Paris in ruins : love, war, and the birth of Impressionism

Paris in ruins Love, war, and the birth of Impressionism

Sebastian Smee

Book - 2024

From the summer of 1870 to the spring of 1871, famously dubbed the "Terrible Year" by Victor Hugo, Paris and its people were besieged, starved, and forced into surrender by Germans--then imperiled again as radical republicans established a breakaway Commune, ultimately crushed by the French Army after bloody street battles and the burning of central Paris. As renowned art critic Sebastian Smee shows, it was against the backdrop of these tumultuous times that the Impressionist movement was born--in response to violence, civil war, and political intrigue. In stirring and exceptionally vivid prose, Smee tells the story of those dramatic days through the eyes of great figures of Impressionism. Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Edgar... Degas were trapped in Paris during the siege and deeply enmeshed in its politics. Others, including Pierre-August Renoir and Frédéric Bazille, joined regiments outside of the capital, while Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro fled the country just in time. In the aftermath, these artists developed a newfound sense of the fragility of life. That feeling for transience--reflected in Impressionism's emphasis on fugitive light, shifting seasons, glimpsed street scenes, and the impermanence of all things--became the movement's great contribution to the history of art. At the heart of it all is a love story; that of Manet, by all accounts the father of Impressionism, and Morisot, the only woman to play a central role in the movement from the start. Smee poignantly depicts their complex relationship, their tangled effect on each other, and their great legacy, while bringing overdue attention to the woman at the heart of Impressionism. --

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2nd Floor New Shelf 759.409/Smee (NEW SHELF) Due Dec 2, 2024
Subjects
Impressionism (Art) > France > 19th century.
Art and social conflict > France > 19th century.
Impressionist artists > France > 19th century.
Impressionism (Art) > France.
Art and social conflict > France.
Published
New York, NY : W.W. Norton & Company [2024]
Language
English
Main Author
Sebastian Smee (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xi, 370 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (page 345-351) and index.
ISBN
9781324006954
  • Author's Note
  • Prologue
  • Part I. Salon of 1869
  • Part II. The Siege of Paris
  • Part III. The Commune
  • Part IV. The Birth of Impressionism
  • Epilogue
  • Acknowledgments
  • A Note on Sources
  • Bibliography
  • Illustration Credits
  • Index
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Art from chaos. Pulitzer Prize--winning art critic Smee draws on a wealth of historical and biographical sources to examine the birth of impressionism during a time of ferocious political and social upheaval in France. Smee focuses closely on three artists--Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Edgar Degas--who, unlike many of their contemporaries, stayed in Paris during the "military and civic catastrophes of 1870-71," which Victor Hugo called "The Terrible Year." A siege by the Prussian army took down Napoleon III and left the city's population starving, its buildings burned to ruins. Isolated, Parisians depended on hot-air balloons to deliver mail to the rest of the country. Although Napoleon's scandalous monarchy had ended, France's Third Republic itself was assailed: the Paris Commune, "a hastily improvised urban government," was composed of rebels who wanted "to dismantle any structures of power--governmental, financial, religious, military--that held people back." They were quashed in a bloody rout that left the city reduced to rubble. Smee vividly conveys the terror of the times, the tense military standoffs and plotting, and the inflamed passions. The aftermath of the terrible year left the nation deeply unsettled. For the artists Smee portrays, the future seemed bleak, portending "the imminent death of the republic, the likely restoration of a monarchy, and a conservative Catholic revival." Impressionism, he argues, was the aesthetic response to their heightened perception of the "existential fragility" of life. The paintings in the first impressionist exhibition of 1874 "idealized transitions and contingency, even as it attempted to dispel grief." Despite being illustrated with color plates, Smee's work devotes less space to the history of artistic creation than to war, but his depiction of impressionists' works is discerning, as is his sensitivity to the complicated relationships among the artists. Deft, vibrant cultural history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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