Paris In Ruins: The Siege, The Commune And The Birth

PARIS IN RUINS:THE SIEGE,THE COMMUNE AND THE BIRTH OF IMPRESSIONISM

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. Edouard 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 Frederic 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.

Review: "Sebastian Smee has a gimlet eye, a seductive style and a novelist's feel for character and incident ... [he] has written an inspiring book ... about artists committed to 'the new': new ways of seeing a changing world; new ways of living and feeling; new ways of painting." -- Christopher Benfey - New York Times Book Review
"Smee brings a fresh perspective by linking [the Siege of Paris and the Paris Commune] to the artistic development of impressionism in general and of Manet and Morisot in particular ... With exquisite sensitivity, he reads the similarities in [Manet and Morisot's] work from this period." -- Caroline Weber - Washington Post
"[A] wide-ranging work of cultural history ... Smee's chronicle gains sinew as he recounts the deprivations and terrors of various artists and their families during the Prussian bombardment and the Communards' revolt. ... The book's central narrative follows two members of the Impressionist group, Edouard Manet and Berthe Morisot, offering an intimate portrait of their relations and changing fortunes." -- Dan Hofstadter - Wall Street Journal
"[V]ibrant and incisive ... Paris in Ruins brims with delicious anecdotes: the Morisots' genteel gatherings; military duty imposed on eligible men; the hot-air balloons and carrier pigeons that preserved the city's communication with the world. ... [Smee] liberate[s] Impressionism from the cliches of dorm-room posters and greeting-card sentimentality." -- Hamilton Cain - Los Angeles Times
"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 ... Better that reality, he argues, than the one that they and their compatriots had just endured." -- Julia M. Klein - Boston Globe

Author Biography: Sebastian Smee is a Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic at the Washington Post and the author of The Art of Rivalry. Formerly the chief art critic at the Boston Globe and national art critic for the Australian, he has also written for the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Financial Times, and the Independent, among other publications. He lives in Boston.