Impressionism and the Modern Landscape

This book offers a major reevaluation of one of art history's most popular and important art movements. InImpressionism and the Modern Landscape,James Rubin shifts the focus from familiar scenes of pleasure-the beautiful countryside, people at leisure-to a landscape changing as the result of productivity, technology, and urbanization and demonstrates not only that the industrial and demographic revolutions of the nineteenth century had a profound impact on art, but also that impressionism was the first art historical movement to embrace such changes. Looking principally at Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Armand Guillaumin, and Gustave Caillebotte, but also discussing pictures by Paul Ceacute;zanne, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, and Vincent Van Gogh, Rubin has selected and arranged works in four categories: industrial waterways, trains, factories, and photographic viewpoints in the modern city. The examples convey not only these major themes but also the painters' belief in the progress of civilization through science and industry. The book thus expands the scope of impressionist celebrations of modernity to include what might be called "impressionism's other landscape" and proposes that in the impressionists' effort to forge a modern landscape art, those signs of modernity defined their vision most clearly.

James H. Rubin is Professor of Art History at Stony Brook, the State University of New York, and Adjunct Professor of Art History at the Cooper Union.