In the mid-19th
century, a Parisian lawyer named Georges Haussmann undertook an ambitious
project to modernize and clean-up the city of Paris. His aim was to recreate the capital in this era of
Enlightenment to achieve urban modernity. Before he started his work in
1848, Paris was dark and dingy, a city of narrow alleyways, encumbered streets,
and congested bridges. It had been
compared to a sewer (“Adieu, vile sewer, vile Paris.”—Eugene Sue; “…moral sewer
of Paris.”—Honore de Balzac).
Henry Thekerman, an American visitor to Paris, marveled at how Baron
Haussmann had “cut through streets, demolished whole quarters, made space, and
substituted modern elegance for old squalor.” (6) More important, he opened up this new city to the
people, giving them trees and sky and light, and encouraging their pursuit of
leisure and entertainment.
It was Haussmann
who made Paris look different, but it was the Impressionists who made us see it
differently. Their paintings
reflected the joie de vivre of the
French people after the modernization of Paris, depicting pleasurable
experiences under conditions of freer movement, in a changing world that was
beginning to show the effects of science on industry and of the energies of
enterprise in other fields. The
Impressionists painted the Paris of modernity whose landscape Haussmann had
transformed.
The majority of
Impressionist themes arose from the environment. There was a sense of motion and the feeling of sensory
delight as a part of everyday life.
Popular subject matter included scenes from the world of entertainment
and sports (dance halls, concerts, races, the circus) and from city streets,
parks, beaches, etc. People were
usually shown enjoying leisurely lives, a reflection of the overall national
prosperity. Individuals were
portrayed as engaging, happy, beautiful, and content. Paintings were pervaded by a sensation of relaxation, and
the glory of nature was extolled, as so many people enjoyed the country as a
result of the rural exodus.
Parisian street
scenes were favorite subjects for the Impressionists. As a group these artists preferred the new capital
transformed by Haussmann to the old one, but some (Renoir, in particular)
objected to the coldness of this Paris of modernity. In their paintings, the Impressionists strove to add warmth
to the city and took the transformation of Paris that the civic planner had
achieved one step further, using light, color, and brushstrokes to change
perspectives and add life, vigor, and spontaneity to the city.
While Haussmann’s commission may have started out at least in part as a political one (i.e. to secure the city against civil war), one effect of the new Paris he created, with his cleaning up of the sewers and opening up the narrow streets to create the scenic boulevards for which Paris became rightly famous, was to produce a backdrop for the art of the Impressionists. Widening the streets to form boulevards allowed for the visual as well as the military penetration of the city. Visibility was the key, letting in light and transforming monochromes into colors, with broad perspectives making it possible to take in an entire avenue at one glance—or in one painting.
Just as in Classical
and Neo-Classical art monuments were the foci of attention, in pre-Haussmann
Paris monuments defined the city, with the streets serving the secondary
function of leading up to them. In
the new Paris created by Haussmann, the beautiful broad boulevards became of
primary importance with the monuments secondary to them. The streets no longer led to the
monuments; the monuments merely decorated the boulevards. These new street scenes became subjects
for the Impressionists’ outdoor environmental art of light, color, and the
everyday.
While
Paris had been a world political and social capital for some time, it was only
when the new Paris entered the era of modernity and witnessed the ascent of
Impressionism that it truly became the art capital of its time. Previous Parisian painting had been
largely derivative, borrowed from other artistic centers, both for theme (Greek,
Roman, Egyptian) and style (largely Italian). Impressionist art was new, bold, and unlike anything before
it. And it was uniquely French—or
Parisian, more accurately.
Impressionist art reflected the modernity that was evolving in the new Paris of Haussmann. It also pictured it. With the coming of Impressionism, Paris truly became more than a world capital. While its fortunes as a world power declined somewhat in the post-Bonaparte period, the artistic fortunes of France—and Paris—were on the ascent. Paris became “the home of a vast art machine”. The country had gone through tremendous turmoil during the days of the monarchs and Napoleon, and after “a century that had endured to much…there must be found a line that would precisely render life…a drawing truer than all drawing…a drawing more human.” (3) This was the art of Impressionism: the art of impressions, reflecting not so much how things looked as how they were seen, using color and light to break with traditional imagery, and the art of the new Paris of modernity created by Haussmann, depicting the visible and the everyday, not yesterday’s monuments, relics, history, and myth.
The
Impressionists’ View of the New Paris