Philip Nord Lectures

Last week we were privileged to hear from Dr. Philip Nord, who came all the way from Princeton (where he is the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History) to give two lectures about French politics. On Thursday he gave a fantastic lecture called Paris Politics and Impressionism. Now, I've been a huge fan of Claude Monet and his colleagues since I was a little girl, but I had never thought about the Impressionist painters in the context of the dramatic politics of their time.

Dr. Nord started his lecture by setting the political scene: Paris between 1850 and 1900 was a hotbed of revolution, political innovation, and physical transformation. During this period of only 50 years the nation went through three different governments, with often violent transitions. Meanwhile Baron Haussman transformed Paris, giving the city the grands boulevards and 19th century façades for which it famous today. The railroad came into town, prompting the construction of the Gare de l'Est, Gare du Nord, and of course the Gare d'Orsay which now houses many Impressionist paintings.

Monet, Manet, Renoir, and the others were not immune to or aloof from these influences and Dr. Nord's lecture prompted his listeners to stop thinking of these painters with flowery muses in Giverny or Montmartre, and to be conscious of the political environment they lived with. These painters not only saw what was happening around them, they took sides and that can be seen in their paintings. Take Monet's "La Rue Montorgueil" for example; this work clearly lauds the birth of the Third Republic and celebrates a promising future. In fact most of the Impressionists welcomed the Third Republic and the freedoms it brought after the Second Empire.



Not everything was a as happy as la Rue Montorgueil draped in the tricolore. 1894 brought the Dreyfus affair which would remain a divisive issue in France for decades. Antisemitism and xenophobia raged. Emile Zola wrote his famous "J'accuse", leading the Dreyfusards opposing the wrongful conviction of Alfred Dreyfus. Claude Monet and Mary Cassatt supported the Dreyfusards, but Degas and Renoir were vehemently antisemitic. The unity they once enjoyed was now gone.

Dr. Nord closed his lecture one last example of politics in painting. Renoir was commissioned to paint this portrait of the daughters of Louis Raphael Cahen d’Anvers in 1881. Alice, on the left lived until the 1960s, but her sister, Elizabeth died en route to Auschwitz. This sobering fact reminds us that the artwork of this time period was by no means separate from the politics and events of the time.



(On Friday Dr. Nord spoke about France's New Deal, a subject taken from his new book of the same title. This book as well as several others he has authored can be checked out from the HBLL here.)