An unusual exhibition is just starting in Essen’s Museum Folkwang, during the last three months of the German city’s year as European Cultural Capital. It takes as its brief “Paris during the last two decades of the nineteenth century”, a period when the French capital had become the focus of numerous artists and photographers.
 
This is a unique occasion, for it enables visitors to see some of the city’s major landmarks at a time when they were novelties: the Haussman boulevards, the Gare St Lazare, railway bridges, the Paris metro, the Sacré Coeur and to compare the differing treatment of the same subjects by artists and photographers.
 
As well as over 80 Impressionist canvasses (Manet, Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Caillebotte, and the lesser seen Luce and Goeneutte), the exhibition is presenting 120 photographs by, among others, Gustave le Gray, Edouard Baldus, Charles Marville, Louis-Emile Durandelle and Henri Rivière.
 
Paintings are on loan from the Musée d’Orsay’s closed floors as well as from private collections and museums the world over. The photograph display is organised by Françoise Reynaud, photography curator at the Musée Carnavalet, from where many of the photographs are on loan.
 
With the exception of Pissarro, the industrialisation of Paris was of marginal interest to the impressionists. For photographers on the other hand, the upheaval in the city centre and the extensive industrial transformations in the suburbs offered endless opportunities. The exhibition, which concentrates around different areas of Paris such as Montmartre and St Lazare Station, aims to give visitors the impression of wandering through Paris at the time.
 
“Images of a Capital - The Impressionists in Paris”, starting October 2, continues until January 30 2011.
 
Jacqueline Karp