What happens to light when summer turns to autumn, the moon rises, or a soft snow falls? Monet found the answers, painting the same familiar scene near his home in Giverny in all seasons, at all hours, in all kinds of weather. A grainstack sits broadly in a field, the edges of its silhouette glowing as the sun climbs amid a cool mist to illuminate the landscape. Orange, yellow, green, and violet dance across the field as the earth meets the sky in a hazy blur. For Monet, this light was just as much the subject of his work as the grainstack itself.
The muffin-shaped grainstack is a symbol of fertility and prosperity in France. Wheat was once literally at the center of French life: In the early 1900s, the average French citizen ate more than three baguettes each day. Glory in gluten.
Monet studied how landscapes changed with the weather: a dusting of snow, overcast skies, or sunshine leading to thaw. Mia’s Grainstack was his sole meditation on mist.
Even the smallest individual brushstrokes join together in this composition, just as slender stalks of wheat are bundled to build a grainstack in the field.
In his memoirs, Wassily Kandinsky reflected on the surprising impact of color in Monet’s work. The Russian-born painter, a leader of the abstract art movement in the early 1900s, described his delight in the "unsuspected power of the palette, previously concealed from me, which exceeded all my dreams.”