This course is about how late 19th-century French painters imaged their city between 1860 and 1900. During this period Paris was reconstructed by Haussman. With the advent of the boulevards and department stores along with phenomenon of café concert entertainment, the city became a paradigm of modernity, which was set to become not only a tourist attraction but also the art capital of Europe. The aims of this course are to discuss how, in the light of these new developments, the city becomes subject matter for Manet, Degas and their contemporaries, and to analyse how these artists - as described by Baudelaire in his seminal essay on the subject – are regarded as the painters of modern life.
To this end, we will also examine the correlation between the artist and the flâneur as objective observers of city life and society, on the new boulevards, which provided new subject matter. This included café society and the high life of the bourgeoisie, through the urban entertainment of the opera, the ballet, the circus and the upmarket café concert. Paradoxically, low life characters also frequented the city streets and are represented through images of laundresses, prostitutes, absinthe drinkers and rag pickers. With the advancement of travel through the railways and the opportunity to escape the city to Argenteuil, Asnières and Bougival, leisure became a new concept, and significant aspect of Parisian life associated with all social strata.
The artists under discussion form a new avant-garde: challenging formal traditional artistic practice as upheld by the Salon and employing innovative techniques with particular regard to composition, perspective and colour. Traditional subject matter (the nude, the portrait and the genre scene) is reinterpreted to produce images of contemporary life that provide us with detailed social documentation of an intriguing period of cultural, social and political change in France.
This was also a period of technological advancement, particularly with regard to photography, and the impact of this new technology on the art world was far-reaching. Both Degas and Caillebotte used photographs as initial references for many of their subjects to produce an impression of the immediacy and intransigence of modern life.
