Maximilien Luce's A Paris Street in 1871 (Fig. 1), exhibited for the first time at the 1905 Salon des Indépendants, has long struck me as strange. Strange because it depicts a historical moment that even in 1905 must already have seemed distant: that of the Paris Commune. Strange, too, because in depicting such an openly political subject, A Paris Street harks back to a tradition of engaged art (and, more broadly, to a set of assumptions about how painting might be politically effective) that must itself already have seemed out of date: like the Commune, a ghost from the past. Although anarchist affiliations were still the norm among the movement's most famous adherents, these ties were no longer often signalled so directly in their painting, which increasingly gravitated towards rather tamer subjects than the still volatile memory of the Commune – the sunlit southern landscapes favoured by Paul Signac, for example – and towards a pictorial experimentation far removed from Luce's dourly representational image. Matisse's Luxe, calme et volupté hung just around the corner from Luce's canvas at the Indépendants, and even in 1905 it was clear which way the art-historical wind was blowing.1
Fig. 1.
Maximilien Luce, A Paris Street in 1871, 1905, oil on canvas. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. (Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Hervé Lewandowski.) © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009
It would be easy to conclude that Luce simply missed the (modernist) boat, that A Paris Street is the sign of nothing more than an artist unable to keep pace with his more adventurous – and, it should be noted, more commercially successful – colleagues. I suspect, though, that Luce was well aware that what he did here was out of time (in every sense), that his painting was deliberately retrospective (even belated), and this with three …
