A simple roll call of the people involved in and/or affected by the siege of Paris in 1870-71 indicates just how pivotal that period of history was. Artists: Manet, Morisot, Degas, Renoir, Monet and Pissarro; and writers: Hugo, Zola and Flaubert. Smee examines Paris’s ‘Terrible Year’ through the lens of art history in an admittedly dense, but compelling narrative. In that period, art changed dramatically, and this book revolves around Édouard Manet and the woman whose role in the birth of Impressionism has been minimised, Berthe Morisot.

In the second half of the 19th century, Western Europe was geopolitically unstable. Attempting to assert his power, Napolean III goaded Prussia into war. The French army, however, was abysmally underprepared. Paris was soon under siege and unrecognisable. Little painting was done during the siege, as many artists became soldiers. Not all survived. In Paris, the lower classes were starving and cold. An uprising of radical republicans (Communards), eager for better égalité, was put down by the French army. The siege ended humiliatingly for the French, but afterwards an art movement in its infancy blossomed.

Manet’s art is described as ‘probing, poetic, allergic to cliché, and open to experiment’. It is this experimentation that marked the change from over-finished art, with its invisible brushstrokes, to Impressionism. At its most powerful, art holds both a mirror and a blowtorch to society. Smee does both here, with plentiful and varied sources and a narrative which showcases his talent.

Reviewed by Bob Moore

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sebastian Smee is a Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic at The Washington Post and the author of The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals and Breakthroughs in Modern Art. He worked at the Boston Globe from 2008 to 2016, teaches at Wellesley College, and has previously worked in London and Sydney for the Daily Telegraph (U.K.), the Guardian, the Spectator, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian and the Monthly.