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So 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.
At the same time, he took to painting in series: the same image over and over again. Why so 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.
The 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 lines breaking into excited flurries of crimson and blue; sometimes they are dirty brown, between the inert pewter sky of winter and the white crust of snow.
The 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.
Slow reflection governed all his work. The pressure of the motif was sublimated in the demands of the painting. Monet also made quite conscious gestures to art history. His series of poplars near his house in Giverny -- their slender, stately trunks along the banks of the Epte reflected in the water and forming an almost abstract palisade, the S shape of their bushed-out tops strung along like a festive garland -- pays homage to French rococo, Fragonard in particular. Like his lyric images of a stretch of the Seine from 1896 to 1897, the paintings show how unrelentingly conscious Monet was of the abstract basis of design, even when painting the mistiest veils of color.