During Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852 to 1870), Georges Haussmann renovated medieval Paris in... more During Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852 to 1870), Georges Haussmann renovated medieval Paris into a modern metropolis. This urban renewal, Haussmannization, impacted not only city infrastructure, but also the fine arts. Painters of the Impressionist movement (1870s and 1880s), embraced the art critic Charles Baudelaire’s idea of modernité by walking through the city to observe their ordinary surroundings, painting with loose brushstrokes to convey fleeting moments, and sometimes working en plein air to experiment with the effects of natural light throughout the day. The Salon rejected this new style of painting that did not conform to its standards, so the artists responded by establishing their own group Exhibitions. This group could not have flourished without its own member Gustave Caillebotte. His financial status enabled him to easily fund many of the Impressionist Exhibitions and to collect his friends’ paintings, both of which helped to stir a curiosity about the new art movement. This paper reveals how Caillebotte participated in, yet also set himself apart from the Impressionist movement. While Caillebotte included his own works in the Impressionist Exhibitions, his style does not completely align with typical Impressionist approaches: he celebrates Haussmannian architecture, which the older members avoided, because he was too young to know medieval Paris; he paints with calculated brushstrokes, a result of his Academic training at the École des Beaux-Arts; and he utilizes photography, a recent technological development, to capture exact details for his preparatory drawings. I propose a new way of looking at Caillebotte’s street scenes and suggest the recognition of sub-scenes within these works. Caillebotte uses a subtle compositional prop to vertically divide his paintings in half, a device that, in conjunction with the flaneur’s gaze, allows him to accommodate separate yet simultaneous depictions of the built environment and the motion of everyday human activity.
During Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852 to 1870), Georges Haussmann renovated medieval Paris in... more During Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852 to 1870), Georges Haussmann renovated medieval Paris into a modern metropolis. This urban renewal, Haussmannization, impacted not only city infrastructure, but also the fine arts. Painters of the Impressionist movement (1870s and 1880s), embraced the art critic Charles Baudelaire’s idea of modernité by walking through the city to observe their ordinary surroundings, painting with loose brushstrokes to convey fleeting moments, and sometimes working en plein air to experiment with the effects of natural light throughout the day. The Salon rejected this new style of painting that did not conform to its standards, so the artists responded by establishing their own group Exhibitions. This group could not have flourished without its own member Gustave Caillebotte. His financial status enabled him to easily fund many of the Impressionist Exhibitions and to collect his friends’ paintings, both of which helped to stir a curiosity about the new art movement. This paper reveals how Caillebotte participated in, yet also set himself apart from the Impressionist movement. While Caillebotte included his own works in the Impressionist Exhibitions, his style does not completely align with typical Impressionist approaches: he celebrates Haussmannian architecture, which the older members avoided, because he was too young to know medieval Paris; he paints with calculated brushstrokes, a result of his Academic training at the École des Beaux-Arts; and he utilizes photography, a recent technological development, to capture exact details for his preparatory drawings. I propose a new way of looking at Caillebotte’s street scenes and suggest the recognition of sub-scenes within these works. Caillebotte uses a subtle compositional prop to vertically divide his paintings in half, a device that, in conjunction with the flaneur’s gaze, allows him to accommodate separate yet simultaneous depictions of the built environment and the motion of everyday human activity.
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Vol. IV (2018 Essays) by Isabel Cabezas