The Courtauld Gallery 10:00
You know how you get all tongue-tied and stupid, blushing and awkward, in front of someone way too beautiful? Monet will do that to you too. There are 21 views of the Thames here, 21 paintings almost too gorgeous to be real.
He came to London a couple of times, the old impressionist master. He stayed at the Savoy each time, and looking out from his balcony across the river, he saw in the fog of London a swirling miasma of psychedelic light. The play of sun and fog and smog created fields of orange and pink and grey and blue that smothered the bridges and choked the Houses of Parliament in a heavy blanket of pure colour.
He came back again and again, eventually painting 120 images of Charing Cross Bridge, Waterloo Bridge and the Houses of Parliament. He wanted to show a bunch of them in London in 1905, but it’s taken until now to finally happen.
It starts with sulphurous yellow and bubble gum pink, the pillars of Charing Cross Bridge just a series of green shoots growing out of the fetid river. And it only gets more abstract. Everything is sickly and pallid, belching fumes and thick smog. Then the sun tries desperately to poke out, but its rays are smothered. It’s reduced to a faint, weak dot fighting through the fog.
It resets your eyes, forcing you to look and look and look
It still has its power, though. Poke your head through to the next room and there it hangs above the gothic towers of Parliament, cursing the city to live under a blood-red pallor. The eight paintings of Parliament shown together here are unbelievable. Monet’s splodged smudges of colour create fields of pink and lilac that seem to move and sway. Parliament itself is a vast ghost looming over the river, haunting the city. In the background of the dimmest, darkest work, a huge dock crane, or a pillar of smoke maybe, looks like a faint, distant gallows.
Seen all together like this, you can trace the time of day across the works, the way light shifts, how the hours pass. It resets your eyes, forcing you to look and look and look. Incredible.
It’s hard to see these images without baggage, to forget the fame and ubiquity of Monet and just take them for what they are. But you have to, because they deserve a clean slate. These paintings are an obliteration of what art was meant to be in 1904, it’s Monet deliberately pushing away from representation, and sprinting towards abstraction.
They’re radical, important and very beautiful, and they might just leave you all tongue-tied and stupid.
