Word: monetization
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...Monet's reply to anti-impressionist prejudice, Tucker argues, was to broaden - the base and subject matter of his work. He wanted to show that the greatest landscape painting in France could still be produced by impressionist means. "Nature should not be submitted to harsh, premeditated analysis, as in the Grande Jatte," he writes of Monet's attitude. "It should be allowed to reign in the painting as it does in the world -- resplendent in all its nuances, variants, subtleties and surprises...
...from the late '80s on, Monet labored to take impressionism out of Paris and the immediate environs of the Seine. He painted all over the country. Tucker suggests that much of his work, seemingly without social content and often without people in it at all, is actually a long lyrical evocation of a timeless France, a rebuke to the political imbroglios and financial scandals that obsessed Paris. Monet wanted to fix impressionism (especially his impressionism) in people's minds as a healing, patriotic style...
...many versions? The reasons are complex, as the motives of any great artist are, but one was his desire to prove the ordering power of impressionism, its ability to set forth infinite discriminations of experience. How many times can you see the same thing and find it different? Monet's serial paintings look for an answer...
...first great achievement among his series was the Grainstacks of 1890-91. Monet painted at least 25 of them, and they seem almost polemical because their subject looks so odd and raw. What are these things? Anonymous structures of oats and wheat, circular, with conical tops. They look like primitive lumps, soft rocks. Why paint a lump? Partly, no doubt, because the grainstacks implied abundance, the nurturing power of deep France. But mainly because, in their very simplicity, they were a superb matrix for the changing effects of light and color. Sometimes Monet's grainstacks glow like furnaces, their shadow...
...grainstacks also correct the often heard notion that Monet did them from start to finish in the open air. In fact, nearly all his work from the '90s was elaborately "harmonized," finished in the studio. One has only to look to see why: the surface is so built up with grainy scumbling over creamy licks of the brush, with thin glazes on top, that the layers needed plenty of time to dry. He would line up the growing series of canvases in the studio and stress the differences between one image and the next by incessant retouching...