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.
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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.
