To accompany the splendid New Paris: from Monet to Morisot exhibition at Kunstmuseum Den Haag the excellent Hannibal Books in Belgium, in association with Kunstmuseum, has produced a wonderful, comprehensive book entitled Impressionist Paris.
The book/exhibition are as much history lessons as treatise on art. They both trace the birth and development of Impressionism which happened more or less in parallel with Baron Haussmann’s destruction and relentless development of central Paris which had been underway since 1853.
Emperor Napoleon III, hoping to achieve the same status as his uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte, wanted to make his own mark on history and ordered Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Prefect of the Seine départment, to build a beautiful new city, and not without cause. In 1845, the French social reformer Victor Considerant wrote: “Paris is an immense workshop of putrefaction, where misery, pestilence and sickness work in concert, where sunlight and air rarely penetrate. Paris is a terrible place where plants shrivel and perish, and where, of seven small infants, four die during the course of the year.”
In the next decades it was out with the old and in with the new as stinking slums were cleared and grand new boulevards and magnificent buildings rose phoenix-like from the rubble. New parks and squares created green havens in the city with plants that thrived, bringing with them a breath of fresh air. In fact, the entire project was not completely finished until 1927.
The artists were quick to recognise the new vistas and were keen to record them on paper and canvas. One of the first was Claude Monet who painted three views across the city, paintings considered to be the first of the Impressionist school. When he set up his easel on the balcony of the Louvre in 1867 to paint the landmark cityscapes he was turning his back, both literally and metaphorically, on the status quo.
And it wasn’t just Monet and Haussmann who were creating the new. That year also marked the invention of the paper clip, the patenting of dynamite, the first passage through the Suez canal, the first volume of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and lots more besides, all of which are revealed in the book.
While Impressionist Paris covers all the pictures in the exhibition in detail it offers a much broader picture of the era in an historical, artistic and political sense. Both in the book and the exhibition the satirical cartoons of Honoré Daumier figure significantly, reflecting or influencing public opinion as they did. There are also a lot photographs by Charles Marville of unbelievably fine quality, of work in progress as the picks swung and the spades dug while the rubble was taken away in horse-drawn carts.
All three of Monet’s Louvre paintings are on show together in the exhibition along with works by Degas, Cézanne, Manet, Pissarro, Renoir et al. Each artist has a section to his or herself in the book which gives insight and information that the exhibition cannot do. The book also offers a more relaxed way to inspect the documentation that is on show. Perhaps the most interesting, and most portentous, is the letter from Monet to the director of the Louvre asking for permission to access the balcony, along with the acquiescent reply.
Edited by Frouke van Dijke, who also curated the exhibition, the book offers a lot more information than the exhibition is able to give. For those who have seen, or intend to see, the exhibition it provides a valuable addition. For those who will not see the Kunstmuseum’s New Paris: from Monet to Morisot, the book functions as a stand-alone and gives a valuable insight into the cultural, social and political history of a city that became the world’s capital of all things artistic for the best part of a century. Michael Hasted February 2025
Details of the English edition of Impressionist Paris
- Publisher : Hannibal Books, Belgium
- Hardcover : 208 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9464941405
- ISBN-13 : 978-9464941401
- Dimensions : 29.2 x 2.5 x 24.5 cm
- €29.95
