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June 16, 2010
James H. Rubin Impressionism and the Modern Landscape: Productivity, Technology, and Urbanization from Manet to Van Gogh Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. 256 pp.; 24 color ills.; 125 b/w ills. Cloth $49.95 (9780520248014)
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What constitutes modernity? More to the point, what did modernity mean to the Impressionists? What concept of it did they admit or celebrate in their paintings? The usual and by now routine answers to these questions revolve around the subject of bourgeois recreation. Beginning with Meyer Schapiro’s essay “The Nature of Abstract Art” (Marxist Quarterly 1 [January–March 1937]: 77–98) and continuing a half-century later in the work of T. J. Clark (The Painting of Modern...