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    When Monet and Turner Found Beauty in London’s Toxic Fog

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    Monet and Turner found something sublime in the polluted 19th-century city — and maybe something darker, too.If you’ve been to London recently (or ever) you’ll probably recognize Claude Monet’s description: “Today the weather was maddening, gusts of snow, then sunshine, fog and dark weather and clear, it was magnificent but all too changeable.”Yet the French painter found London’s moody climate an inspiration, and he purposely came in only the colder months. During three visits from 1899 to 1901, he produced dozens of canvases of the city’s surging River Thames, 36 of which were shown to acclaim in Paris in 1904 but never exhibited in London.One hundred and twenty years later, the Courtauld Gallery has brought a selection of the series home for the first time in “Monet and London: Views of the Thames” (through Jan. 19, 2025). The effect is as radiant and sublime as Monet might have hoped — though today we might see those unsettled skies in a different light.“Every day I find London more beautiful to paint,” he wrote to his wife Alice from the swish Savoy Hotel, where he stayed on those visits. From his riverside balcony, the artist could observe the working waterway, chugging with boat traffic and steaming with trains on bridges above, from sunrise to sunset. Here, he would fulfill his enduring wish to “try to paint some fog effects on the Thames.”Monet’s “Charing Cross Bridge, The Thames” (1903)Alain Basset/Lyon MbaAt the Courtauld (less than half a mile from the Savoy), 21 canvases show the river in an atmospheric suite of cornflower blue, cobalt, dove gray and mauve. The choppy Thames glimmers in shades of silver and blue flecked with violet and pink, or flaming yellow, orange and crimson from the sun — “the little red ball,” Monet called it — that’s high above in a sky thick with “delicious fog.” “The extraordinary fog so very yellow,” he wrote, characterized the industrialized late-19th-century London. Locals already called it “the Big Smoke.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      These Are the Artists on the Turner Prize Shortlist

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      This year’s four nominees are Claudette Johnson, Jasleen Kaur, Pio Abad and Delaine Le Bas, whose works draw on personal history and cultural interpretations.Claudette Johnson, a Black British visual artist who is experiencing a late-career renaissance, and Jasleen Kaur, an artist whose installations have explored her upbringing in a Scottish Sikh community, are among the nominees for this year’s Turner Prize, the prestigious British art award.The four-person shortlist was announced on Wednesday at a news conference at the Tate Britain art museum in London. Each artist is nominated for an exhibition held in the past 12 months, and Tate Britain will host a group show of their work from Sept. 25 to Feb. 16, 2025.Johnson, 65, whose portraits of Black women and men in pastels and watercolor are held in the collections of Tate and the Baltimore Museum of Art, is the highest-profile artist shortlisted.Her career began in the 1980s as a member of the Blk Art Group, a British collective, but she stopped exhibiting for decades while she raised two children. In a 2023 interview with T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Johnson described that period as a “long wilderness” in which the idea of becoming a successful artist was “beyond a dream.”In recent years, Johnson has become an art-world fixture again, and the Turner Prize jury nominated her for solo exhibitions at the Courtauld Gallery, in London, and Ortuzar Projects, in New York.At Wednesday’s news conference, Sam Thorne, a jury member who runs the Japan House cultural center in London, said that Johnson’s “vibrant” portraits were a “moving response to traditional representations of gender and Blackness in Western art history.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More