The Urban Sherpa - a blog by Christopher DeWan

(lyrical and romantic, beautiful and strange...)

The Urban Sherpa keeps a collection of stories and curios filed under Mythic Proportions.

Foggy rating=2

July 8, 2005
File under: Art Explained

Today, all the world's eyes are on London, and so were mine—but the London I was looking at was filtered through Claude Monet: the Brooklyn Museum is running an exhibit called Monet's London: Artists' Reflections on the Thames, 1859-1914.

Artists flocked to London in the second half of the 19th century, in part to find refuge from the Franco-Prussian War, and also to get a closer look at the ways the Industrial Revolution was reshaping Old London: the fog and colors that fascinated Monet owed no small part to the two-hundred tons of coal ash that were getting dumped into the air each day. Painters before and after Monet focused on the social and economic ramifications of all this industrial empire-building; Monet chose instead to aestheticize.

Aestheticize he did. I know it's popular or effete or both to say so, but this Monet guy—he can paint. These are probably some of the best-crafted paintings ever made, and if you're in the area, you should see them.

But, the day after these London bombings, it's hard to resist comparison: the smoke pouring out from the tube stations is also a kind of result of industrialization and imperialism. And it's hard not to wonder if we don't need to take a closer look at those socio-economic ramifications, after all...

Partly cloudy, chance of rain

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