Claude Monet: The Haystacks Series
Personally, I prefer the Haystacks to the Roeun Cathedral series. However, they are opposedly different if viewed in the urban vs. agricultural context — so perhaps the comparison is irrelevant. Still, it seems that Monet’s color effects agree better with wide and open landscapes than with elaborate Gothic architecture. In the Cathedrals there’s 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 matter in the Rouen Cathedral series. 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.
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, temporality adds the fourth dimensions, and every piece becomes an animated representation that employs all four. Composition is minimal; despite the even number of stacks, the difference in size (in perspective, to be more accurate) is so significant that there are often, in fact, only one and a half haystacks on the canvas — a compositional device that relieves the viewer from monotony.
It appears that color complements the radically modest composition by becoming a compositional player 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 level. Thus, a synthesis of color and composition takes place, but on the terms of the latter, as color is being subjected to compositional revolutions. Monet anticipates stylistic developments in the art of painting — and he does that by fully exploring the possibilities of his own. He foreshadows abstract art, which denied color and composition their figurative anchors, and made them into independent subjects.
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This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Claude Monet, Impressionism.
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