Claude Monet: The Haystacks Series
First, I would like to say that I prefer these to the Roeun Cathedral series. They are very different, opposing even, if viewed in the urban vs. agricultural context, so perhaps you may say that the comparison is irrelevant. Still, it seems to me that Monet’s color effects agree much better with wide and open landscapes than with elaborate Gothic architecture. In the latter case I have been getting a sense of hyper tension, ensuing from overabundance of detail coupled with the usual palette swamping. In a way, there is a thematic imbalance between the painter’s style and subject in the Rouen Cathedrals. Back to the haystacks, I think that in these series the artist may have found the perfect combination of subject and style; they feed off each other in curious ways, and I will try to build an argument expounding this interaction.
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There are two paths of examining the series: the main one, of hue, and the secondary, compositional, of the haystacks themselves. Taking either path will eventually lead to a junction that unites both, but one needs to go back and tread the second path, for a complete understanding of that junction and where it leads. However, as it is often said, it is the journey that matters, not the destination. Evaluating palette and composition in these series is a pleasure for its own sake.
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Color virtually vibrates — a quality inherently conditioned on time’s passing — and thus the artist injects temporal progression into the paintings. Along with the illusion of space, that makes the four dimensions that are at our disposal, and every piece becomes an animated representation employing all of them. Composition is minimal; despite the even number of the stacks, the difference in size (in perspective, to be more accurate) is so big that there are often, in fact, only one and a half similar objects on the canvas, relieving the viewer from monotony.
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So what happens at the crossroad? It appears that color complements the radically modest composition by transcending the palette’s traditional role into a compositional part as well. Areas of color may be viewed as geometrical plains of various forms, much like in abstract art; they interact with each other, creating an additional, underlying compositional layer. Thus a synthesis of color and composition takes place, but on the terms of the latter element, as color works on a compositional level. Once again, Monet anticipates further stylistic developments, and he does it by fully exploring the possibilities of his own. He foreshadows abstract art, which stripped the two elements of their traditional accompaniments and made them into independent subjects.
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