Monet's Series Reconsidered

Monet's serial practice with its chronological turn captured a world focused on a new totalizing order of days, hours, minutes, and seconds. This chapter seeks to lay bare the bureaucratic industrial temporalities that underwrote Monet's turn towards seriality, including the ways they helped him order what were complexly relational paintings of instants, often more than twenty in one series alone. Monet's formidable achievement was to redirect modern time-frames back into the landscape, helping viewers naturalize then still unfamiliar industrial time-frames within their visual field and temporal awareness. The advent of the impressionist series followed widespread discussions about standard hours and minutes that accompanied the period's haphazard and gradual, but also inevitable, adoption of universal time. The Mornings on the Seine series creates a curiously superior world of nature, atmospheric effect, and also time.