Illuminated Paris Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Poque

The City of Light. For many, these four words instantly conjure late nineteenth-century Paris and the garish colors of Toulouse-Lautrec's iconic posters. More recently, the Eiffel Tower's nightly show of sparkling electric lights has come to exemplify our fantasies of Parisian nightlife. Though we reflect longingly on such scenes, in Illuminated Paris, Hollis Clayson shows that there's more to these clichés than meets the eye. In this richly illustrated book, she traces the dramatic evolution of lighting in Paris and how artists responded to the shifting visual and cultural scenes that resulted from these technologies. While older gas lighting produced a haze of orange, new electric lighting was hardly an improvement: the glare of experimental arc lights--themselves dangerous--left figures looking pale and ghoulish. As Clayson shows, artists' representations of these new colors and shapes reveal turn-of-the-century concerns about modernization as electric lighting came to represent the harsh glare of rapidly accelerating social change. At the same time, in part thanks to American artists visiting the city, these works of art also produced our enduring romantic view of Parisian glamour and its Belle Époque.

About the author

Hollis Clayson is professor of art history and the Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University.

Product details

• Authors: Clayson Hollis, Hollis Clayson, Hollis S. Clayson
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
• Content: Book
• Product form: Hardback
• Publication date: 31.05.2019
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Art > Art history; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Technology > General, dictionaries
• EAN: 9780226593869
• ISBN: 978-0-226-59386-9
• Pages: 320
• Subjects: Paris, Glamour, Belle Epoque, Essays, Safety, Toulouse-Lautrec, art, Technology, France, Eiffel tower, HISTORY / Europe / France, ART / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945), TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / History, Pre-Raphaelite, engineering, Social Change, History of Art, Illustrated Book, Revolutions, uprisings, rebellions, Illustrations, anthology, History of engineering and technology, Modernization, History of engineering & technology, Essay collection, Posters, Art & Design Styles: Pre-Raphaelite Art, French Revolution, c 1790 to c 1799, French History, 19th Century, city of light, gas lighting, shifting visual scenes, new colors, romantic view, electric lights, parisian nightlife, artists representations