Grainstack, Sun in the Mist by Claude Monet

Today’s episode takes us to the Minneapolis Institute of Art for a long look at Claude Monet. 

We’ll find out how the morning light on a neighbor’s haystacks inspired one of his most famous painting series and the hectic practice he developed to paint them!

SHOW NOTES (TRANSCRIPT BELOW)

“A Long Look” theme is “Ascension” by Ron Gelinas https://youtu.be/jGEdNSNkZoo

Episode theme is “Sonatine – I. Modéré” by Maurice Ravel. Performed by Markus Staab. Courtesy of musopen.org
https://musopen.org/music/4724-sonatine/

Artwork information 
https://collections.artsmia.org/art/10436/grainstack-claude-monet

Haystacks (Monet series) 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haystacks_(Monet_series)

Monet article
Perry, Lilla Cabot. “Reminiscences Of Claude Monet From 1889 To 1909.” The American Magazine of Art 18, no. 3 (1927): 119-26. Accessed May 12, 2021.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23931183.

Exploring Late Monet with Art Historian Kathryn Calley Galitz, Pac Pobric, Editor, Digital Department, 2018
https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/collection-insights/2018/monet-conversation

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to A Long Look! I’m your host, Karen Jackson

Did you know most people spend only a few seconds looking at works of art? But what happens if you slow down and take a long look? Let’s find out with a work in the The Minneapolis Institute of Art! 

MUSIC

Today I’m looking at Grainstack, Sun in the Mist, by Claude Monet.

If you want to follow along, you can find it at alonglookpodcast.com/monet 

So what do you first notice? 

A circle of harvested grain stands upright, topped With a kind of cone-shaped pile of hay. We’re seeing it from the side so it looks like a big muffin. But it’s all kinds of crazy colors. Instead of being wheat colored, like golden yellow or beige, it’s a mix of lavender layered with flecks of cornflower blue peeking through thick strokes of lilac.

The scene is divided into three horizontal sections that fill the canvas. There’s a wheat scattered field on the bottom, a middle band of subtle washes of cool lavender and blue running behind the top of the stack, and a top band washed with warm tones of rose pink and peach over a grey blue. 

The conical top is built with wide lilac strokes angling upwards over a lavender background til they meet trickles of burnt orange draped over the crown and down the sides.  

Narrow horizontal waves and swirls of rust red and earth brown divide the  top from the bottom which is woven with densely packed lilac strokes. Diagonal strokes of burnt umber and brown flick across the lower half and at the very bottom of the stack, swipes of bright blue extend outwards from where it meets the ground. 

The field itself is built from scattered strokes of golds and tawny browns, going every which way layered over a base of that lilac and cornflower blue and it angles upwards a little from left to right as it spans the width of the canvas. What’s cool is, these wheat colored strokes fall away from the stack, like what you’d see after a harvest! On either side of the stack the colors are warmer, more golds and browns, with even spots of green on the right side.

A shadow extends along the ground outwards from the backlit stack, built with cool blues and flecks of tawny brown and yellow as it widens out toward the bottom edge. 

In contrast to all the energetic brushwork on the field, the middle and top bands look smoother. When I zoom I can the paint isn’t as thick, it’s a lot more blended and there are wispy swirls of pink and coral scattered across the top band. At the very top, right over the grainstack is a hint of sun, it’s bottom half suggested by a warm yellow halo surrounded by thin strokes of tawny brown, radiating outwards.  

So what is up with these funky colors? 

MUSIC 

The answer might be in some advice Monet gave the American artist, Lilla Cabot Perry. “When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you.”

His whole goal was to nail down these first impressions of a scene–no editing, no “hey this should really be brown, this should be blue…” But really showing the scene in its actual color. He wanted artists to paint what they actually see, not what they think they’re supposed to be seeing. If you do that, you’ll realize shadows aren’t just grey and black, sometimes there’s a little blue or violet in them. The point was to capture the colors before the light changed as the day went on. 

And this painting is a great example. It’s a scene of an autumn morning. The sun’s come up and is starting to burn off the mist rising from the field of Monet’s neighbor, a farmer named Monsieur Quéruel (K RU-EL). Monet was living in Giverny, a rural area outside of Paris. So that middle band is the rising mist bleeding into the peach pink early morning sky.

He’d become fascinated with how colors and light change during a day, week, even seasons. 

So he began painting his neighbor’s harvest and Grainstacks became part of his first painting series. The idea was, if you painted just one thing over and over, whoing how color and light change over time would change our experience of the thing. 

He worked on multiple canvases at once, set up outdoors in all kinds of weather. so he could start a new one at different times of day. But he had to work fast, the light would only last for a few minutes.

The story goes that every day he’d cart these canvases with all his paints and gear to and from the field and would work on whichever one matched what he was seeing at the moment. 

Monet did a lot of series after this, including one of the historic Gothic cathedral in Rouen and a row of poplar trees along a riverbank near his house. 

And the deal with the stack is, wheat would be cut down and gathered and stood on end. Then it would be capped with this conical mound of hay to protect it from weather and rodents until the wheat was dry enough to thresh. They could stay out in the field for months, which is why Monet was able to paint them in different seasons. The peaked stacks were a point of pride for the French, representing the prosperity of the countryside.

The thing I love about talking about artists like Monet who are so famous and familiar is that for a long time when he was starting out, the public thought he was thought he was nuts to paint like this! Or lazy! To people back then, his sketchy landscapes looked unfinished. Sketches like those were what artists made at the beginning of a project, not the final product. 

But by the time he painted this in 1891, the public had caught up to him. Plus, while Monet did a lot of work in the field, he did refine them back in the studio. His dealer sold 15 of the haystacks in one day and that money allowed him to buy the house in Giverny where he built a garden with ponds filled with waterlilies. Which inspired his biggest, most famous and last series, Water Lilies. 

I’ve included a link in the show notes where you can see thumbnails of all the haystacks. Seeing them together helps make sense of the series idea. 

Try this yourself! Take pictures of your backyard, favorite park, or view from your roof deck at different times of day or even for a few weeks and see how much the view changes! 

OUTRO:

So, I hope you’ll try out a long look on your next museum visit! Just take a little time and let the art reveal itself. 

You can find links to today’s information in the show notes at alonglookpodcast.com and in most podcast apps. While you’re there, you can leave a comment or ask a question. I’d love to hear from you! 

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One more thing, transcripts are now available at the end of each post! 

Thanks for joining me