You wouldn’t know it from their luminous canvases, featuring idyllic pastoral scenes and vignettes of urban life. But while inspired by nature, light, and the energy of modernity, the Impressionists also were indebted, however indirectly, to another legacy: the torments of siege and civil war in early 1870s Paris.
Such, at least, is the thesis of Sebastian Smee, the Washington Post’s art critic, and onetime Pulitzer Prize-winning chief art critic of The Boston Globe. Having survived military and political turmoil, this generation of pioneering artists “succumbed to a new and suddenly deeper sense of existential fragility,” Smee writes in “Paris in Ruins,” adding that “it is hard not to see Impressionism’s emphasis on fugitive light, shifting seasons, glimpsed street scenes, and transient domesticity as expressions of this heightened awareness of change and mortality.”
The clarity and conviction of Smee’s prose notwithstanding, this is not the kind of thesis susceptible to rigorous proof. The transience of life has, after all, been a frequent artistic theme, in the vanitas paintings of the Dutch Golden Age and elsewhere. And wars have dogged Europe for centuries without liberating its painters’ brush strokes.
If they were haunted by war, the Impressionists demonstrated that mostly by its absence from their work. They had in common, Smee points out, a “conspicuous refusal” to depict the bloodshed and tumult of 1870-71. With the exception of some works on paper by Manet, these artists “seemed to say no to history” and “rejected the dark and opaque past.”
Not so Smee, who seems to revel in describing the carnage that the Impressionists overlooked or ignored. He devotes much of “Paris in Ruins,” and certainly most of his narrative energy, to detailing the labyrinthine military and political conflicts that decimated the City of Light as France lurched convulsively from Second Empire to republic.
Smee is especially good at depicting the hardships of Paris under Prussian siege, when existence “grew bleaker by the day,” and hunger gave birth to a market in rats. “The bigger, fleshier rodents sold for 60 centimes, while standard-size denizens of the sewers sold for 30 or 40,” he writes.
With Paris mostly cut off from the world, the French used both hot-air balloons and homing pigeons to transmit mail. The methods employed were ingenious: Tiny photographic negatives of letters were inserted into a goose quill, “fastened by silk threads to the strongest tail feather of a pigeon that had already been carried out of Paris by balloon.” The pigeons were then dispatched to Paris, and ultimately 60,000 of 95,000 letters were successfully delivered — and no doubt consumed with more avidity than today’s proliferating email and texts.
The collapse of French military forces and ill-considered governmental decisions precipitated a political crisis. The era’s warring factions included imperialists, royalists of various stripes, and both moderate and radical republicans. After a contested election, the Paris Commune was proclaimed, a breakaway government that Smee describes as both radical and prosaic. “Like an Impressionist painting seen too close, it never really coalesced,” he writes.
Civil war and yet another siege of Paris followed, culminating in the demise of the Commune and the murderous reprisals of Bloody Week, in late May 1871. At one point, Paris’s celebrated Père Lachaise Cemetery was “transformed from a decorous resting place for the honored dead into a chaotic killing field.” In the end, after all the upheavals, France remained a republic, if just barely.
So where are the Impressionists (and their forerunners) in all this? They flit through the landscape of war, with mostly republican sympathies, alternately abandoning violence-racked Paris and returning to it. Frédéric Bazille died, heroically, in the Franco-Prussian War. The dean of Realist painters, Gustave Courbet, empowered by the Commune, worked to reform Paris’s hidebound artistic establishment.
But at the center of Smee’s story, at least when war itself recedes, are Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot, the sole woman to exhibit in the first Impressionist exhibition and, Smee writes, “a poet of the ephemeral.” Charmers and innovators, the two were friends, artistic allies, and mutual influences; Morisot was also a Manet model, sometimes chaperoned and sometimes not.
Smee depicts their relationship as an unconsummated romance shortcircuited by Manet’s unwillingness to jeopardize his marriage. If the documentary record seems thin, Smee summons the artistic one. “That they loved each other is evident to anyone looking at Édouard’s portraits of her,” he writes. They were “palpably in love,” he asserts. “In carrying on a secret dialogue on canvas, it was as if Édouard and Berthe were trying to come to terms with all that had been lost, and all that had been impossible between them from the beginning.”
The pair did manage a Victorian happy ending of sorts, preserving both appearances and relationships: Berthe married (and subsequently painted) Édouard’s brother Eugène, and the two families remained close.
As for the larger story of the Impressionists, Smee suggests that their refusal to depict war may have constituted “a collective act of psychological repression” or “an assertion of pacific values as an antidote to violence and trauma” — or both. In any case, he writes, “they were choosing to show a shared, promiscuously intertwined and authentic reality.” Better that reality, he argues, than the one that they and their compatriots had just endured.
PARIS IN RUINS: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism
By Sebastian Smee
W.W. Norton, 384 pages, $35
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.