Stoddard Lecture: Sebastian Smee

Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic Sebastian Smee captures the shifting passions and politics of the art world in Paris in Ruins, revealing how the pressures of the siege and the chaos of the Commune profoundly impacted modern art, and how artistic genius can emerge from darkness and catastrophe.    

From Summer 1870–Spring 1871, famously dubbed the “Terrible Year” by Victor Hugo, Paris was besieged, starved, and forced into surrender. In stirring and exceptionally vivid prose, Smee tells the story of those dramatic days through the eyes of Impressionism’s greatest figures. In the aftermath, these artists’ newfound sense of the fragility of life, and their 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.    

Sebastian Smee is a Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic at the Washington Post and the author of The Art of Rivalry. Formerly the chief art critic at the Boston Globe and national art critic for the Australian, he has also written for the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Financial Times, and the Independent, among other publications. He lives in Boston. 

Photo credit: Amber Davis Tourlentes