Illuminated Paris: Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Époque by Hollis Clayson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Illuminated Paris: Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Époque by Hollis Clayson Karen Quandt Clayson, Hollis. Illuminated Paris: Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Époque. UP of Chicago, 2019. ISBN 978-0-226-59386-9. Pp. 228. With bright and witty prose and a barrage of illuminating and alluring artworks, Clayson deftly matches the dazzle of her "electric" subject matter. This is no straightforward analysis of the representation of new forms of lighting in late nineteenth-century painting, caricatures, and graphic art. Instead, with an impressive trove of primary and secondary sources in the realms of art history, visual culture, and critical theory that grapple with technology and modes of seeing, Clayson establishes a "philosophical and visual matrix" (3) of what she terms an "illumination discourse" (3) that serves to coalesce an aesthetically and culturally diverse range of artists from the Parisian photographer Charles Marville, to the American expat John Singer Sargent, to popular French caricaturists, to the intaglio prints of Mary Cassatt, and even to the moody interiors of Edvard Munch. Throughout, Clayson convincingly demonstrates that her study serves as a necessary counterbalance to conventional studies of the Impressionist period, thereby dismantling "art history's century-and-ahalf romance with natural light" (11). In six probing chapters bookended with an introduction and conclusion, Clayson instead insists on navigating the tension between light and darkness in order to reveal (and revel in) an array of artists' reactions to Paris's multitude of light forms. By doing so, each of her chapters creates a tension between human subjects and artificial light, between artist and light source, between enchantment and disenchantment: gas lampposts become "sensate" (24) characters in Marville's photographs, or in Gustave Caillebotte's famous Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877); the moon in Sargent's depictions of the Luxembourg Gardens becomes alien in his eerie intersection of twilight, gas lights, and Jablochkoff candles; electric light alienates city dwellers and Salon-goers, and is lampooned as insalubrious and anti-art by critics and caricaturists; the seemingly muted or black-and-white prints of Degas and Cassatt paradoxically evoke artificial light in their surprising nuances, with Cassatt in particular evoking the disturbing effect of street lamps in seemingly intimate interiors; dissonances erupt as the American artists Maurice Prendergast, Childe Hassam, and Charles Courtney Curran jauntily countered the French sense of an electric dystopia with idealistic Paris "nocturns." Edvard Munch perhaps most of all serves as a key harbinger of modernity in his collapse of interior and exterior, as the transparency of windows in his canvases stand in uneasy relationship to the opaqueness of doors. The rich plurality of perspectives and ideas prompted by these tensions and paradoxes leads Clayson to omit obvious examples, such as Toulouse-Lautrec, due to her conclusion that the embrace of the electric "discouraged subtlety and complexity" (178). A handsomely illustrated page-turner, Illuminated Paris is a sophisticated yet accessible volume that will appeal to a broad range of art history and French studies scholars, from undergraduates to specialists. Though the chapter on comic art might well have been reserved for a study unto itself (it seemed a bit [End Page 244] cumbersome in comparison to Clayson's eloquent expositions of paintings and prints), it is a true pleasure to indulge in this ray of darkness. Karen Quandt Wabash College (IN) Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French