Welcome to London Grip, a forum for reviews of books, shows & events – plus quarterly postings of new poetry. Our most recent posts are listed below. Older posts can be explored via the search box and topic list. For more information & guidelines on submitting reviews or poems please visit our Home page.
Published by Hannibal Books to coincide with the exhibition New Paris: From Monet to Morisot at the Kunstmuseum in the Hague until June 9
In 1867, Claude Monet painted three views of Paris from the balcony of the Louvre. He was turning his back on the great tradition shut away in the museum behind him and firing the opening shot of impressionism, associated with outdoor scenes, infused with light and shade.
It’s a school, often easy on the eye and so familiar we forget it was once radical.
The latest work from Hannibal Books sets the works of Monet, Manet, Renoir as well as less well-known names, in their historical context of violent change and transformation.
With authoritative text by specialists from leading museums, it vividly recreates the atmosphere of Paris in the second half of the 19th-century and is the perfect complement to the latest major exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in The Hague.
The museum is the proud owner of one of the three views, which the exhibition unites with the other two.
Such rapid-brushstroke depictions of Paris, together with those of Monet’s fellow impressionists, played a leading part in creating the myth of “the city of light”.
Emperor Napoleon III’s prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann had a still more central role: as the painters painted, he destroyed medieval, warren-like Paris at break-neck pace to make way for his uniform-height apartment blocks and wide streets. The cartoonists depicted him without affection as a busy beaver. We’re told he destroyed some 20,000 buildings, built 300,000 new homes, planted 80,000 trees and installed 500 kilometres of sewage pipes.
No one disputes Paris was overcrowded and many lived in squalor, but Haussmann’s razing of districts was above all to the benefit of the bourgeoisie. The contribution of the poor was mostly confined to the back-breaking work of construction. If there was a reward for them, it was a home among the cramped sixth-floor spaces in the mansard roofs above the spacious luxury of the floors below.
For the impressionists, the stereotype of the artist starving in a garret, we learn, is too simplistic.
They tended to have the backing of the wealthy families into which they were born, while their career choice sometimes exposed them to rough living conditions. In sum, they straddled classes. They sympathised with and had insights into the lives of the poor, but their patrons were the bourgeoisie whose world they glorified. When it came to the horrors of the Commune, even those impressionists with radical leanings were mostly nowhere to be seen.
Gustave Caillebotte, one of the youngest and richest of the impressionists, was able to afford an apartment accessed from the illustrious Boulevard Haussmann and his paintings take a lofty perspective on modern Paris. We look from a sixth-floor mansard far down to the diminutive passersby in the street below, or through the wrought iron of one of Haussmann’s elegantly crafted balconies.
Caillebotte also bucks the impressionist trend for sunlit scenes with his “Paris Street, Rainy Day”.
Despite the weather, the Parisians beneath the umbrellas are chic, as fashion emerges as another dominant theme for the impressionists, who captured not just the high-quality fabric of Haussmann’s buildings, but of their well-to-do inhabitants.
A section entitled “The Parisienne” explores the importance of “the figure piece” used to depict fashionable Parisians and all they stood for.
As consumerism took hold, portraits of the chic women of impressionist Paris were used to market fashionable finery.
Beyond any commercial purpose and the conventionally well-dressed, Edouard Manet’s “Woman with a Fan” pays homage to the “Black Venus”, as his friend the poet Baudelaire referred to Jeanne Duval, a mixed-race actress who was the muse and mistress considered to have inspired “Les Fleurs du Mal”.
Baudelaire in his novel “La Fanfarlo” had evoked Duval’s strong personality and how she “liked material that made some sound”.
Manet’s portrait depicts Duval in a shimmering crinoline that undoubtedly would have rustled had she been able to walk in it. It is so vast, it does not fit into the picture’s frame.
If Duval scandalised Paris’ chattering classes, other women fared still worse.
Edgar Degas’ “Nude Study for the Little Dancer” speaks of the appalling vulnerability of the “little rats”, or street urchins who became the child ballerinas in a desperate attempt to improve themselves. Most failed to do so and instead found themselves victims of sexual abuse and threatened with terrible violence.
The tensions between rich and poor erupted in the Commune when women were among those who paid the ultimate price, as we see in a photograph taken by André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri of them lying in cheap open coffins.
The photographer whose work is most prominent in this book is Charles Marville, who was commissioned by the city authorities to document Haussmann’s destruction of the old city and creation of the new.
He did so by pushing a cart through all the dusty demolition that carried his heavy glass plates and a portable darkroom as the plates had to be developed immediately. The results are crystal clear if somewhat empty as the long exposure time meant fast-moving vehicles did not register.
Monet more than made up for that with his “Le Pont de l’Europe” in which the new mode of fast, long-distance transport fills the scene.
To make his task easier, we learn, Monet persuaded the crew to slow down the trains or load extra coal to create more steam.
His highly atmospheric painting has the effect of celebrating modernism and creating the feeling the impressionists were inherently optimistic that change equated to progress.
As the book “Impressionist Paris” concludes, the movement was not political. It was also not neutral in that it delivered to its bourgeois audience the Paris it wanted to see. The horrors of war and the Commune were a bad dream ultimately brushed aside.
Impressionist Paris,
A Panoramic View of Paris in French Impressionism
Published by Hannibal Books to coincide with the exhibition New Paris: From Monet to Morisot at the Kunstmuseum in the Hague until June 9
In 1867, Claude Monet painted three views of Paris from the balcony of the Louvre. He was turning his back on the great tradition shut away in the museum behind him and firing the opening shot of impressionism, associated with outdoor scenes, infused with light and shade.
It’s a school, often easy on the eye and so familiar we forget it was once radical.
The latest work from Hannibal Books sets the works of Monet, Manet, Renoir as well as less well-known names, in their historical context of violent change and transformation.
With authoritative text by specialists from leading museums, it vividly recreates the atmosphere of Paris in the second half of the 19th-century and is the perfect complement to the latest major exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in The Hague.
The museum is the proud owner of one of the three views, which the exhibition unites with the other two.
Such rapid-brushstroke depictions of Paris, together with those of Monet’s fellow impressionists, played a leading part in creating the myth of “the city of light”.
Emperor Napoleon III’s prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann had a still more central role: as the painters painted, he destroyed medieval, warren-like Paris at break-neck pace to make way for his uniform-height apartment blocks and wide streets. The cartoonists depicted him without affection as a busy beaver. We’re told he destroyed some 20,000 buildings, built 300,000 new homes, planted 80,000 trees and installed 500 kilometres of sewage pipes.
No one disputes Paris was overcrowded and many lived in squalor, but Haussmann’s razing of districts was above all to the benefit of the bourgeoisie. The contribution of the poor was mostly confined to the back-breaking work of construction. If there was a reward for them, it was a home among the cramped sixth-floor spaces in the mansard roofs above the spacious luxury of the floors below.
For the impressionists, the stereotype of the artist starving in a garret, we learn, is too simplistic.
They tended to have the backing of the wealthy families into which they were born, while their career choice sometimes exposed them to rough living conditions. In sum, they straddled classes. They sympathised with and had insights into the lives of the poor, but their patrons were the bourgeoisie whose world they glorified. When it came to the horrors of the Commune, even those impressionists with radical leanings were mostly nowhere to be seen.
Gustave Caillebotte, one of the youngest and richest of the impressionists, was able to afford an apartment accessed from the illustrious Boulevard Haussmann and his paintings take a lofty perspective on modern Paris. We look from a sixth-floor mansard far down to the diminutive passersby in the street below, or through the wrought iron of one of Haussmann’s elegantly crafted balconies.
Caillebotte also bucks the impressionist trend for sunlit scenes with his “Paris Street, Rainy Day”.
Despite the weather, the Parisians beneath the umbrellas are chic, as fashion emerges as another dominant theme for the impressionists, who captured not just the high-quality fabric of Haussmann’s buildings, but of their well-to-do inhabitants.
A section entitled “The Parisienne” explores the importance of “the figure piece” used to depict fashionable Parisians and all they stood for.
As consumerism took hold, portraits of the chic women of impressionist Paris were used to market fashionable finery.
Beyond any commercial purpose and the conventionally well-dressed, Edouard Manet’s “Woman with a Fan” pays homage to the “Black Venus”, as his friend the poet Baudelaire referred to Jeanne Duval, a mixed-race actress who was the muse and mistress considered to have inspired “Les Fleurs du Mal”.
Baudelaire in his novel “La Fanfarlo” had evoked Duval’s strong personality and how she “liked material that made some sound”.
Manet’s portrait depicts Duval in a shimmering crinoline that undoubtedly would have rustled had she been able to walk in it. It is so vast, it does not fit into the picture’s frame.
If Duval scandalised Paris’ chattering classes, other women fared still worse.
Edgar Degas’ “Nude Study for the Little Dancer” speaks of the appalling vulnerability of the “little rats”, or street urchins who became the child ballerinas in a desperate attempt to improve themselves. Most failed to do so and instead found themselves victims of sexual abuse and threatened with terrible violence.
The tensions between rich and poor erupted in the Commune when women were among those who paid the ultimate price, as we see in a photograph taken by André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri of them lying in cheap open coffins.
The photographer whose work is most prominent in this book is Charles Marville, who was commissioned by the city authorities to document Haussmann’s destruction of the old city and creation of the new.
He did so by pushing a cart through all the dusty demolition that carried his heavy glass plates and a portable darkroom as the plates had to be developed immediately. The results are crystal clear if somewhat empty as the long exposure time meant fast-moving vehicles did not register.
Monet more than made up for that with his “Le Pont de l’Europe” in which the new mode of fast, long-distance transport fills the scene.
To make his task easier, we learn, Monet persuaded the crew to slow down the trains or load extra coal to create more steam.
His highly atmospheric painting has the effect of celebrating modernism and creating the feeling the impressionists were inherently optimistic that change equated to progress.
As the book “Impressionist Paris” concludes, the movement was not political. It was also not neutral in that it delivered to its bourgeois audience the Paris it wanted to see. The horrors of war and the Commune were a bad dream ultimately brushed aside.
Barbara Lewis © 2025.
By Barbara Lewis • art, books, drawing, exhibitions, painting, print, year 2025 • Tags: art, Barbara Lewis, books, drawing, exhibitions, painting, print