Shining New Light

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Most art exhibitions focus on a single artist or maybe a few from the same school. Much more gratifying is "Turner, Whistler, Monet: Impressionist Visions," which runs at the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, until Sept. 11, then moves on to Paris' Musée d'Orsay in October and London's Tate Britain next February. This is a show designed to draw out the affinities among three distinctive figures: the powerfully original British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner; the difficult, dandyish American expatriate James McNeill Whistler; and the quintessential French Impressionist Claude Monet. If this is a thesis show, and it is, there's nothing dry or academic about it. It's an argument touched by fire.

The story begins with Turner. Fiendishly productive, ever mindful of his position in art history, he presented a supremely challenging style to a British public of famously sluggish tastes and still managed to die, in 1851, with a sizable fortune and a reputation to match. Yet even to his apostle John Ruskin, the British critic who declared him the greatest landscape painter of all time, it could seem that some of Turner's canvases foundered in their own wild surfs of light. Was he really depicting anything solid in there, or was he just slapdashing great foams of yellow and white?

To Turner, light was all. In some of his later work, like Sun Setting over a Lake, all things dematerialize, all contours dissolve. Even in The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834, an eyewitness report on the fire that consumed the old houses of Parliament, chunks of specific form — a bridge, figures in the crowd — plunge downward toward a vortex of light and mist. But while the British public may not have always known what to make of Turner's work, Whistler and Monet did. It was especially in Turner's watercolors, weightless blooms of tinted wash, that the later artists found a model for the practices that their own intuitions were pointing them toward.

An American by birth, Whistler was just 21 when he left the U.S. for good and sailed to Europe with the firm intention of becoming an artist. In Paris he aligned himself at first with the Realists around Gustave Courbet, painters who detested the shepherds and nymphs of the French Academy and ushered in an art of city streets and village life in fullest grimy detail. But Whistler would turn out to be soft at the center. The relentless ugliness of the industrial age, the telegraph wires and smokestacks and steel trusswork, unnerved him. How could he be true to the contemporary world without allowing its mess and banality to infect his art?

Katharine Lochnan, the senior curator who conceived and co-organized this show, argues that Whistler found his way out through Turner's bright fogs. He realized that by shedding the same veils of light across the contemporary scene he could gently obscure its rough edges. From that insight grew his famous nocturnes of the 1870s, purring silver and gray-toned scenes of London after dark. Subtle floods of thinned oil paint, the nocturnes have the delicacy of watercolors, combining broad washes of diluted pigment with pinpoints of yellow and white to represent distant lamps or reflected moonlight. When they admit the brick chimneys and bleak embankments of the Thames into the picture, they do it on their own velvety terms. In Nocturne: Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge, an abruptly edited segment of bridgework intersects a ghostly slice of the Chelsea riverbank. In the upper right corner, fireworks spangle the sky. You find it hard to keep in mind that this is the image of a raw-boned bridge construction site? That's the effect Whistler was after.

Whistler's milky light is nothing like the muscular sparkle of Monet, but there were lessons in Turner for Monet's art as well. The Impressionists aimed to take dictation directly from nature, making rapid notations of color on canvas. In Turner, Monet found an example of work in which fleeting light effects could be made the basis for sizable canvases, paintings in which light itself could be the subject.

For all three men, a precondition for the misty atmospheres of their art was the filthy air of London. As the world's first great industrial metropolis, it was also one of the first to be badly polluted. For much of the 19th century, the Thames was a rippling cesspool, and the sky over London a kind of celestial slum. Industrial pollution combined with dense natural mists produced suffocating smogs that killed Londoners by the hundreds every week. But if the atmosphere was poisoned, it was pretty poison all the same. Seen through the layers of infested air, the London sky at twilight, with its crimson, chrome yellows and weird greens, was one of the great putrid spectacles of the Victorian Age.

Monet especially loved the thick pea-soup fogs that moved in on London in the 1840s. Sunlight struggling through mist and smoke offered him the shifting effects that were the very essence of his art. From 1870 until 1903, he made repeated expeditions to London to paint the Thames. A bad day for him was one when the air was clear. After one of those he wrote home to his wife Alice, "When I got up I was terrified to see that there was no fog, not even the shadow of a fog. I was devastated."

For all three men, Venice was an inevitable destination, a whole city resting on reflecting waters. Monet was the last to arrive, in 1908. In San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk, he produced an image, both softly glowing and ferocious, that brings to a close their conversations. This was one of Turner's favorite views, in a city that Monet's good friend Whistler had also touched upon, evoked with the drumbeat of Impressionist brushstrokes. It was a fade-out into the light they all showed to the world.