Toronto is hosting a remarkable exhibition of paintings that brings to light the inseparable connection between the three artists Turner, Westler and Monet.
Most art exhibitions center on a single artist or multiple artists from the same school, but this exhibition brings us even more surprises. Its purpose is to reveal the connection between three unique artists: the highly creative British landscape painter J.M.W Turner, and the withdrawn American exiled painter Jim McNair Westler. And the quintessential French Impressionist painter Claude Monet.
Let’s start with Turner. As a prolific painter who took his place in art history very seriously, he developed a very challenging style of painting. English-language art lovers of the day favored works with a somber style, and even John Rothken, a veteran British critic who declared Turner the greatest landscape painter, thought some of his paintings were mere cluttered stacks of light. Was Turner really revealing something pure with his brush, or was he just scribbling yellow and white?
For Turner, light was everything. In his later works, such as “The Sun Over the Lake”, all the scenes are dematerialized, and all the outlines are also blurred. His painting “House is Burning” recreates the fire that engulfed the Capitol. In the picture, many specific scenes leap into the vortex of light and fog that Turner created. When the British public had not yet recognized the artistic value of Turner’s works, Westler and Monet had already grasped its essence, especially the ethereal mood created by the light watercolors in Turner’s watercolours, which made them stunned.
Born in the United States, Westler left his homeland for Europe at the age of 21 with the dream of becoming an artist. In Paris, he initially became closely associated with realist artists. Those painters hated the shepherds and teenage girls in the French academic paintings, but made subtle descriptions of city streets and rural life with unsightly brushstrokes. The ugliness of the industrial age, with telegraph lines, chimneys and steel frames, frustrated Westler. How can he faithfully reflect the real world without tainting art with chaos and staleness?
”By figuring out the bright fog in Turner’s work, Westler found a way out,” said Kathryn Lauznan, who advocated and co-organized the exhibition. He realized that by demystifying light in the modern landscape, the vulgar fringes could be obscured. Under the guidance of this concept, he created the famous series of night paintings of the 1870s. The main body of the work is London at night, and the scenes in silver and gray are pleasing to the eye. The author blends the light oil paint with the diluted dry powder paint, and then makes a delicate outline on the scroll, and then uses a little yellow and white to imply the light and moonlight in the distance. When the brick chimneys and the windy banks of the Thames come into the picture, the painter employs soft dark tones. In “Blue and Cold: The Old Battersea Bridge”, one of the paintings in the night series, a freehand clip of a bridge cuts the river bank into two appalling parts. In the upper right corner of the picture, a little fireworks illuminate the night sky. It is hard for viewers to believe that this is the location of a reinforced iron bridge, which is exactly the performance that Westerler is looking for.
Monet’s intense light color is very different from Westerler’s hazy light, but Monet also imitates Turner. Impressionists were dedicated to reproducing nature with color, and from Turner, Monet realized that large-scale oil paintings could use fleeting light effects as the tone, and that light itself could become the subject of the painting.
For the three artists, the hazy backgrounds in their paintings benefit from the stale London air. As the world’s earliest and largest industrialized city, London was the first city in the world to be severely polluted. For most of the 19th century, the Thames was just a flowing garbage dump, and the London sky was clouded with filth. Industrial pollution combined with natural smog creates a suffocating poisonous smog that kills hundreds of people every week. However, if the environment is polluted, it is “beautiful” pollution. Through the catastrophic atmosphere, the chrome yellow, crimson and strange green over London at dawn and dusk is one of the unflattering “scapes” of the Victorian era.
Monet had a soft spot for the yellow fog. The sun shines through the mist and smoke, giving people a sense of flow, which is the essence of Monet’s artistic creation. Between 1870 and 1903, he traveled to London several times to paint the Thames. He dislikes London with clear skies. He once wrote to his wife: “When I wake up, I can see that the sky is not foggy, and there is no shadow of fog. I am very depressed.”
Venice is a must-see for three artists Impossible place. Monet was the last to go there in 1908. In “San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk”, Monet shows us a picture that blends softness and roughness. Venice is also Westler and Turner’s favorite location, where the drums beat by the Impressionists reverberated in the sky for a long time. The wonderful effects of light shown by the three artists to the world are unforgettable.
