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A fascinating mirage: Monet's paintings changed the way we see London

A fascinating mirage: Monet's paintings changed the way we see London
"Waterloo Bridge, Overcast Sky" (1903)

By: Kelly Grovier, art critic and historian / BBC
Translated by: Agron Shala / Telegrafi.com

Some artists help us perceive the world more accurately. Few are those who go further and see beyond the appearance. Their reality is deeper and more sensitive than what is seen. Monet [Claude Monet] is one of them. During three visits to London between 1899 and 1901, the French Impressionist, now in his sixties, began one of the most ambitious series of penetrating paintings ever produced by an artist. This project is now the focus of a ground-breaking exhibition at the Courtauld Institute, Monet and London: Views of the Thames [Monet and London: Views of the Thames].

From a dark mist filled with toxins and soot that choked the air above the River Thames, he produced nearly 100 paintings – more than he had created of any other subject in his long career. His immortal visions, dissolving the might of London's bridges and grand palaces into an incomprehensible tapestry of vapor, would forever sculpt the way the world conceived of the "unreal city," as TS Eliot would later call it—a place beyond place, standing outside of time in an ethereal alienation.


Consider the steamy power of one of the series' most popular paintings, London, Parliament, sunlight in the fog. Among Monet's best-known views of the River Thames, this painting captures the mighty towers of the Palace of Westminster twisting in an afternoon sunbeam, dispersing a veil of mist covering the neo-Gothic structure.

During his second stay in London, in 1901, he began to chronicle the various moments of the Houses of Parliament, from a covered terrace at the newly built St Thomas's Hospital, opposite the palace on the south bank of the the river. A year earlier, the artist had begun to render, from the balcony of his sixth-floor room at the Savoy Hotel – where the series began in September 1899 – the changes of dawn light as they transformed Waterloo Bridge and Chering Cross Bridge into structures bright and high in the air. Subsequent studies of Parliament, captured at different times of day and in varying densities of fog and steam, testify to a further intensification of the artist's understanding of the essence of his subject itself.

Parliament, sunlight in the fog (1904)

While Monet's work is often praised for its brilliant rendering of light, there is a small but significant inaccuracy in this praise. What sets his art apart from the paintings of Pissarro, Morisot and other Impressionist contemporaries is his belief in the destructive potential of sunlit air, which he saw as the key to understanding the temporality of form. The world is a fascinating mirage. Through the lens of Monet's painting, form—however harsh or immutable, stable or immobile—is temporary and struggles for survival.

When an American collector and writer first viewed a London exhibition of Monet's paintings five years later, he witnessed the visual enigma presented in Monet's captivating canvases, which seemed to subvert material imagery of substance and air. bright. The urban infrastructure, as Desmond FitzGerald explained, “is so hazy that the viewer is initially surprised by what looks like a half-finished painting; but gradually, as the eye penetrates the mist, objects begin to appear ... The illusion was wonderful, and had never before been attempted in the same way. Parliament shines through the fog with an old rose pink or purple color."

FitzGerald's insistence that what Monet had captured was both "an illusion" and something never before articulated by an artist is significant. The word "illusion" entered the English language in the middle of the 14th century, being associated with "funny" and originally meant a derisive act of deception. Is it possible that Monet's captivating depictions of the Thames differed so markedly from those of earlier artists because, in fact, they did not capture his subject as he appeared? Are his paintings, in fact, lies of brilliance?

Monet was the first to admit that to make London a suitable subject for him, a "filter" was needed that would make this city worthy of his paintings. “Without the fog,” he observed, “London would not be a beautiful city. It is the fog that gives it its grandeur. Her neat and massive blocks become majestic within that mysterious cloak." His panic as he pulls back the curtains in his hotel room – to reveal the clear, clear light of a fog-free morning – is palpable. “When I got there,” he confessed to his wife in a letter written in March 1900, “I was horrified to see that there was no fog, not even a trace of fog; I was devastated and I was already seeing all my canvases destroyed." His relief came when "little by little, with the burning of the fires, the smoke and fog returned," which reinforces the suspicion that London, as a city, was merely incidental to his purposes. What he was actually compiling were not studies of a city, but optical experiments – a pioneering treatise on the undiscovered properties of light.

Waterloo Bridge, sunlight effect (1903)

It is among the most interesting and understudied cultural coincidences that Monet's bold series, which presents light as a moving impulse, skillfully depicted in painting, began at the same time that, in Germany, the theoretical physicist Max Planck marked the discovery of his concept of light as a quantum or bundle of energy. The light was everywhere. Embracing the dark medium of the thick, poisonous vapors billowing from the factory chimneys that touched the riverbanks—[William] Blake's “dark satanic mills”—Monet carefully tested his paradoxical hypothesis: that what matters most much to see is what is less visible, the veil that gives life to reality.

Our eyes are so used to seeing the Thames, through the misty lens of Monet's luminous paintings, that it is almost impossible to imagine how the river could be perceived before it made us aware of the weaving of the "mysterious cloak" of fog. Writing in the same year that Monet first set up his canvas in the Savoy, Oscar Wilde expressed the existence of fog in his essay Breaking the lie [The Decay of Lying]. "At present, people see fog, not because it exists," said Wilde, "but because poets and painters have learned the mysterious beauty of these effects. There may have been fog in London for centuries. I think there was. But no one saw it, and so we know nothing about it. It didn't exist until art invented it."

Commenting directly on Monet's works, which would not appear for another five years, Wilde concluded: “Things are because we see them, and what we see, as well as how we see it, depends on the arts that have influenced us. To see a thing is very different from seeing a thing. You don't see anything until you see its beauty." Monet's dissolution of the soot-filled fog into a thin canvas (filled with “all the colors,” as the artist himself explained; “there's black, brown, yellow, green, purple fog”) would replace the would soon eclipse the visions of his predecessors and irrevocably change the way London saw itself.

Waterloo Bridge, gloomy weather (1900)

Contrast the similar views of the Thames by Monet and his distinguished British predecessor, JMW Turner, whom the Impressionist occasionally resembled. It is hard to believe that both artists set up their canvases in the same city. Turner painting, Thames over Waterloo Bridge (1830–1835), which sees the city from a perspective similar to Waterloo Bridge, sunlight effect of Monet (1900), illustrates this divergence. While both artists were obsessed with light, for Turner, the sun was a powerful god, not a thin hook that tore at the threads that held reality together. In Turner's canvas, the smoke billowing from a factory is not a blessing, but a bitter omen. The black clouds seem to take the form of a barking black dog, jumping out of the chimney and scratching the sky. Toxic pollution is a concern, not a revelation.

To appreciate how revolutionary was Monet's vision of London at the beginning of the 20th century, it is enough to compare it with his early paintings. Thirty years ago, the young artist, then in his late twenties, made his way to London, leaving his home town of Avri to avoid fighting in the Franco-Prussian War. An early Monet painting from that time, The Thames below Westminster (1871), shows the instinctive attraction he felt for fog and presents the artist in formation, gracefully balancing the relative gravity of light and the elevations of architecture, as Parliament begins to disappear into the dense weave of fog. But what catches our attention is not the analysis of light that we find in his late paintings, like Chering Cross Bridge, Thames (1903), but the rigid structure of the wooden pier we see being built noisily to the right of the canvas. The mist is alive, but not yet vital.

Chering Cross Bridge, Thames (1903)

Although we tend to think of Impressionism as a movement that aims to capture – quickly and directly – fleeting moments, Monet's London series changed this ideology. Far from being a chronicle of fleeting rays, the Thames paintings are complex fusions of many moments, artificially stitched together and constantly reworked over a period not of minutes but of years. Instead of working on a single canvas at a time, he spread out hundreds of fragmentary studies in his hotel room – the beginnings of which he would select when a particular mix of fog, smoke and sunlight reappeared. Since no light effect lasted more than a few minutes, each canvas is a palimpsest of colliding atmospheres.

After returning to his studio in Giverny, Monet spent four years processing his visions, in an attempt to extract from the archeology of light a harmony that would come together as a symphony. The result is a comprehensive, misunderstood, multi-layered masterpiece that was dispersed when the paintings were sold individually to international collectors. The exhibition at Kortold offers a precious opportunity to dwell among more than a third of the works that Monet began between 1899 and 1901 – a stunning convergence that has shaped the way we see and how the wonders of light they capture can never happen again. /Telegraph/