The Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Musée d'Orsay
Exhibition themes: Imaging the city
In the mid to late nineteenth century, Paris underwent a long and transforming period of urban change. The town planning reforms of Baron Georges Haussmann (1809-91), which eradicated as much of the city's past as they contributed to its enduring architectural legacy, left almost no corner of the city centre untouched, demolishing large sections of the metropolis and laying down more than one hundred kilometres of new roads, and the new buildings that lined them.
Fascinatingly, these changes were recorded with some ambivalence by the Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist artists. Gustave Caillebotte documented the Haussmann phenomenon in a celebratory manner befitting a wealthy artist who could afford to live at the heart of it. And Claude Monet transformed into a cathedral-like vision, the bustling hub of the Saint-Lazare Station, modernity's sleek new transit lounge between the mad, pulse-quickening rush of the capital and the relative tranquility of his own rural retreat at Argenteuil.
A number of Neo-Impressionist artists held strong socialist beliefs, and their works reflected the urban alienation that fed the rise of anarchism in the late 1880s and 1890s. Neo-Impressionism was a term coined by the critic Félix Fénéon in 1886, that sought to acknowledge both this group's indebtedness to the original Impressionists and their own new, divergent ideals, which were concerned with the scientific study of optical effects. Maximilien Luce's representations of urban life, for example, reflected his anarchist sympathies. Luce, whose early teenage years had been scarred by witnessing the atrocities committed against the citizens of Paris during the suppression of the Communard uprising in 1871, painted Parisian workers and their soulless environments as an act of political faith. Even in Luce's powerful depictions of the mining centres in Belgium's industrial Black Country, it is the city, be it Brussels or Paris, that is the real subject of these paintings, the city as omnivorous devourer of all the steel and glass that industrialization could produce.
