Paris in Ruins: The Siege, the Commune and the Birth of Impressionism
Paris, 1870: the events of the ‘terrible year’ are seen through the eyes of the artists who lived through it. Yet for Smee, what is most striking is the ‘conspicuous refusal’ of the most avant-garde artists of the period, Manet, Morisot and Degas and their circle, to depict the upheaval of that time, barring some graphic art.
Smee’s prose is spirited, a form of creative non-fiction, as in: ‘The wind mussing Hugo’s hair now, as he again looked out over Paris, seemed promising.’ Thus this is not an academic text, though Smee certainly knows his material in historical and art-historical terms, though the book has a copious bibliography and some illustrations (but not footnotes). His descriptions of the atrocities of 1870-1871 are agonising to read from the human angle (Goya’s Horrors of War indeed) and remind us too of how close even the Louvre came to destruction. The book has a cast of characters to rival a Dickens novel, inevitably so, for this is primarily history, not fiction.
This reader regularly went rabbit-holing after the less familiar names (for example, many would recognise the name Manet but be less familiar with Meissonier, though it was the latter who commanded high prices). The unifying theme of the book is the rapport of Morisot and Manet, its nature never made explicit as it’s impossible to know just what it was (Morisot eventually married Manet’s brother). There is a passage in which Manet indulges in a spectacular act of artistic mansplaining, altering one of Morisot’s paintings, but as Smee demonstrates, it was her work that came to influence his.
Smee is above all observant; he points out aspects of paintings you probably thought you knew all the details of, because they are so often reproduced. Most of all, he puts art in its historical context, which too often the stylistic study of art does not sufficiently acknowledge.
