Richard Scully reviews Sebastian Smee’s Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism, (Melbourne: Text, 2024).
The understanding of French Impressionism has always been bound up with biography and with history. The reaction against an older way of doing things was crucial to the development of the ‘art of light’: a genre that has remained among the most instantly recognisable and loved schools of painting. The names of its great exponents – Cézanne, Manet, Renoir, Degas, Monet, Pissarro – are still amongst the best-known artists worldwide, from the most self-congratulatory critic to the person who doesn’t know much about art, but knows what they like. Can there be more to say about this loose collective and their impact on art?
Sebastian Smee certainly thinks so, and in a book appearing to coincide with the sesquicentenary of the first Impressionist exhibition (April 1874), he deploys biography and history in excellent style to remind readers that the timelessness of Impressionism was definitely conceived and born of a time and of a place.
Smee himself is also of a time and of a place, and it may surprise the general reader to know that the Pulitzer Prize winner and darling of the New England (US) artistic establishment is a Sydney boy, born and bred, and educated at what has always been a great home for artistic scholarship and which – hopefully – will sustain that core of brilliance once its 2026 metamorphosis is complete: the University of Adelaide. Work on The Australian gave him a chance to expand the nation’s artistic horizons while remaining firmly rooted in traditional notions of greatness in art. The Boston Globe and the Washington Post have seen Smee hone his talents still further; Side by Side (2002) and The Art of Rivalry (2016) display that talent in the long form. That so much of the artwork explored resides in Smee’s American (since 2008) home, also underpins the Americanness of this book, but also makes it transnational.
Paris in Ruins is therefore both a development of Smee’s previous work, and a departure. The personal, the social and intimate interactions of living and breathing artists, the thoughts and emotions that drove them to create something new and of-the-moment: all this infuses this latest book. The bipolar interaction of very human geniuses is again the way Smee urges us to understand the artists and their art. The conversation amongst these figures, not in words, written or spoken, but in fragrant oils on canvas – this is the essence of Impressionism.
What is particularly striking about Paris in Ruins is the way Smee is able to manage both the intensely personal, small-scale – especially Manet’s requited love for Berthe Morisot – and the world-shaping global events – the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune of 1870-1871 – in putting forward an essentially historicist explanation for the birth of Impressionism. That the Impressionists’ best-known work eschewed the ruins, the smoke, the hunger, and the blood, of the ‘Terrible Year’ is itself shown to be just as much a response to war and insurrection as the lesser-known sketches and works that Manet and others made of their surroundings. Parisians queuing in the rain for food during the German siege feature here, as does lithography by Manet showing the executions of the Communards, the churn of the barricades, and more besides. Smee shows that the colour and light, love and sentiment of Impressionism cannot be understood unless juxtaposed with the black-and-white and shadow, death and despair of these other works, and the events that inspired them all.
That Manet’s imagining of the execution of a group of Communards is a direct lift from his 1867-1869 depictions of the execution of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico came as a surprise to me, and I can never un-see it. The underlying political critique Manet was expressing towards Napoleon III and Bonapartist foreign policy seems now revealed in all its ambivalence. Are the executioners of 1871 – National Guardsmen, as Manet was himself – identical to the Mexicans who dispatched the unfortunate Habsburg puppet four years earlier? Who then has blood on their hands in 1871 for the killing of fellow-citizens, albeit rebels against the nascent Third Republic and the nation?
More overt and well-known is Manet’s Rue Mosnier with Flags (1878), details of which were chosen by Text and Sarahmay Wilkinson for the cover art of the book. But with Smee’s analysis now in place, the foregrounded figure of the one-legged war veteran (veteran of the German war or the Commune?) becomes all the more poignant, given the scene is of the Fête de la Paix (30 June 1878), France’s national day before a more determinedly republican administration settled on a revival of Bastille Day (14 July) in 1880.
Does all this grounding in the politics of the early-to-mid-1870s spoil the appreciation of an art that is celebrated for its timelessness? As an historian, I don’t think so. Smee’s account of the birth of Impressionism does not have to be the account. It is merely one of many that enriches our understanding still further, if we wish it to. As an historian of cartoons and of satire, I myself would have liked to see even more ink spent on the man and the magazine that gave ‘Impressionism’ its very identity, and did so not out of a terribly serious and high-minded appreciation of its merits, but out of satirical good humour: the 25 April 1874 review of the exhibition in Le Charivari (1832-1937). That the original exhibition was hosted by the cartoonist ‘Nadar’ (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon), who is celebrated more for his photography than his caricature, nonetheless hints at the interconnectedness of Parisian, French, European, and world caricature and high art. Something Smee gestures in the direction of, but which really does need a little more attention from ‘serious’ art historians.
Paris in Ruins is a delightful read, as one would expect from a Pulitzer alumnus. Is it good history? Yes, with some caveats. As Smee himself states repeatedly, he ‘relied’ upon a lot of monograph-length work to flesh out the historical details. There is not much in the way of critical history in that Bibliography (although the classics by Alistair Horne, and the newer, drier military history of Michael Howard make an appearance, alongside a number of journal articles).
Of unpublished archival material, there is a dearth, but then that is something that has actually been at the heart of Smee’s efforts at reconstruction: most of the letters exchanged between Manet and Morisot were burned when the latter married in 1874. That Manet was a married man (to Suzann Leenhoff, in 1863), and Morisot married Manet’s brother Eugéne (1874) makes for intriguing possibilities. Manet painted Morisot’s portrait many times before she became his sister-in-law.
Were they lovers? Smee seems to think so, but we shall probably never be sure. This is another reason why Paris in Ruins need not be imagined to be definitive.
Does it matter? Only if intimacy must be sexual to be of importance. The bulk of Smee’s book seems to indicate that it doesn’t. It can be spiritual and inspirational, of a kind that can help conceive a great artistic movement rather than be concentrated on conception of the more mundane kind.
