In this essay, we will look at how artists portray city life, how they make the most common things in our lives becoming special and how they transform reality into art. Indeed, everyday, ordinary life often becomes special under their brushes. Some of them like Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec liked painting after shows instead of the show in itself, the most commune scene rather than the spectacle. Indeed, city life is what we experience every day and its portrayal could be assimilated with reality shows, nowadays: it aims at showing the most common things of our lives. Some of the pictures even disturb by showing aspects of city life, which people would have rather forget (like Degas' L'Absinthe or his Interior (The rape) ). In this essay, we are going to reflect on how painters portray city life, and what effects it has on the general public, looking at a group of works we saw in the Tate Britain's special exhibition dedicated at Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec. First, we will look at how they painted the city in itself, and then its activities, and, to finish, its people.
[...] French painters Tissot and Renoir also painted a lot of outdoor city scenes like London Visitors[12] (Tissot) showing tourists on the step of the National Gallery or Place Clichy[13] (Renoir, 1880), which represent a crowded streetscape of Paris. In painting the cities and their habitants, they showed totally different things that have never (or rarely) been shown before. That way, they attracted a new public. However, this portraiture of cityscapes was maybe more pessimistic than the countryside ones, showing even the worst sides of human lives. [...]
[...] As I said before, it allows the viewer to identify to the people painted in that these scenes are closer to the public than the catholic ones painted by Delacroix or Gericault before, but it has also a function of memory of this period, showing the current trends (for either fashion, occupations or arts). In a nutshell, the urban places represented in this group of work, show the industrialisation that took place during the impressionism period, but also a certain wish to change in the art world. [...]
[...] As a matter of fact, we could say that maybe the portrayal of everybody's everyday life, linked to city life great number of the population lived already in cities at these times), respond to a certain demand of the public to see something he feels involved in and in which he can recognise himself or his environment. We are now going to see which activities of the city were the most portrayed, according to this idea of showing what is close of the public and can talk to them. [...]
[...] Thus, according to Ruth Schenkel[4], Degas, like the impressionists, sought to capture fleeting moments in the flow of modern life and showed little interest in painting plein air landscapes, favouring scenes in theatres and cafés It was not obviously the most luxurious places of the city that were shown, but rather the places were ordinary people goes. For example, with L'Absinthe1, Degas portrays the seedier side of Parisians cafes life, with alcoholism and decadence, and the Moulin-Rouge was shown in multiple works like Charles Conder's The Moulin Rouge[5]. [...]
[...] To conclude on this topic, we could say that the portrayal of city life was a frequent topic for the impressionists and allow them to show the most common side of everyday life, as well for celebrities than for ordinary people. With this new subject, art is becoming closer of its public and respond to a real need of seeing something you know about and what you can identify to (like when we are in the cinema and we see a place we know about, it is always more interesting Bibliography Most of the pictures quoted in this essay have been seen in the Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition at Tate Britain, except from the Van Gogh one, which has been seen in the Courtauld Institute. [...]
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