The Urban Landscape: Impressionism and the Modern City

The Urban Landscape: Impressionism and the Modern City

Date: 31 October 2013 (Thursday)
Time: 5:00-6:30pm
Venue: Room 7.58, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus

This lecture explores one of the specifically novel and modern contributions of Impressionism. Although views of cities were not unprecedented, Impressionism chose them for elements of modernity rather than nostalgia. In doing so, Impressionism made the urban landscape into a significant example of the “modern landscape art’ to which they had committed themselves. The paper will follow these developments, emphasizing the formative period of the 1860s and 1870s. Discussion will include the relationship between Impressionism and photography, urbanism, and the city as aesthetic object.

Speaker: James H. Rubin

Prof. Rubin is one of the most respected authorities on Impressionism and 19th-century French art in general. He has written 11 scholarly books, including works on Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, the photographer Nadar, and Impressionism, works which have helped shaped our current understanding of realism and the culture and modernity.