Until mid-January next year, London’s Courtauld Gallery presents an exquisite and demanding display of the master of Impressionism’s British experience. Overwhelmed by the cosmopolitan magnitude of the London capital, Claude Monet abandons himself to the empire of light and during three successive stays (1899, 1900 and 1901) he adds up to a total of six months of British plastic experience, representing around one hundred paintings, nothing least, with the Thames as the protagonist, which the artist planned to turn into a series and present in London as a daring adventure. The project did not come to fruition, unfortunately, and is now becoming a reality in the natural environment of the moment. The nearby Savoy hotel was the space chosen for the company, the privileged residence of the French artist and an imaginative urban perspective: Parliament, the foggy London dawn of 1904 and the impressive environment of the light reflections on the river, as the key to a moment of active creativity. A risky challenge, certainly, between light and color, which becomes an identifying motif of the painter’s mature work. The images of Parliament between reflections and sunrises are a peak of the evolution of impressionism that survives time.
The painter Charles-François Daubigny introduces the French artist to the radical atmosphere of London and strengthens his intimacy with Camille Pissarro, who points out the perfect angles of focus and intonation. Waterloo Bridge a painting completed between 1900 and 1903, is the absorbing example: the architecture of the environment in an accomplished tonal fade that nuances the undertaking and hints at a superb chromatic play. Monet’s suggestive London work – both versions of the painting were presented in Paris in 1904 – received the admiration of the public, dazzled by the eloquent mix of indigos in the central motif and the subtle range of dark green elements that cross the Thames hectic on an autumn evening.
The impressionists transfer to the canvas what is precipitated in the spontaneous visual act
The chromatic energy of Impressionism once again challenged “the pantheistic motto” of William Blake – “Everything that lives is sacred” – and constitutes a practical lesson by transforming painting – specifically time – into a hasty spontaneous visual action, almost a performance. urban, in contemporary vocabulary, which is perhaps the best example of the “innocence of the eye”, which eludes the rational experience of the artist’s gaze and energetically discovers the stimuli of fantasy proposed by the dissolving color of French Impressionism. A plastic miracle
in the history of modern art.
The pictorial mode of the impressionists gives the figure the same consistency as water, for example. And this type of indifference to objective content can be clearly explained. The impressionists do not propose to reproduce the hard and palpable materiality of the physical world, experience as a visual custom, but rather to transfer to the canvas only that which is precipitated in the spontaneous visual act, not proposed by any prior knowledge. This rejection of the usual visual conventions, accepted by the realist tradition, is what differentiates and drives the radical painters of the moment. In Monet’s pioneering proposal, as highlighted in the London motifs, the unfinished, the fugitive, seems to have emerged instantly from the visual experience. The impressionist masters, in addition to eliminating from the pictorial act any prior knowledge of their impressions – color sensations –, demand the avoidance of already known formulas typical of both an idealist and illusionist lexicon.
Waterloo Bridge, by Claude Monet (1903)
The primordial, original image of the alert impressionist gaze frees the represented motif from its material solidity in favor of a declared “pictorial superficiality”, which imposes the furious chromatic display and is transfigured into a revolutionary glimpse that marks with fire the evolution of the modern and even contemporary painting, I would dare to suggest. Impressionist audacity, convinced of the classical ideal of the innocence of the eye, aims to provide the painting with “the remembered colors of things”, a fabric of chromatic nuances that the attentive observer will have to discern. The master stroke, and here Monet intervenes, is a short brushstroke, analogous to the comma in writing, which configures the sparkling and rhythmic structure of the painting.
Impressionism as a living metaphor of color – “Pure spots of color” – detached from any objective content, from the realism trend that will end up, well, drowning out the classicism of the lively French tradition. An advance without return in contemporary imaginative representation. This has been and remains the transcendent truth of impressionist painting, which still intrigues us.
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