Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism - Hardcover

From the summer of 1870 to the spring of 1871, famously dubbed the "Terrible Year" by Victor Hugo, Paris and its people were besieged, starved, and forced into surrender by Germans--then imperiled again as radical republicans established a breakaway Commune, ultimately crushed by the French Army after bloody street battles and the burning of central Paris. As renowned art critic Sebastian Smee shows, it was against the backdrop of these tumultuous times that the Impressionist movement was born--in response to violence, civil war, and political intrigue.

In stirring and exceptionally vivid prose, Smee tells the story of those dramatic days through the eyes of great figures of Impressionism. Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Edgar Degas were trapped in Paris during the siege and deeply enmeshed in its politics. Others, including Pierre-August Renoir and Frédéric Bazille, joined regiments outside of the capital, while Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro fled the country just in time. In the aftermath, these artists developed a newfound sense of the fragility of life. That feeling for transience--reflected in Impressionism's emphasis on fugitive light, shifting seasons, glimpsed street scenes, and the impermanence of all things--became the movement's great contribution to the history of art.

At the heart of it all is a love story; that of Manet, by all accounts the father of Impressionism, and Morisot, the only woman to play a central role in the movement from the start. Smee poignantly depicts their complex relationship, their tangled effect on each other, and their great legacy, while bringing overdue attention to the woman at the heart of Impressionism.

Incisive and absorbing, Paris in Ruins captures the shifting passions and politics of the art world, revealing how the pressures of the siege and the chaos of the Commune had a profound impact on modern art, and how artistic genius can emerge from darkness and catastrophe.

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Praise for Sebastian Smee and The Art of Rivalry

"The keynotes of Sebastian Smee's criticism have always included a fine feeling for the what of art--he knows how to evoke the way pictures really strike the eye--and an equal sense of the how of art: how art emerges from the background of social history."
-- Adam Gopnik

"Sebastian Smee brings the perfect combination of artistic taste and human understanding, and a prose style as clear as spring water."
-- Peter Schjeldahl

"Persuasive and vivid. . . . The Art of Rivalry is rooted in a closely observed theory, but it roams in a way geared to nonspecialist readers, part mini-biographies, part broader art history."
-- John Williams, New York Times

"With novella-like detail and incisiveness . . . [and] vivid, agile prose . . . The Art of Rivalry is a pure, informative delight, written with canny authority."
-- Michael Upchurch, Boston Globe

"[Sebastian Smee's] brilliant group biography is one of a kind."
-- Ann Hulbert, Atlantic

"One of those rare books that manages to show, convincingly, the exalted stuff of genius emerging from the low chaos of life."
-- Economist