Monet, Through The Iris

Claude Monet’s painting The Path through the Irises is hard to ignore. First of all, there’s the sheer size of it—the canvas stretches six and a half feet high and over five feet across. The Path through the Irises hangs center stage in its gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and if you have the time to linger, as I did on a recent Monday afternoon, you’ll notice the almost gravitational pull that it exerts over the room. No matter where someone entered, they almost always ended up in front of Path through the Irises, even if just for a few seconds. There's just no getting around it.

It takes longer than that for the painting to resolve itself into a coherent image, or at least it did for me; the first impression I had was one of almost violent contrasts. The American visual artist George Condo described The Path through the Irises as possessing “some of the ugliest combinations of colors I've ever seen in my life: these polar opposite tones, like purple and yellow, those oranges and green mixed in.”

My pilgrimage to the Met was precipitated by a desire for a different sort of museum experience than the ones I’d most recently had. Those had all been squeezed into already busy weekends, journeys made with a specific purpose or exhibition in mind. Those visits have their own specific set of pleasures, but what I craved most on this dreary March day, at the end of a month-long break from work, was the sort of unhurried time I associated with my days as a student when my ID granted me free access to the Art Institute of Chicago and the shape of my life gave me endless hours to while away there.