Pulitzer Prize–winner Sebastian Smee, art critic for the Washington Post, discusses his new book, Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism (Norton, 2024) with Matthew Teitelbaum, Ann and Graham Gund Director.

From the summer of 1870 to the spring of 1871, famously dubbed the “Terrible Year” by Victor Hugo, Paris and its people were besieged, starved, and forced into surrender by the Germans. It was then imperiled again as radical republicans established a breakaway commune, which was ultimately crushed by the French army after bloody street battles and the burning of central Paris. It was against the backdrop of these tumultuous times that the Impressionist movement was born.

In Paris in Ruins, Smee tells the story of those dramatic days through the eyes of great figures of Impressionism, including Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frederic Bazille, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro. At the heart of it all is a love story between Manet and Morisot, as Smee poignantly depicts their complex relationship, their tangled effect on each other, and their great legacy, all while bringing overdue attention to the woman at the heart of Impressionism.

In the aftermath of conflict, these artists all developed a newfound sense of the fragility of life. That feeling for transience―reflected in Impressionism’s emphasis on fugitive light, shifting seasons, glimpsed street scenes, and the impermanence of all things―became the movement’s great contribution to the history of art.