How Monet’s paintings changed the way we see London

A new exhibition illustrates how Claude Monet’s revolutionary vision of the fog-shrouded River Thames “irreversibly changed the way London itself was seen”.

Some artists help us perceive the world more accurately. Some rarely go further. They don’t just see, they look at things. Their reality is a deeper reality that is felt rather than seen. Claude Monet is one of them. During three visits to London between 1899 and 1901, the French Impressionists, then approaching 60, embarked on one of the most ambitious series of penetrating paintings ever undertaken by an artist. The project is currently the focus of a ground-breaking exhibition in London. Courtauld Institute, Monet and London: Views of the River Thames.

Monet created nearly 100 paintings out of the murky miasma of the Thames’s choking, toxic, soot-laced smog. This is more than he devoted to any other subject in his long career. His ephemeral vision of dissolving the weight of London’s crowded bridges and stately palaces into an intangible tapestry of vibrating steam would forever shape the world’s idea of ​​the Unreal City. . As TS Eliot later called it – A place beyond time, somewhere other, ethereal.

Consider the evaporating power of one work in a vast series, such as London, Houses of Parliament, or Shafts of Sunlight Through the Fog. Among the best-known of Monet’s views of the River Thames, this painting is depicted in a flash of late afternoon sun that teasingly clarifies the curtain of fog that blankets the neo-Gothic building. It captures the propulsive towers of the Palace of Westminster trembling.

During his second stay in London in 1901, Monet began recording the changing temperament of the Houses of Parliament from the covered terrace of the recently built St Thomas’ Hospital, directly across the river from the Palace on the South Bank. Ta. A year earlier, the artist had captured the changing nature of dawn light alchemizing the austere confines of Waterloo and Charing Cross Bridges from the balcony of his sixth-floor room at the Savoy Hotel, where the series began in September 1899. I started translating it. To the shining floating. Subsequent studies of the Capitol, photographed at different times of the day and in varying concentrations of smog and fog, further demonstrate the artist’s understanding of the essence of the subject.

Monet’s work is often praised for its exquisite depiction of light, but there is a slight, albeit significant, inaccuracy to that praise. What distinguishes his paintings from those of Pissarro, Morisot, and other impressionist painters is his belief in the vanishing potential of sunlit air, which Monet saw as the key to understanding the ephemerality of form. We believe that this is the case. The world is a fascinating mirage. Viewed through the lens of Monet’s paintings, forms, no matter how stony or static, unyielding or inert, are fungible. It fights to survive.

Five years later, seeing an exhibition of Monet’s paintings for the first time in London, the American collector and writer realized that Monet’s enchanting canvases seemed to reverse each stone of material substance and fresh air. Presented attested to the mysteries of the retina. Urban infrastructure is Desmond Fitzgerald explained: “Everything is so foggy that the viewer stares in amazement at what at first appears to be a half-baked painting. But as the eye penetrates into the fog, objects gradually begin to appear. …The illusion is amazing and unlike anything we’ve seen before.” It had been attempted in exactly the same way before, with the Capitol shining out of the fog in an old rose or purple color. ”

Fitzgerald’s assertion that what Monet captured was at the same time a “fantasy”, something that had never been expressed by an artist before, is telling. Introduced into English in the mid-14th century, the word “fantasy” is related to “comic” and originally meant a jeering act that mocked deception. Could it be that Monet’s mesmerizing depictions of the River Thames are so different from those of earlier artists because he does not actually see his subjects as they appear? Is it a glorious lie?

Monet was the first to confess that he had to create an Insta filter to make London a suitable subject for him to tackle. “Without fog, London would not be a beautiful city. It gives London a grand expanse; its regular, gigantic blocks become grand in their mysterious cloak. ” he said. When Monet drew the curtains of his hotel room and discovered the crisp, clean light of a fog-free morning, it was clear that he was in a state of sheer panic. In a letter written in March 1900, he wrote to his wife: “When I woke up I was horrified to see that there was no fog, not even a hint of fog. I was devastated and had already ruined all my canvases. “I saw it turn out to be,” he confessed. His sense of relief when “the fire was lit little by little and the smoke and fog returned” only confirms his suspicion that the London location was almost incidental to his purpose. What he was actually compiling was not a study of cities, but Experiments in Optics, a pioneering treatise on the undiscovered properties of light itself.

Monet’s bold series, which provocatively envisions light as a pulsating mass deftly rendered in short strokes, began at the same moment that theoretical physicist Max Planck was celebrating in Germany. , one of the more interesting and less explored cultural coincidences. He made a breakthrough in his own concept of light as quanta, or packets of energy. It seemed like the light was floating in the air. By capturing Blake’s “dark devil’s factories,” the murky medium of toxic vapor spewing from the chimneys of the factories crowding the banks of the river, Monet shows that what is most worth seeing is what is most invisible. We have carefully verified this paradoxical hypothesis. A veil of vibration that uplifts reality.

Our eyes have become accustomed to seeing the Thames through the smeared lenses of Monet’s shimmering smoggle, so much so that before Monet made us aware of the weaving of the “mysterious cloak” of fog, the Thames It is almost impossible to imagine how the river was perceived. In the same year that Monet first set up his easel on the Savoy, Oscar Wilde grappled with the very existence of fog. in his essay The decline of lies. “People see fog today not because there is fog, but because poets and painters have taught them the mystical beauty of such an effect. London has had fog for centuries. I would venture to say there were fogs.” But no one had ever seen them, so they didn’t exist until Art invented them. ”

As if directly commenting on Monet’s work, which will not be exhibited for another five years, Wilde concludes: When you look at something, you don’t see anything until you see its beauty. ” Monet breaks up the soot-laced mist into a transparent fabric (filled with “all kinds of colors,” as the artist himself described it. “There’s black, brown, yellow, green, purple fog.” ) would soon be replaced by the vision of our predecessors. And it irreversibly changes the way London itself is viewed.

It sets Monet side by side with a comparable view of the Thames by JMW Turner, Monet’s revered British ancestor. JMW Turner was sometimes compared to the Impressionists, but it’s hard to believe that the two artists set up their easels in the same city. Turner’s paintings from 1830-1835 River Thames over Waterloo BridgeA glimpse of the city from a perspective similar to Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect, 1900, shows the difference. Both artists are obsessed with light, but for Turner the sun was a muscular god, not a thin hook tearing at the threads that hold reality together. In Turner’s canvases, the smoke billowing from the factory is not a blessing, but a scar. The dark billows appear to be in the shape of a black dog jumping down a chimney, clawing at the sky and screaming. Toxic pollution is more of an irritation than a revelation.

To understand how revolutionary Monet’s vision of London was at the beginning of the 20th century, it is enough to compare it with Monet’s vision of London in his youth. Thirty years ago, the budding artist, then in his late twenties, fled his hometown of Le Havre for London to avoid fighting in the Franco-Prussian War. Monet’s early painting, The River Thames Below Westminster (1871), expresses his visceral fascination with the up-and-coming art scene as construction began on the Houses of Parliament. It can be seen that the house elegantly balances the relative gravity of the light and the floating of the architecture. To place oneself in a constricting cloth of fog. But our focus is not on the stroboscopic analysis of the nature of light seen in his later paintings, such as Charing Cross Bridge on the River Thames in 1903, but rather on the noisy construction to the right of the bridge. It is a solid armature with wooden piers. canvas. The fog is vivid, but not yet lifeless.

We tend to think of Impressionism as a movement dedicated to capturing fleeting moments quickly and directly, but Monet’s London series manages to turn this ideology on its head. Far from recording a fleeting flash of light, Thames paintings are complex compressions, artificial fusions of multiple moments, continually reworked over years rather than minutes. Rather than working on one canvas at a time, Monet would scatter fragmentary studies around his hotel room, fumbling and fumbling as certain clumps of fog, smoke, or sunlight reappeared. Every canvas is a palimpsest of echoing atmospheres, as no particular light effect lasts more than a few minutes.

Returning to his studio in Giverny, Monet spent four years revising his vision, convincing himself of the archeology of the harmonies of light that could compose his vision like a symphony. The result was an immersive and misunderstood multi-panel masterpiece that was scattered in all directions when the paintings were sold individually to international collectors. The Courtauld exhibition provides a rare opportunity to be surrounded by more than a third of Monet’s works, which he began painting between 1899 and 1901. These works are a collection of wonders that have shaped the way we see things, and, like the miracles of light they captured, may never occur again. .

Monet and London. A View of the River Thames will be on view at the Courtauld Gallery in London until January 19, 2025.