The memory of the Water Lilies

A shell went through one of the paintings. It was 1944. I'm in the Water Lilies room, the second and perhaps most secret room, at the back of the Musée de l'Orangerie. My father is with me. At the entrance, he is asked to leave his umbrella behind, perhaps for fear that in a rash move he might skewer a canvas. He, a little stung, turns to me. My father, so meticulous, who has been working on his paintings for years, my father whose skin smells of turpentine at all hours of the day, so much so that when I enter any museum in the world, I think I'm entering his home, my father lays down his arms. We both start laughing, firstly because if the museum were to be afraid of clumsiness, it would be mine, as I can only fully control my movements when I'm surrounded by music. But that's just as well, because they haven't yet noticed my awkward body, my ankle that trips easily, my arms that are always a little bigger than I'd imagine, as if I'd remained child-sized inside, and the amplitude of my adult movements still didn't come naturally to me. Except when the music's on. Then, by a magic trick that always surprises me, it makes the objects dance, softening the walls of reality and making room for my melancholy, stubborn bird's gestures, my child's gestures playing the adult. We also laugh simply because, I think, my father and I are both happy to be at the Orangerie on a day when it's closed. We walk through the entrance, with that determined step my father takes when he enters a museum. He heads straight for the Water Lilies. When I was little, I remember we only stopped in front of paintings that "called" to us. That's what he used to say: painting calls us. We'd walk briskly through a room, then stop dead in our tracks, because something had grabbed us. Then we'd stay for hours in front of a single painting. For a long time, I believed that the power of painting lay in its ability to grasp everything in a fraction of a second, the time it takes to look, as an experience of pure presence. But I've learned that it also tells us a story that is woven over time. You have to be on the lookout, keep your ears open, your heart open too, and accept moments of boredom. I'm sometimes struck by the similarities between music and painting. I believe that, like any language that attempts to express the invisible, painting is a matter of fidelity and patience. Sometimes we have to do violence to ourselves, to break down our inner resistance, to allow its secret language to emerge within us. We cross the first room, occupied by a team working on photographing the canvases in micro-fragments, for a 2.0 reproduction of which museums have the secret, before arriving at the second, empty room, bathed in a diffuse light designed to let the changing atmospheres of the day play with the painting, transforming it from hour to hour. I stop in front of a panel. The darkest, it seems to me. Perhaps the most enigmatic. Then I learn that this panel, the one that first called to me, the one that absorbs me because I feel I'm incapable of deciphering it, I learn that this panel was pierced by a shell in 1944. And it twists my stomach. Why am I always called by what was once destroyed?

I think, the war has erupted inside the canvas. I imagine the garden torn apart. Years of work to make the material vibrate, to turn the garden into sky, into movements torn from the soul, to make peace so strongly imprinted on the canvas that thousands of eyes crowd into this room to let it enter them. It has taken years to bring out these large panels, which contain so much beauty and so much anger, fragility, abandoned trials, flowers that are dead and born against the current, light that is charged with storm and also with azure, rage, complexity, and a mad faith in the living, in what is you, in what overflows us, in what will always be so much greater than us, in the infinite and changing movements of nature, in what is secretly made and unmade inside our bodies, and also in painting, in what tries to pierce the surface of reality, to dig into our gaze to the point of reopening the wound of having access only to a two-dimensional world, in what would turn the wound inside out like skinning an animal, to go to the side of the shadows, of the barely perceptible, of the enigma that permeates our every movement. The war tore this panel apart. The shell landed on the other side, but didn't explode. As if, for once, some angels had woken up and protected something of the world's fragility. Before going back to sleep and letting humans tear away what's left.

I'm standing next to my father, thinking about what would happen if a shell put a hole in one of his paintings. Nothing lasts, Clara. Sometimes we think we write, paint, compose, so that something remains, to leave a trace, like a mad movement against death and oblivion. But nothing lasts. He says that, my father, and he smiles. Calm. You really start painting when you realize that you're not doing it to fight oblivion, you're painting to try and balance something in the world. To oppose the forces of destruction that exist and will always exist with the forces of construction and invention. Not so that invention wins out, no, we've known since the dawn of time that it never does. But to ensure that these two dynamics continue to coexist. To try and tip the balance, for a few seconds, towards what makes us great. And if we've been able to feed the ocean beating against the frozen walls of fear, even just a drop, we've won. The gesture was worth it.