Hollis Clayson

"Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century?" The question that guides this volume stems from Walter Benjamin's studies of nineteenth-century Parisian culture as the apex of capitalist aesthetics. Thirteen scholars test Benjamin's ideas about the centrality of Paris, formulated in the 1930s, from a variety of methodological perspectives. Many investigate the underpinnings of the French capital's reputation and mythic force, which was based largely upon the city's capacity to put itself on display. Some of the authors reassess the famed centrality of Paris from the vantage point of our globalized twenty-first century by acknowledging its entanglements with South Africa, Turkey, Japan, and the United States. The volume equally studies a broader range of media than Benjamin did himself: from modernist painting and printmaking, photography, and illustration to urban planning. The essays conclude that Paris did in many ways function as the epicenter of modernity's international reach, especially in the years from 1850 to 1900, but did so only as a consequence of the idiosyncratic force of its mythic image. Above all, the essays affirm that the study of late nineteenth-century Paris still requires nimble and innovative approaches commensurate with its legend and global aura.

"Essays on Art and Modernity, 1850-1900 "

Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century?

Clayson focuses especially on Rosa Bonheur, Edgar Degas, Jean-Alexandre-Joseph Falguiere, Edouard Manet, and Henri Regnault, but she also covers a host of other artists, including Louis-Ernest Barrias, Gustave Courbet, Edouard Detaille, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Albert Robida, and James Tissot. Paris in Despair includes more than two hundred color and black-and-white images of works by these artists and others, many never before published.".

Art and Everyday Life Under Siege (1870-71)

Paris in Despair

Presents examples of how artists, such as Cezanne, Degas, Manet, and Renoir, perceived prostitutes in nineteenth-century France

Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era

Painted Love

Nicholas Penny

National Gallery of Art (U.S.)

Peter W. Parshall

Hammer Museum

David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art

Christiane Hertel

For many today, the art of the late nineteenth century is equated with impressionism and post-impressionism. This book with its insightful essays and remarkable works of art presents us with an alternative account of the period. For collectors the experience of prints, drawings, and small sculptures was often a private affair, like taking a book down from the shelf for quiet enjoyment. Prints and drawings were kept aside, compiled in albums and portfolios, while medals and bronzes were often placed in the seclusion of the library. In short, such works of art were not typically a part of one's day-to-day environment in the manner of a framed object hung on a wall. Rather, they were subject to purposeful study on chosen occasions. From the beginning this element of discreteness allowed for degrees of experiment, leading artists to some times recherche, sometimes enigmatic, and often melancholy subjects that indulged the solitary circumstances of their reception. By explicating a range of highly engaging, often mysterious and beautiful objects, The Darker Side of Light evokes the shadowed interiors and private introspections that compose a far less familiar history of late nineteenth century art.

Arts of Privacy, 1850-1900

The Darker Side of Light

The City of Light. For many, these four words instantly conjure late nineteenth-century Paris and the garish colors of Toulouse-Lautrec's iconic posters. More recently, the Eiffel Tower's nightly show of sparkling electric lights has come to exemplify our fantasies of Parisian nightlife. Though we reflect longingly on such scenes, in Illuminated Paris, Hollis Clayson shows that there's more to these clichés than meets the eye. In this richly illustrated book, she traces the dramatic evolution of lighting in Paris and how artists responded to the shifting visual and cultural scenes that resulted from these technologies. While older gas lighting produced a haze of orange, new electric lighting was hardly an improvement: the glare of experimental arc lights--themselves dangerous--left figures looking pale and ghoulish. As Clayson shows, artists' representations of these new colors and shapes reveal turn-of-the-century concerns about modernization as electric lighting came to represent the harsh glare of rapidly accelerating social change. At the same time, in part thanks to American artists visiting the city, these works of art also produced our enduring romantic view of Parisian glamour and its Belle Époque.

Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Époque

Illuminated Paris

In this engrossing book, Hollis Clayson provides the first description and analysis of French artistic interest in women prostitutes, examining how the subject was treated in the art of the 1870s and 1880s by such avant-garde painters as Cézanne, Degas, Manet, and Renoir, as well as by the academic and low-brow painters who were their contemporaries. Clayson not only illuminates the imagery of prostitution-with its contradictory connotations of disgust and fascination-but also tackles the issues and problems relevant to women and men in a patriarchal society. She discusses the conspicuous sexual commerce during this era and the resulting public panic about the deterioration of social life and civilized mores. She describes the system that evolved out of regulating prostitutes and the subsequent rise of clandestine prostitutes who escaped police regulation and who were condemned both for blurring social boundaries and for spreading sexual licentiousness among their moral and social superiors. Clayson argues that the subject of covert prostitution was especially attractive to vanguard painters because it exemplified the commercialization and the ambiguity of modern life.

Hollis Clayson

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