Paris in Ruins: Love, War and the Birth of Impressionism
Author(s): Sebastian Smee
Art | September 2024 New Releases | Spring Reading Guide 2024
Impressionism--its dramatic depiction of light, its lovely evocation of the transience of everything--remains wildly popular. Crowds flock to exhibitions by its greatest artists--Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro. But as Sebastian Smee shows in Paris in Ruins, a book of great narrative sweep and vivid detail, Impressionism was a complex reaction to an age of violence, civil war, and political intrigue.
From the summer of 1870 to the spring of 1871, famously dubbed the 'Terrible Year', Paris and its people were cut off, starved, and forced to surrender by Germans--before rebel republicans established a breakaway government or Commune. After street fighting and the burning of central Paris, the republicans were crushed by the French army.
In Paris in RuinsSmee tells this story through the eyes of these key artists, with a special focus on the intimate, enigmatic relationship between Manet--the father of Impressionism--and Morisot, the group's only female member in its early years. An indelible portrait of the city, Paris in Ruinscaptures the shifting passions and politics of the art world, and reveals how the chaos of that year had an incalculable effect on the development of modern art.
Born in 1972 in Adelaide, Sebastian Smeeis now a Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic at the Washington Post. He has written widely about art, and is the author of The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art. He lives in Boston.
'Astonishing. Heartstopping. A true story confined by two brutal years, and the walls of a great city under siege, which exults in love, courage, beauty, mischief and the mystery of human intimacy.' Annabel Crabb
'Its psychological insights into male friendship, ambition, ego and vulnerability make it a book as rich as a multi-layered cake.' Sydney Morning Heraldon The Art of Rivalry
Product Information
General Fields
- :
- : Text Publishing Company
- : Text Publishing Company
- : 486.0
- : 09 September 2024
- : {"length"=>["23.4"], "width"=>["15.3"], "units"=>["Centimeters"]}
- : books
Special Fields
- : 368
- : Paperback
- : Sebastian Smee