Written by:
Graham Ogilvy
Managing Editor
Review: How a ‘Terrible Year’ ushered in the supremacy of the Impressionists
Reading time: 4 minutes
Written by:
Graham Ogilvy
Managing Editor
Sebastian Smee’s Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism was published last year to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the first exhibition by 30 artists who rebelled against the stultifying grip of the French art establishment and who jointly ushered in the age of the Impressionists.
Smee’s contention is that the rise of the Impressionists was a reaction to the ‘Terrible Year’ of the Prussian siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war and to the subsequent savage repression of the Paris Commune, the brief attempt by the old revolutionaries of 1848 and young radicals, socialists and revolutionaries to organise a progressive society in Paris that could form a model for the government of France.
A comparison might be drawn with the emergence of The Jazz Age in the ‘Roaring Twenties’, frequently said to be a reaction to the horrors of World War I and the reactionary imperialist regimes responsible for it.
One problem faced by Smee is that hardly any of the Impressionists were actually in Paris during the siege (only one, Frederic Bazille, died in the war). And during the Paris Commune only the left-wing Gustave Courbet played a significant role.
Politically, most impressionists were Republicans, at odds with the stifling regime of Napoleon III which allowed itself to be tricked by Bismarck into the disastrous Franco-Prussian War. And Impressionism itself began in the 1860s, another problem for Smee. Just as Zola was challenging the grip of the censors on the written word, young artists rejected the authority of the Academie which controlled the visual arts.
Smee, a Pulitzer-prize winning art critic, is good on this. He writes:
“By and large, Renoir, Monet, Sisley, and Pissarro as well as Degas, Manet, and Morisot were now depicting not just what they saw all about them but what they yearned for: a secular, open, and democratic society where nature, commerce, and industry were in a provisional, constantly evolving struggle for harmony, in configurations that were as changeable and unsettled as the weather. The crucial thing was that the new painters’ work was rooted in the here-and-now rather than in exhausted mythologies, religious parables, or legends of the ancients. The society they portrayed and the way they painted it—in loose, unfinished-looking brushstrokes that captured colored light and sensations of transience—were pointedly at odds with the conservative establishment’s program of national rejuvenation, which required artists to execute a moralistic vision with high degrees of finish and laborious displays of skill. It was in this increasingly stark opposition that the modern avant-garde was born.”
The Impressionists’ reaction to the horrors of the siege and the appalling repression of the Commune which saw the massacre of at least 30,000 Parisians by the Versailles government was to ignore it. In this respect, they could be argued to be escapists. The blood-thirsty atrocities of the right-wing forces and the subsequent repression are ably described in John Merriman’s brilliant Massacre: The life and death of the Paris Commune.
And the intensity of the repression (Courbet was jailed and was lucky to have evaded the firing squads) was, perhaps, enough to intimidate the artistic community.
Nonetheless, this is a well-written account and adds to the history of Paris and its artistic community. It also gives welcome attention to Berthe Morisot, the only woman to have exhibited in the 1874 exhibition. The Impressionists may have kept their heads down during a dreadful period of French history but they challenged reactionary orthodoxy to bequeath us some of world’s greatest art treasures.
Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism by Sebastian Smee. Published by Oneworld Publications, 384pp, £25.
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