Yes, It Matters

i love them all dearly, but i can just see the money-managing, goal-oriented, future-thinking business-school types i know squirming with dissatisfaction here and wondering what the hell difference it makes what exact colour the sky was a hundred years ago.

but this article, from the NYT, makes perfect sense to me.

Air-Index Impressionism
By JOHN GLASSIE
Published: December 10, 2006

“Without the fog, London wouldn’t be a beautiful city,” the French painter Claude Monet wrote to his wife, Alice, during one of his long visits to England from France. Few Londoners would have agreed with his statement at the time, when the city was choked by the smog of the Industrial Revolution, but no one argues with the beauty of the colorful skies he began painting there between 1899 and 1901. Pollution has never looked quite as attractive as when seen through Monet’s eyes.

Now there is evidence that Monet’s atmospheric images of London were not Impressionist concoctions but a result of highly accurate observation. According to a paper published by two environmental scientists in August, the paintings (nearly 100 of which still exist) may “provide useful information in the analysis of the London fogs and air quality during this period” — a period before pollution levels were routinely recorded.

In their study, Jacob Baker and John E. Thornes of the University of Birmingham analyzed the position of the sun in 9 of the 19 paintings in Monet’s “Houses of Parliament” series. There was “a perfect correlation,” Thornes says, between the solar positions in the images, the actual solar positions derived from astronomical records and the dates on which Monet said, in letters to Alice, that he began the works. “We can date, almost to within 15 minutes, when he first put the sun onto certain images,” Thornes says. Having found some quantitative information in the paintings, Baker and Thornes say they hope to find more. “We believe,” Thornes says, “that we can basically deconstruct the images to work out how much smoke would have to be in the air to create that visibility and those colors in, say, February 1900.”

Some art historians doubt the London paintings hold this much documentary evidence, pointing out, among other things, that Monet continued to work on many of the images after he returned to his studio in Giverny, France. “There’s no question that Monet was astonishingly allegiant to what lay in front of him,” the Monet scholar Paul Hayes Tucker says. “But at the same time, for example, he had a penchant for pinks. He always was trying to sneak pinks into pictures throughout his career.”

Thornes concedes that “it’s still just a hypothesis” but maintains that “we’re fairly optimistic that we’ll get something out of it.”

you see, in the long run, it's not going to end poverty or save darfur or cure cancer or make some dude rich through stock market shenanigans. but investigating, unlayering, rediscovering the past, at least for me, makes my present existence more understandable, more dimensional. whether it's etymology or calligraphy or tristan + isolde, it informs my world.

(and monet, to me, believe it or not, is prettier than money.)