Monet's London: Artist's Reflections on the ThamesMuseum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg. Through April 24. Admission: $12 adults, $8 seniors, $5 students. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Tues.-Sat.; 1-5 p.m., Sun.The show starts with a big, pastel bang: Claude Monet's paintings of the Thames. The first gallery in the Museum of Fine Arts exhibition is closely hung with Monet's confectionary towers and bridges, all diffusing into shimmering fog-shrouded atmosphere. Stand in the center of the room and turn round to survey the canvases depicting the Houses of Parliament, Waterloo and Charing Cross Bridges, and the very air of the gallery takes on the magical effect of light multiplied by infinite particles of air and water.
The seed for Monet's London: Artist's Reflections on the Thames was the St. Petersburg museum's best-known work: Monet's Houses of Parliament, Effect of Fog. Building upon the currency of this painting, curator Jennifer Hardin arranged for the loans of 11 additional Monet paintings of the Thames.
The revelations, however, begin with the other 138 works in the exhibition. The Monets are lovely, but London and the Thames at the turn of the 19th century provided vastly varied subjects and views for many other great artists of the time. The glittering Monets are but a breath of fog in the context of new art movements and the dawning industrial age.
In part, due to a concurrent exhibition, Turner, Whistler, Monet, at London's Tate Gallery, many Monets (and Whistlers) had previous engagements. Hardin used this fortuitous limitation as inspiration, widening the focus of her exhibition to other important artists, and including photographs and prints to enlarge this historic and artistic survey of turn-of-the-century London. This is not just the Thames of Monet, but of James McNeill Whistler, Childe Hassam, Andre Derain, Camille Pissarro, Joseph Pennell and many others. The exhibition immerses us in the grainy "tristesse" of industrial London at the peak of this coal-combusting epoch.
In the late 19th and first years of the 20th century, London and the Thames River drew artists from France, America and surrounding Great Britain in large numbers. French artists came to London to escape the Franco-Prussian War, and in hopes of finding a better market for their work. The impressionists' interest in light and the naturalists' romantic ideals were somewhat confounded by the reality of factories and commerce.
The Thames and the London air were infamously polluted, nature diminished by industry, light dimmed by smog. Still, Monet brought along his sun-infused palette, Sisley his delicate daubs and Derain his bold color.
British and American artists seemed better suited to absorb and reflect the machine-made veil that gave the Thames its singular aura. The brilliant effluence of Britain's industrial empire was earliest understood and transformed by the American expatriate James McNeill Whistler, as if he were a prophet of his own country's future inheritance – industry and pollution.
Monet was first drawn to London by his admiration for Whistler's work. Still, Monet returned to his garden to finish his Thames paintings, predestined to include crystalline color and light, transforming London's gothic towers into airy fantasy.
The spiky towers of Houses of Parliament, Reflections on the Thames resemble reedy plants sprouting from his Giverny pond. Whistler remained in London, where his paint, crayon and ink fused with London's film of smog to produce works as grayed and authentic as the air and river.
Nocturne, an example of Whistler's London paintings, is the highlight of the exhibition. This small, minimalist work of saturated blue-gray with spare points of light glows like a window to dusk. Just next to this gem, we return to gray with Whistler's wonderfully fluid prints of the Thames. With delicate washes, the lithotint Early Morning captures the river awakening, while the smoky haze of Nocturne: The River at Battersea is a meditation on the river at day's end.
Perhaps the darkest works of the exhibition are two small mezzotint and drypoint prints by Pennell: Westminster, Evening and The City, Evening. They might have been carved of coal for their utter depths of black. Darkest gray cloaks the inky beauty of the industrial river at night. Gaslights make the faintest appearance, reflections barely there in the black surface of the river.
The exhibition illustrates a wide breadth of styles, including the newest media of that time, photography. We see a spectrum of artists working to define a modern art of landscape. The Thames as subject challenged traditional and avant-garde artists to create works of and for the new industrial age.
Early photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn capture the landscape with a grainy quality very similar to the prints of Pennell and Homer's watercolor The Houses of Parliament. The realist paintings of Grimshaw and Hull, while not offering any stylistic innovations, capture the romantic gloom and glow of the Thames.
As if to relieve the oppressive dimness (deepened further by the low light levels required to protect the numerous works on paper), the fog lifts in the last gallery with late Impressionist and early modernist works.
Here are Derains of brilliant contrast and color, celebrating the life of the river and the freedom of "les fauves" (wild beasts, as a contemporary critic named the group including Derain and Matisse). A bright work by Georges Lemmen fails with its pointillist dots to achieve the veil of Monet's London air, but offers a dappled impression of the river.
After viewing the last painting, turn around and walk backwards through the galleries to again inhale the grainy melancholy of the Thames, ending at the first gallery with a final infusion of Monet's light.
This article appears in Jan 19-25, 2005.