Visual arts | Was Monet’s romantic haze just air pollution? A new study is confusing

When industrial air pollution increased, the sky of paintings clouded accordingly, claims a new study. A study published on Tuesday analyzed style and color changes in almost a hundred French people Claude Monet’s and British of Joseph Mallord William Turner in the painting.

The research suggests that at least part of Monet’s and Turner’s impressionistic style would have been created by air pollution.

About the study published in Applied Physical Sciences magazine The Washington Post.

Impressionistic art representatives Monet (1840–1926) and Turner (1775–1851) lived during the industrialization of Western Europe. In the centuries of the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, air pollution increased strongly. Factories burned coal and the atmosphere was covered with pollutants, including sulfur dioxide.

Researchers Anna Lea Albright and Peter Huybers in the paintings, they evaluate, among other things, the visibility with which the object can be seen clearly.

Before 1830, Turner’s paintings had an average visibility of 25 kilometers, but after 1830 it dropped to ten kilometers. In several paintings from Monet’s Charing Cross Bridge series, made at the turn of the 20th centurythe farthest visible object was estimated to be about a kilometer away.

“Not even fog”, Claude Monet wrote in his letter to his wife on March 4, 1900 For Alicewhen visiting London.

The unfinished works that weighed on many’s minds only continued when the smoke and fog of industrial pollution returned to the sky.

Researcher Albright thinks that the artists living in London at that time “were very aware of the changes in air pollution and were really committed to them”. According to Albright, there is perhaps a similar parallel to what is seen today, when society and artists react to unprecedented changes.

Valued an art critic Sebastian Smee presented a position on the study of Albright and Huybers In The Washington Post on Wednesday.

The crux of the criticism was that art history explains the paintings, not air pollution. The willingness of artists to abandon clear outlines and old ways of painting was due to internal creative choices and not to external stimuli such as atmospheric sulfur dioxide.

According to Smee, the idea that pollution may have caused Monet and Turner to abandon realism and look for beauty in the modern urban environment has also been put forward in the past. Turner was certainly interested in modernity, but also in poetic associations that arose, for example, from when the setting sun spelled the end of an empire, Smee writes.

Monet’s style, on the other hand, was preserved when he moved to the countryside in Giverny and painted water lilies and bridges in his garden – in the fresh air. Also, as he got older, Monet began to paint instead of the unchanging cliffs, cathedrals, bridges and haystacks, the atmosphere around them, the air between him and the objects, explains Smee. Monet wanted to paint the world as he saw it.