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  • (piano music)

  • Voiceover: I think to us in the early 21st century,

  • this painting looks like quaint old Paris.

  • Voiceover: It does.

  • We see a horse and carriage.

  • We see a woman wearing a long Victorian dress

  • with a bow on the back and a pretty hat,

  • strolling with her two children.

  • It really does look like a very quaint scene.

  • Voiceover: But to Renoir, and to the people depicted on this boulevard,

  • this would have been incredibly modern.

  • This was a brand new boulevard that rebuilt Paris.

  • This was a new world.

  • Voiceover: This was as modern and as contemporary as you could get in the 1870s.

  • Voiceover: And it's modern not only in terms of what it's depicting,

  • but it's modern in terms of how it's depicted.

  • This painting was made only one year after the first Impressionist Exhibition.

  • That term, "impressionism," had just been coined.

  • The idea of representing the city in a series of fleeting brush strokes

  • that seem to catch the moment was a radically new idea.

  • Voiceover: And Renoir was one of a group of artists who are doing this

  • who became known as "The Impressionists,"

  • who had, as you said, their first exhibition the year before,

  • so we might think about Monet or Camille Pissarro and Degas,

  • all of them painting different aspects of

  • this new sense of modern life in Paris.

  • Paris was, at this moment, being rebuilt from an old city

  • with narrow winding streets to a city of wide boulevards flooded with light,

  • a planned city lined with shops and cafes and trees,

  • the city of Paris that we know and love today.

  • Voiceover: It was to be the new Imperial City under Napoleon III,

  • and it wasn't just the architecture or the city planning that was being rebuilt.

  • In a sense, French culture was being rebuilt.

  • It was just five years earlier that France had been humiliated

  • in their defeat against the Germans, in the Franco-Prussian War.

  • Here, we have a rebirth of a modern optimism.

  • But none of that politics is apparent.

  • Voiceover: Renoir is interested in giving us a cross-section of what we might see

  • if we walked outside onto the boulevards in Paris.

  • On the left, we have a figure sitting alone on a bench, reading a newspaper.

  • Just to the right, we have two men who are talking who look rather well-dressed,

  • maybe businessmen.

  • Then just to the right of that, that small family led by a mother,

  • and then some figures in a carriage coming our way.

  • Voiceover: The city was a place to view,

  • and one could be a dispassionate onlooker, a flaneur.

  • Voiceover: You said before that the form of the painting

  • was also radically modern,

  • and I think that's also hard for us to understand

  • because to us, it looks quite normal,

  • and we love impressionist paintings like this,

  • but the sketchiness that we see here is radical.

  • Renoir has reduced these trees to big broad brushstrokes

  • in some areas that sweep across and also little dabs of paint in ...

  • Voiceover: He's not rendering the type of tree that's represented here.

  • We might guess that it might be a London plane tree perhaps,

  • but we don't know precisely what it is.

  • This is not about conveying the specifics of any individual form;

  • rather, representing the momentary.

  • That notion of the momentary, of the fragmentary

  • is such a modern and urban idea.

  • It's really perfect for the scene.

  • Voiceover: In representing the fleeting

  • but also representing an optical experience.

  • What does this look like to my eye at this moment?

  • Not what I know about a tree

  • but how I actually perceive and experience that tree

  • with the light coming through it on a bright summer day.

  • Voiceover: And he's remarkably successful in doing this.

  • Look at the carriage, for instance,

  • with the white horse and the driver and then the couple on the back.

  • It's only the barest notations,

  • and yet it feels as if that horse is moving forward towards us,

  • and we can almost hear its hoof-falls.

  • This becomes an environment that is filled with light motion

  • and filled with sound.

  • Voiceover: We talked about this painting

  • as being this remarkably new and modern image

  • in both its form and its content.

  • But in some ways, Renoir is also stepping back just a little bit.

  • He's giving us some clues about a recession at the space.

  • We have a diagonal line that appears to recede into the background,

  • much like a traditional orthogonal going from the bottom right

  • and moving back up toward the left.

  • Voiceover: And especially at the top of the apartment houses

  • and the top of the trees.

  • Voiceover: Exactly.

  • But we fail to really calculate a measurable distance into space,

  • and that was something that was required of paintings in the 19th century.

  • He is also not quite dissolving the form of the human body

  • as much as, for example, Monet is from exactly this time.

  • Like the "Boulevard des Capucines," for example,

  • the figures are really reduced to just a short few strokes of paint,

  • and you can't see fashion.

  • You can't see gesture.

  • Very characteristic of Renoir is this interest in human beings

  • and their social lives.

  • We're still getting a sense of family groups,

  • of people talking to one another,

  • of sociability.

  • Voiceover: This was a city inhabited,

  • and Renoir has created that social dynamic

  • that populated this new urban experience.

  • Voiceover: Right, but where other artists are interested in depicting

  • the sense of alienation or aloneness of that experience in the city

  • that was really different from the small-knit communities

  • that had made up Paris before that,

  • Renoir is showing us this more optimistic side of modern life.

  • (piano music)

(piano music)

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