Monet

In the years that he spent at Argenteuil, Monet began to work on a number of sequences of paintings in which he repeated subjects. These works were forerunners of the famous series that Monet created from 1891 to his death. One important aspect of the connection between the early sequences and the later series is the iconographic content of these works. Just as the later series are often viewed as an approach to pure abstraction, the earlier sequences are often viewed solely as the height of technical accomplishment in Impressionism. Yet, whether one considers the series of grainstacks from the 1890s or the earlier sequences of bridges at Argenteuil, these groupings of painting carry themes and meanings that are often overlooked in the attention that is paid to the evolution of Monet's Impressionist technique. The early sequence of the highway bridge at Argenteuil show the beginnings of the artist's interest in this aspect of landscape painting.

Claude Monet (1840-1926) spent the major part of his forties at Argenteuil. The small picturesque town was located on the Seine, a fifteen-minute rail trip north of Paris. The town was a popular destination for Sunday outings and widely regarded as one of the most beautiful spots around Paris. For Monet this period was significant not only for the extent to which he realized his technical goals in painting, but for the fact that his first sequences, forerunners of the famous series, began to take shape there. For these six

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ight Monet had, as Canaday put it, "changed from a painter responding to nature into one fascinated by an abstract problem." This series and others came to be seen as a tentative movement toward abstract painting. Wassily Kandinsky's contention that, after seeing two of the pictures four years apart, the Grainstacks were a revelation "in discrediting the subject" tended to support the idea that this was Monet's intent. Certainly criticism had tended in this direction since the early days of Impressionism. The method seemed to distract attention from the work as a whole. Even in the 1870s, Renoir's friend Georges Riviere, had written that impressionism consisted of the treatment of tone rather than subject matter. Monet's own description of the process of painting the series certainly seems to dispute this interpretation, however. In a letter to a friend Monet wrote, I am set on a series of different effects but at this time of year, the sun goes down so quickly that I cannot follow it . . . I realize that I have to work a great deal in order to convey what I am seeking: "instaneity," especially the . . . same light spread everywhere. This interest in the effects of the light does not differ from his earlier techni

Category: Arts - M