The Modern City

When the Impressionists turned to the city they found a new subject: modern life itself, moving. Haussmann's rebuilt Paris, with its wide boulevards and gaslit cafés, offered crowds, weather, traffic and reflection — a world in flux that suited a style built on the fleeting. Caillebotte painted the rainy intersection with an almost photographic eye; Monet looked down on a boulevard swarming with tiny brushstroke figures; Pissarro returned again and again to the view from an upper window. Later the city turned nocturnal and electric, its wet pavements doubling the lights. The technical challenge is multiplicity — how to suggest a hundred figures, a hundred reflections, without painting each one. The answer was the loaded, abbreviated mark. Watch how a single dab becomes a passerby, a smear becomes a wet street. The modern city picture is about being one anonymous person in a crowd, seen from a distance, and the painters loved it precisely because it never holds still.

Curatorial note by Alexander Knigge, Editor, Artifact World Gallery