Today I stumbled upon an article about a Monet exhibition in Paris that has been extended to 24 hours/day thanks to long lines and massive demand.  Apparently 7,000 people visit the show every day.  The article’s featured photo knocked my socks off – a lovely lesser-known Monet painting with plenty of personal significance.

Finishing my art degree at UC Davis, I enrolled in an art history course on the impressionist movement, and throughout the first months of 2009 I studied the lovely paintings of Monet, Manet, and Pissarro.  To prepare for exams, I created stacks of flash cards – an image of the painting affixed to the front, and on the back, important details like the artist name and date.  The trick was choosing which paintings to make into flashcards.  Memorizing every single painting in the textbook, or even those mentioned in lecture, would be daunting (one professor, Jeffrey Ruda, actually imposed this ridiculous requirement), and I considered myself very skilled at predicting which paintings may appear on the exam.  With dozens to choose from, and only 5 to 10 on each test, it was logical that our esteemed professor Catherine Anderson would select only the most important pieces.  On the day of our second mid-term exam (worth about 20% of the total grade), I came prepared to identify a good 30 paintings – confident my stack of flashcards included all the slides we were about to see.  I was right on, and I cruised through the test, quickly identifying each painting as it appeared.  Then, near the end of the exam – disaster.  This painting appeared – a Monet piece I’d failed to include in my flashcards.

I didn’t know the title.  I guessed the date within a few years but I didn’t know the darn title – an easy 2 points out the window. I glanced at the desk of the girl to my right, who had set to writing her analysis of the work – and the name she’d written seemed to jump off of her booklet and into my mind: “Claude Monet  – A Day by the Bay”.  Without thinking twice, I wrote this down and proceeded with my mini-essay about the work.  I never thought about the title again, I finished what turned out to be a stellar analysis, the test ended, I handed in my booklet, hopped on my bike and pedaled for home.

On my way through campus I ran into Gab, and she asked how the test had gone.

“Really well” I responded “except for one slide…”  And I explained the situation, and how I’d grabbed the ID from my classmate.  Gab looked at me kind of seriously, and said something like “can’t you get kicked out of school for that?”, and the true nature of what I’d just done started to sink in.  We said goodbye as she proceeded to class, and I biked home, slowly developing an awful feeling in the pit of my stomach.  By the time I reached the Viking I realized a few things:

a. Since Monet was french, the title of the piece probably wasn’t “A Day by the Bay”
b. The girl on my right was just as clueless as I
c. Our tests would be the only two that incorrectly identified that painting as “A Day by the Bay”
d. The shit would hit the fan

I got inside and laid down on the couch, feeling pretty sick now.  I opened my computer and pulled up the class site and Monet’s pretty little painting read “Terrasse a Sainte-Adresse” and I wanted to throw up.  I imagined every step of the process – professor Anderson grading the tests, marking my ID as wrong, coming upon the girl’s test a few minutes later, reading “A Day By The Bay” again and thinking “hmm.. that looks familiar”, going back to my test, turning to that page and saying “aha!”.  Then me being called in to her office, confronted by the other girl, getting kicked out of UC Davis… and I couldn’t bear it.  I wrote an email to Professor Anderson right then and there.  I laid it all out – what happened, how sorry I was, how I wasn’t in the habit of this sort of thing, (but that I knew there was no way to prove it).  I appealed to her mercy and hoped for the best.

She didn’t get back to me for a couple of long days, but finally she responded and set up a post-class meeting, where she thanked me for my note and told me her decision was to simply mark that part of the question wrong.  She said that from my writing it was clear that I wasn’t casting about for answers.  I was elated.  I was so freaking grateful I painted her a painting.

Despite the lack of consequences, I like to think that I learned something.  Mostly that cheating is never worth it.  I would’ve still gotten an A had I simply left the name blank (Or come up with my own original name like ‘a day by the bay’).  I also learned that I’m not very smooth, and probably never will be.

Anyhow, 2 years later, that little Monet pops up in my Twitter feed, and a really rich memory comes back to me.  I hope the midnight museum-goers are enjoying it in Paris, and I hope Catherine Anderson is enjoying her tulips.