Between 1899 and 1901, this passionate painter of beauty came to Britain’s polluted capital to experiment with ugliness. Through the smog emerged a great modernist
nly an eye – but my God, what an eye!” said Cézanne of Monet. But no artist is only an eye. Posing as an innocent, unquestioning painter of the light that came to him gave Monet a helpful privacy, a professional facade, behind which he could explore wild poetic thoughts. His early masterpiece Impression, Sunrise presents itself as a simple view of dawn in the Le Havre docks, but it’s a Romantic meditation, as tentative and emotionally growing as a Wagner prelude.
By revisiting Impression, Sunrise on a foggy day in London, Monet was rethinking his entire artistic nature. Everyone thought they knew what impressionism was – they still do: a movement that captured the pleasures of modern French life in dappled scenes of people picnicking, partying or swimming, deliberately eschewing depth in favour of the shimmering surface of life. But couldn’t impressionism be about more? So I picture Monet musing in his Savoy room.
Once Monet had made the modern city look like heaven. His paintings of London suggest an urban hell. His repetition of the same views from his hotel becomes itself nightmarish. Each one catches variations in the light. But what light: a shifting palette of yellows, greys, purples, sickly and macabre, always filtered by fog and smoke.
No, because his eye meets its match. He is painting what he sees and most of it is fog. Vague forms of buses, people, trains struggle to become real, to be seen. Smoke gets in his eyes. The distorted, eerily coloured light becomes a thing in itself rather than a way of illuminating objects. The unreal city changes his art, as he loses his way in its smog.Monet’s paintings from his hotel represented a phase of struggle as he tested the way London’s smoke changed perception itself.
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