The Water Lilies - The Two Willows

For decades after the rooms opened in 1927, the public largely stayed away. Impressionism looked dated beside Cubism and Surrealism, and the museum sometimes put up partition walls in front of the panels to stage temporary shows. The change came after the Second World War, and it came from painters. In 1952 the French painter André Masson called these rooms the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism, and in 1955 the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought one of Monet's large water-lily canvases. The American critic Clement Greenberg saw in late Monet a forerunner of the new painting in New York, work with no centre, spread evenly from edge to edge, like that of Jackson Pollock. The Two Willows makes the point on the largest scale. Four panels, 17 metres in all, the longest of the eight, close the eastern end of the second room. Slender willow trunks stand near the far edges, and between them the flat surface of the pond runs on with no single focal point. Near the right-hand tree the brush has left patches of bare canvas showing, while the lily flowers along the bottom are built up in thick paint that stands off the surface.