PARIS IN RUINS

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.