for symbolism or explanation. Monet is simply painting water lilies, yet they possess their own unconscious.
“the liquid transparencies of an extraordinary world of underwater flora, of long filaments of algae, muddy and untamed, which, under the pressure of the current, tremble and twist.”
Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies, Ross King. / Cahiers Octave Mirbeau. 2001. p. 261.
In the opening shot of Solaris, seaweed or some form of aquatic vegetation undulates beneath the surface of water. The camera then pans gradually to the right, unveiling additional layers of greenery to slowly reveal the figure of a man (the protagonist Kris Kelvin) amidst mist-shrouded surroundings. Amidst the expanse of nature, man places himself at the center of it all.
Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself.11
The Primacy of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
In an essay on the heterotopic12 nature of Solaris, Nicolae Sfetcu describes Solaris as a 'pure object' without an intelligible or experimentally defined purpose13. This quality resonates with emptiness in Buddhism, known as 'Śūnyatā' in Sanskrit, which rejects dualistic views of reality and denies the existence of a fixed self. Solaris itself is adaptive and acts as a void entity that reflects the subjectivities of those it encounters. It mirrors the inner conflicts of the scientists back onto themselves, resurrecting ghosts from their pasts and, unwittingly, from within their deepest recesses. Buddhist emptiness also teaches that all phenomena arise and exist dependently on conditions, nothing exists independently or in isolation. By painting the complex surface of his pond based on his perception of this unending interconnectedness, Monet also sought to capture the contingencies of everything emerging from the infinite base of nothingness.
… by beaming x-rays at the surface of the Solaris ocean, the crew has unwittingly crossed the threshold of the board’s artificial exploratory boundaries: the point of no return. Through irradiation, the cosmonauts have performed a figurative cerebral probe into the recesses of the primordial mind of Solaris, which is answered with a reflection of their own subconscious.
Source: 1972: Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky), Acquarello
The central entity in the film 'Solaris' spawns madness by materializing as physical manifestations of memories and subconscious desires of the spacecraft's inhabitants. Initially dismissed as hallucinations, the scientists eventually acknowledge the existence of their unwanted guests as real but classify them as non-human entities, affording them no affection. The protagonist encounters an uncanny manifestation of his deceased wife, Hari, who appears like a fever dream. The resurrected Hari (whom I will refer to as Hari X) is actually the embodiment of what Solaris has extracted from his subconscious. Hari X, desirous, desperate, and hapless, can be seen as a projection of the male-ego’s need for affirmation and a manifestation of the stoic Kris’s hidden torments.
Kris, understand that this is not madness. It has something to do with conscience.
Doctor Gribaryan, Solaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky
Hari X while maintaining a suicidal impulse, perhaps carried over from some genus of her previous incarnation, retains no memories from her original self and is impervious to death, capable of endless resurrection. In her blankness and programmatic immortality, Hari X serves as a Lacanian mirror-stage for Kris, a pivotal moment in ego formation when infants first recognize themselves in a mirror. In Solaris, Kris sees himself in Hari X, who is a reconstruction of his psychic interiority. The infant then internalizes the mirror image as their own, establishing a sense of identity and self. However, this process also introduces a level of estrangement from the body, whereby the infant identifies more with the ideal-I in the mirror, forgetting that the true body is fragmented and inconsistent. An interesting role reversal results where Kris becomes increasingly unmoored from himself and grows increasingly dependent on Hari X, while she as a character, becomes more assertive and self-defined.
It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.
Alice in Wonderland: Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll (1865)
Ultimately, the mirror stage marks the subject's entry into dissociation by creating a double. Yet Hari X transcends her role as the surrogate double, exhibiting intelligence, self-awareness and her own sense of autonomy. In one of my favorite scenes, Hari X, in defiance of her inhuman limitations, attempts to drink a glass of water but chokes. She is grief-stricken by her failure, but her grief in itself is revelatory. What makes Hari X so compelling is her negotiation of her own contradictions and her fight for self-determination.
Hari: I don't know how to sleep. It's not sleep. It's somehow around me. It's as if it wasn't just inside of me, but much farther away.
Solaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky
None of the crew members besides Kris perceive Hari X as alive or human. Kris is the exception due to his own guilt at causing the original Hari’s death and his desire for salvation. Yet this perspective is problematic and egocentric, for he refuses to consider the new Hari as distinct from his wife, believing instead that the old Hari’s return from the dead is his chance at redemption. Throughout the film, Hari X evolves in intriguing ways, becoming increasingly self-actualized and distinguishing herself from her namesake. Kris eventually falls in love with Hari X, acknowledging that she is something or someone completely different.
Conversely, the other men aboard the spacecraft grow increasingly fragmented and detached from their humanity. One of the scientists, Dr. Sartorius, an astrobiologist, maintains a dismissive and contemptuous stance toward the guests, viewing them through a detached rather than emotional lens. He regards them primarily as subjects for scientific study, indiscriminately conducting experiments on them in his quest for attaining immortality. Dr. Sartorius categorically despises Hari X, viewing her as a composition of unstable neutrinos. From this rationalist or scientific standpoint, Hari X is classified as unreal or non-essential due to her unstable and extraterrestrial make. His closed perspective raises the question: is stability and biological/genetic constitution a fundamental criterion for defining what is real or true? At this juncture, Hari X as a character has become more expansive, tangible and multi-faceted but also more precarious in her evolutionary potential.
Hari X: Please don't interrupt me. I'm a woman, after all.
Dr. Sartorius: You're not a woman and you're not a human being. Understand that, if you're capable of understanding anything. There is no Hari. She's dead. You're just a reproduction, a mechanical reproduction. A copy. A matrix.
Hari X: Yes. Maybe. But I - I am becoming a human being. I can feel just as deeply as you. Believe me.
Solaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky
From this exchange between Hari X and Dr. Sartorious, she acknowledges and validates her own liminality and humanity. Hari X asserts that she is “becoming a—”. If we were to use Deleuze's definition of "becoming", we could understand Hari X as a veritable force of nature, the embodiment of living process whose existence is constantly redefined by her ongoing relationships to the forces around her.
Monet's lily pond paintings, the depthless roiling ocean of Solaris and the bio-replicant Hari X all serve as scrying mirrors, live surfaces that offer glimpses beyond their facades into the secret visibility of things. These fluid modes of representation eschew fixity in favour of a more open-ended proposition. Initially, they may appear inscrutable, yet their instability can potentially awaken us to a truer and more embodied vision. In Camera Lucida, Barthes writes of two concepts, the studium (the impersonal) and the punctum (the personal). The studium as “the order of liking, not loving14” — is an “irresponsible interest15” — that creates a chasm between us and others. The punctum, the wound, punctures the elevated complacencies of the studium and initiates us into the disorder of loving, into greater and more profound intimacies.
Even when we tire of or try to maintain distance between ourselves and the world around us, an impulse deep within us persists in seeking out the wound. Perhaps this is why we have not yet looked away—searching for an opportunity to find love within the emptiness.
After Hari X’s final death, the scientists broadcast Kris’s brainwaves into Solaris, offering his consciousness to the ocean. An island materializes on the planet’s surface and the film closes with Kris kneeling in front of his father, in a moment of penultimate surrender, penance and reconciliation. Perhaps in order to tuchē love’s immensity, you have to wholly give yourself up.
Notes:
Wikipedia has an index of all of Monet’s water lily paintings.
Fig 1. Water-Lily Pond
c.1915-26, Oil on Canvas, Diptych, Each Part: 200X30cm
Fig 2. Water Lilies, Cluster of Grass
1914-17, Oil on Canvas, 200x213cm
Fig 3. Water Lilies
1914-17, Oil on Canvas, 200x200cm
Fig 4. Water Lilies
1914-19, Oil on Canvas, 100x200cm
Fig 5. Water Lilies, Reflections of Weeping Willows
1916-19, Oil on Canvas, 100x200cm
King, Ross. 2016. Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies, Bloomsbury Publishing. p.51
King, Ross. 2016. Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies, Bloomsbury Publishing. p.44 / Christopher E. Forth, “Neurasthenia and Manhood in fin-de-siècle France,” in Cultures of Neurasthenia from Beard to the First World War, ed. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter (Amsterdam: Éditions Rodopi, 2001), pp. 329–62.
The Lasting Impression of French Impressionism –– Minneapolis Institute of Art.” n.d. https://new.artsmia.org/programs/teachers-and-students/teaching-the-arts/five-ideas/the-lasting-impression-of-french-impressionism.
King, Ross. 2016. Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies, Bloomsbury Publishing. p.231
Barthes, Roland. 1993. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. London, England: Vintage Classics. p.37
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. The Primacy of Perception. Northwestern University Press. p.162
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. The Primacy of Perception. Northwestern University Press. p.185
Hebdomadaire Revue. 1909, quoted in Levine, Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection, p. 246
King, Ross. 2016. Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies, Bloomsbury Publishing. p.198
Cf. Le visible et l'invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 273, 308-11.-Trans. 4. See Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960),210,222-23, especially the footnotes, for a clarification of the "circularity" at issue here.—Trans.
A concept by Michel Foucault related to places or spaces that exist in parallel to our everyday lives, yet differ in terms of function and meaning from established norms.
Barthes, Roland. 1993. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. London, England: Vintage Classics. p.37
Barthes, Roland. 1993. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. London, England: Vintage Classics. p.37