Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life Under Siege (1870-71)

Abstract

The siege of Paris by Prussians in the fall and winter of 1870 and 1871 turned the city upside down, radically altering its appearance, social structure, and mood. As Hollis Clayson demonstrates in Paris in Despair, the siege took a heavy toll on the city's artists, forcing them out of the spaces and routines of their insular prewar lives and often thrusting them onto the ramparts. But the crisis did not halt artistic production, as some have suggested. In fact, Clayson argues that the siege actually encouraged innovation, fostering changed attitudes and new approaches to representation among a wide variety of artists as they made art out of their individual experiences of adversity and change - art that has not previously been considered within the context of the siege. Using the visual arts as an interpretive lens, Clayson illuminates the wide range of issues at play during the siege and thereafter. For anyone concerned with life or art in nineteenth-century France, Paris in Despair will be a landmark work.

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