The View from Notre-Dame

This article is about Haussmann’s effort to rebuild Paris with his ideals
about unity.  In this article, Clark presents us when painters began to
create works that had a realistic view of Paris as the city people began
to want to have more realistic information about everything. Social life
and the city were presented as a unity. In the later nineteenth century,
it began to be presented as a unified community separated by class
divisions.  The images represented a pattern of class conflict because the
city was segregated along class lines. The arrangements in the paintings
were first economic “but on them had depended notions of social place and
personal identity, and ways of dealing with the detail of everyday life.”

One way to describe Haussmannization is to use paintings of the edge of
Paris as an example. Painters chose subjects like this because they
believed it to be modern and poetical. They believed that these sorts of
places may reveal secrets of the city. Also the land between the town and
country portray in a way what it means to be bourgeois (middle class). To
view this part of Paris’ geography in this way is very poetical in my
opinion. This region is an in-between, just as the bourgeois are. This was
an example of the way that the art represented the way society was like at
the time.

The pictures of Paris had details of the region (topographic) as well as
social points of reference. The people learned a lot about the reality of
their society through these art works.

Because I don’t have an art history background, this article was
challenging, but worthwhile to read. I wonder though, how society dealt
with the uncertainty in the modern artworks. I really admire Haussmann’s
attempt to change Paris and bringing moderniality to the times.