ART HISTORY Paris in Ruins: Love, War and the Birth of Impressionism Sebastian Smee Text, $36.99 French Impressionist painting offers a vision of colour and light so vivid and pure we might imagine the artist saw nothing but the elemental beauty of the observable world. In this art, typically, every colour of the spectrum is used except black.
And yet, there is an aspect to Impressionism that is dark, and that darkness is the preoccupation of this book. Prussian troops within the ruins of Fort Issy near Versailles at the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War on February 1, 1871. Credit: Getty Images Sebastian Smee, the Australian-born Pulitzer Prize-winning critic who writes about art for The Washington Post , is interested in the wider influences on visual art that are not necessarily marked on the canvas.
His previous book, The Art of Rivalry , explored the personal and professional relationships between pairs of famous artists that affected their lives and work. Smee describes Paris in Ruins as “an attempt to knit together art history, biography, and military and social history”. The book well could change the way you think about Impressionism, and it might alter your perception of art history .
Three-quarters of it covers the period before Impressionism was established as a significant movement in art. Credit: Supplied Impressionism followed on from the self-inflicted horror of foreign invasion and civil war that almost destroyed Paris, culminating in the so-called Terrible Year of 1870-71. A criminally inept French government brought death and destruction on its own people by declaring war on what is now Germany.
A well-organised and ruthless Prussian army quickly occupied France, and the capital was besieged. The failure of the French state to protect the people led to the establishment of the Paris Commune, a utopian experiment in radical self-government that despite the best intentions of its founders soon descended into a new hell of misery and bloodshed. Paris had been regarded as one of the world’s leading cities, a beacon of modern European civilisation.
“As reports of what was taking place reached beyond France, the world responded with stupefaction and moral recoil,” Smee writes. “That Paris – that proud, exquisite city with no obvious equal on earth – could be reduced to a predicament so debased beggared comprehension.” He seeks to understand why Impressionists chose not to depict in their art the catastrophe they had lived through.
“The absence of almost any depictions of this rubble by the Impressionists, or of other subjects explicitly addressing the recent violence, needs to be accounted for,” Smee writes. If ever there was a demonstration of T.S.
Eliot’s maxim that humankind cannot bear very much reality then it is the Impressionist movement when viewed in historical context. A generation of artists who had experienced the very worst of times found in their art a path leading beyond the horrors they suffered. Berthe Morisot’s painting Eugene Manet on the Isle of Wight (1875).
Sebastian Smee says she took some aspects of the Impressionist style further than any of her peers. Credit: National Museum of Women in the Arts. “Over polarising political rhetoric, they were choosing to show a shared, promiscuously intertwined and authentic reality,” according to Smee.
The rejection of authority of any kind as toxic was manifest in the way the Impressionists made their art. “That absence of hierarchy extended even to technical considerations: the Impressionists painted straight onto the canvas rather than with varnish layered over glazes layered over paint layered over drawing.” Impressionism can be seen as a response to the rise of photography, a new technology that captured form with a speed and precision that previously only realist art could achieve with painstaking attention to detail and at much greater cost.
Painting, however, could provide colour while early photography offered monochrome only. Colour, then, became the special attraction of painting. Later on, of course, photography offered colour as well as form.
Thus displaced, painting moved away from figurative representation altogether towards abstraction. Rather than view painting and photography as being in competition with each other, Smee portrays Impressionist art as learning from the new method of making images. “The movement paralleled the rise of photography and was stamped with many of that medium’s well-known contradictions: its evidential authority but its transience; its optical beauty but its arbitrariness.
” Loading Paris in Ruins has a large cast of characters, including names such as Manet, Degas, Monet and lesser known though significant figures such as Frederic Bazille, one of several gifted young artists who died fighting for their country in a futile war. An important strand in the narrative is the passionate friendship between Manet and Berthe Morisot, a relationship characterised by the author as an “affair of the heart”. Smee regards Morisot as a supreme practitioner of Impressionism who took painting in a new direction.
“She painted not only the flux and transience of light but the profound fragility of life itself, emphasizing the lives of women and children.” According to Smee, Morisot “took some aspects of the Impressionist style further – into a more radically ‘incomplete’ and broken mode of painting – than any of her peers”. The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger.
Get it delivered every Friday . Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. License this article Review Visual art Simon Caterson is a Melbourne-based freelance writer.
Most Viewed in Culture Loading.
