| The Paris Commune can be identified not simply as a radical reorganization of the municipal government, but as a redefinition of the city itself. As one of the primary characteristics of the Commune, this radical political and ideological project set it apart from other historical events that had previously served as subject matter for ambitious paintings. By 1871, the status of history painting had already long been open to question. Artists who depicted the Commune therefore only occasionally employed the format of traditional history painting, and often modified it considerably when they did so. The majority of works followed different models. Moreover, paintings made up only a small portion of the visual material that treated Commune themes, the greater part consisting of works of graphic art. Prints appeared in a variety of different formats, from engravings in illustrated journals, to caricatures, to etchings intended for connoisseurs. Similarly, photographs of the city proliferated, recording certain moments of the Commune's existence and extensively cataloguing the damaged city after its fall. The nature of the visual record reflects the way in which such an historical event was depicted at this particular moment, when history painting seemed outdated, when prints and illustrated journals widely distributed pictures of contemporary events, and when photography was emerging as a competing recording medium.;Works in all the media frequently focused on Paris itself as the best visual manifestation of the effects of the Commune. The majority of the paintings are thus characterized by their various relations to the documentary sources that recorded the city's appearance during the spring. Some paintings resemble documents in their nearly uninflected, descriptiveness, while others that do not record evidence of the Commune directly instead thematize the process of observation of the city much as the documents themselves do. The focus of these works on the city and its destabilization, and the consequent transformation of Paris into a spectacle, characterizes many of the images of the Commune. The present study examines such images along with others that acknowledged the Commune's existence only ambiguously or indirectly, in order to determine their interrelations. |
