Impressionism and Urban Renewal

In 1859, Baron George-Eugene Haussmann, Prefect of the Seine, began overhauling Paris. The ultimate result was a masterpiece of urban rationality – straight streets, buildings of the same height, squares, a mappable city.

On the way to clarity, though, the city was “rendered illegible,” according to art historian T. J. Clark. He adds that Paris was depicted in the media as “parade, phantasmagoria, dream, dumbshow, mirage, masquerade. Traditional ironies at the expense of the metropolis mingled with new metaphors of specifically visual untruth. They were intended to stress the sheer ostentation and flimsiness of the new streets and apartment blocks, and beyond that to indicate the more and more intrusive machinery of illusion built into the city and determining its use.”

Margin Jay suggests that this urban reconstruction “was soon registered in the Impressionist demolition of three-dimensional space.”