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To browse Academia. Vincent van Gogh moved to Paris in and for the first time saw the Impressionist canvases that depicted the rush of modern life. Drawing from their example, he painted subjects that signified Parisian urbanity, like boulevards, parks, and restaurants.
In the painting, Van Gogh explored uncharted pictorial territory by using compositional spatiality to emphasize the marginalization of the working class. While both painters critiqued urban consumerism and conveyed solidarity with the labor force, Van Gogh departed from Signac through his metaphorical use of spatial relationships, color, and brushwork to convey the discord between laborers and the industrialized landscape.
On my second pass through the Art Gallery of Ontario's excellent Impressionism in the Age of Industry: Monet, Pissarro and More, I overheard a visitor telling his companions, "generally speaking, [the exhibition] doesn't have the typical Impressionist paintings you see-you know, the very pretty ones. Indeed, as curator Caroline Shields noted, the goal of the AGO's exhibition and the accompanying catalogue, Impressionism in the Age of Industry was to shift the public's perception of Impressionism as "a movement chiefly concerned with sunny landscapes, bourgeois leisure, and recreation," to one that encouraged audiences to see the fundamentality of industry to the Impressionist project.
Shields, the AGO's Associate Curator and Head of European Art, conceived and organized the project in fourteen months, bringing together eighty-eight loans from domestic and international museums as well as private collections to complement thirty-two artworks from the AGO's own holdings.
