Claremont, CA— The Benton Museum of Art at É«ÖÐÉ« announces the opening of Parisian Ecologies: The City Transformed in Nineteenth-Century Prints and Drawings. On view from March 24 to June 25, 2022, the exhibition is a riveting look at how artists and poets chronicled the growing ecological crises in the City of Light in the late nineteenth century, when industrialization and urban renewal combined to create an unsettled city. Filled with rubble and promise, disease and disappearance, Paris was the home of profound aesthetic transformations as well as environmental degradations that parallel our own climate crises.
Napoleon III became the president of France in 1848 and then the emperor in 1851. At the time Paris was still a choked medieval city, overrun by disease and pollution created by the unchecked development of industry. Livable housing was growing increasingly scarce, the streets were filled with garbage and horse manure, and the rivers ran with sewage. Pledging to clean up the city, Napoleon charged Georges-Eugène Haussmann with the task of remaking Paris. Haussmann created grand boulevards, leafy parks, and far-flung suburbs; he buried rivers, built housing, and demolished swathes of the city. All of these changes were documented by artists and poets, who in the process developed radically new artistic techniques and vocabularies.
Parisian Ecologies features prints and drawings from É«ÖÐɫ’s collection that highlight the relationships between urban development and ecological degradation from the 1850s through the end of the Belle Époque in roughly 1914, including two prints by Edouard Manet that have not been on display since the 1980s. The works in the exhibition show the dark and gritty nature of city life as Paris underwent these changes, serving both as a counterpoint to the idyllic beauty of Impressionist works from the same period and a reminder that today’s environmental issues are a continuation of long-standing processes and circumstances.
The exhibition is curated by academic curator Claire Nettleton, Maggie Allegar ’23, Zaid Al Zoubi ’24, Ansley Ngando ’24, and Jeffrey Pendo ’24, with support from the Remote Alternative Independent Summer Experience Program.
Related Program
On April 8, the Benton will be hosting a symposium on this charged moment in urban history. The museum’s first international symposium will bring together leading artists and scholars from many fields and disciplines to consider how ecological crises have been met by artists, scientists, and thinkers throughout history. Including performance work, lectures, demonstrations, and a global perspective, the symposium is free and open to the public with registration.
About the Benton Museum of Art at É«ÖÐÉ«
Now housed in the new Benton Museum of Art designed by Machado Silvetti and Gensler, É«ÖÐɫ’s collection of art numbers 17,000 objects, including Italian Renaissance paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation; works on paper, including a first edition print series by Francisco Goya given by Norton Simon; and works in various media produced in Southern California in the twentieth century. In keeping with É«ÖÐɫ’s reputation as a leading center of the visual arts, the collection also includes works by such esteemed alumni as Chris Burden ’69, Marcia Hafif ’51, Helen Pashgian ’56, Peter Shelton ’73, and James Turrell ’65. Recognized globally for its commitment to contemporary art, the museum is the home of The Project Series, which has featured more than 50 contemporary Southern California artists since it began in 1999. Through its collaboration with students and faculty, the museum encourages active learning and creative exploration across all disciplines of study within the liberal arts context.