The Painting of Modern Life Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers [Paperback]

The Paris of the 1860s and 1870s was supposedly a brand-new city, equipped with boulevards, caf?s, parks, and suburban pleasure grounds--the birthplace of those habits of commerce and leisure that constitute modern life. Questioning those who view Impressionism solely in terms of artistic technique, T. J. Clark describes the painting of Manet, Degas, Seurat, and others as an attempt to give form to that modernity and seek out its typical representatives--be they bar-maids, boaters, prostitutes, sightseers, orpetits bourgeoislunching on the grass. The central question ofThe Painting of Modern Lifeis this: did modern painting as it came into being celebrate the consumer-oriented culture of the Paris of Napoleon III, or open it to critical scrutiny? The revised edition of this classic book includes a new preface by the author.

T. J. Clarkis Chancellor's Professor of Modern Art at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author ofImage of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution,The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851,andFarewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. The Painting of Modern Lifeis a very good and very beautiful book. It deserves the closest critical attention.... It is a book that will stir up passion and controversy. ---David Harvey,Journal of Historical Geography That he restores a social and historical context to the work he discusses--from Manet'sMusique aux Tuileriesto Seurat'sGrande Jatte--is not what is most original about Clark's book, elegant and telling as his delineation generally is.... What really lifts the book into a category of its own is the manner in which the assimilation of contextual detail and the observation of pictorial detail are worked together into an argument. ---Charles Harrison,Art Monthly Mr. Clark ... writes with considerable verve; his interpretations of individual painl#>