Page 47 - Studio International - March 1973

reality was as solidly material as that. His
anatomy of the motif under all aspects (not so
much a difference from Cezanne as an extension
from space into time of the proto-cubist concept
of simultaneous viewpoints) demanded a subject
which would acknowledge reality as shifting,
immaterial and, above all, interchangeable in
texture. Philosophically or metaphysically, such
an interpretation of the world has not been held
wholly disreputable; for Monet it was entirely
necessary in order to achieve the
transubstantiation of paint. He came to London
not to study Charing Cross Bridge, or Waterloo
Bridge, or the Houses of Parliament, but to
paint fog. Fog is a medium which makes one
substance out of two of the elements, air and
water, and can, in its way, absorb fire and earth
into itself as well; and at the turn of the century,
the best place to study fog was London in
mid-winter (Monet conspicuously showed no
interest in painting here at any other season).
Fog, or at least a fog- and smoke-affected
atmosphere, offered many advantages as a
subject, and the London series — so long
projected, carried out on a huge scale and finally
only realized with an effort which brought the
artist at times to the point of despair — is in many
ways a great one. But as a subject, its limitations
are an all-too-literal lack of sunlit, southern
clarity and a possibly inevitable kind of
glooming romanticism, neither of which could
ultimately suit Monet's temperament. The
Waterlilies, by using transparency and
reflection as the means to interfuse air and water,
surface and depth, material and immaterial,
transcend those limitations with an ease and
certainty which have made this last series the
only one to be seriously valued for its
achievement as a series. The Hayward Gallery
exhibition will, I hope, help to extend such a
valuation to the London paintings. None of their
individual felicities looks quite as impressive
singly as when related to several variants on the
theme, and this in turn makes profounder sense
of the 'visionary' Monet himself. It is only en
série that one begins to forget the particular
locale (that the pictures don't look or even feel
very like London at all, apart from a generalized
urban atmosphere and light), and become aware
of the massively, cumulatively detailed
annotation of a certain kind of space — space with
a specific density of its own, subsuming both
solid and void. The airy and yet fine, close-
woven texture of colour that Monet evolved for
this series makes infinite variations of depth
marvellously realizable at all points of the
surface, and there are passages where his
(Above)
bodying-forth of space almost takes on the Parliament, effect of sun through fog 1904
quality of some kind of dematerialized flesh- 81.5 x 92 cm
painting, vibrantly sensual. Compared with the Private collection
Waterlilies, the London series is rather narrower
(Below)
in range and more claustrophobic in atmosphere Waterloo Bridge
(perhaps only because it's more difficult to 65 x 100.5 cm
breathe freely in fog), but the pantheistic Alex Maguy, Paris
nature of Monet's final vision of reality is
already abundantly present. q
DAVID THOMPSON
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