As I write this column, I'm about halfway through my month-long sojourn in France, where I'm leading a study abroad course for SUNY New Paltz, looking at the development of 19th-century plein air landscape painting by visiting the work in the amazing number of museums here, followed by trips out to some of the locations in which the paintings were made.
Of course, many things have changed over the past century or so, but what's really astounding is precisely how much history has been preserved here—both in the museums and in the locations themselves. The paths of people and events past wind together to create a dense matrix, like the thick crop of ivy that now covers the graves of Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo in Auvers. The very history of the places here is an inescapable dimension of experiencing them today.
Taking a picnic lunch in the Fontainebleau forest at Barbizon last week, it was amazing to see the same sort of trees, the same light, the same atmosphere that inspired Theodore Rousseau, Jean-Francois Millet, and the other painters who sought out this place in the 1830s and '40s. In fact, disturbed by new encroachments on the ancient forest (which had been kept for centuries, up to that point, as a hunting preserve for the French monarchy), Rousseau actually sent paintings by way of appeal to Louis-Philippe, then the French "citizen-king," to enact legislation protecting his beloved forest from short-sighted commercial exploitation. (It's been protected to this day as a result.)
The village of Barbizon is small and quaint, and a number of my students couldn't resist skipping along the cobblestone streets, singing songs from Disney's Beauty and the Beast, which must have based its vision of Belle's town on villages exactly like this. It's a world away from life in the States, where the inevitable grind of suburban sprawl, strip malls, and the impulse to make the way safe for cars everywhere has systematically uprooted so many old buildings and historic building techniques, the physical traces of history that would otherwise give us a sense of place, a different perspective from which to set out to understand the world.
The American attitude is perhaps best encapsulated in one of Oscar Wilde's bon mots, in which he characterized the cynic as the man "who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." How often (and how vociferously) have I heard arguments on behalf of short-sighted, absolutist property rights, whenever sensible sacrifices or accommodations for the public good are called for? And so we witness the decimation of local farms and rural countryside, as every square inch of land capable of being built on is given over to real estate speculation, dotting the countryside with countless bland McMansions, surrounded by ecologically unfriendly acres of lawn.
 A sign posted on the exterior of Claude Monet's house in Giverny. Photo by Beth E. Wilson. |
While there have been a number of changes here in France since the 19th century, where suburban leisure sites like Argenteuil have been swallowed up by mostly characterless block houses (erasing all trace of their allure for pleasure-seeking Parisians), a surprising amount of the historic flavor of the Impressionist locations has been preserved. It's not that the French abhor change—indeed, Paris (in Walter Benjamin's phrase "the capital of the 19th century") generated greater fundamental shifts in human history than just about any other place or time I can think of—but that they seem interested in finding ways to accommodate the past while building the new. In the 1850s and 1860s, when Baron Haussmann cut through the old Paris to create the broad boulevards that gave the city its new title as "the city of light," the memory of Old Paris was permitted to linger on in certain quarters. The closest equivalent I can think of for this sort of development in the States occurred when Robert Moses shredded old neighborhoods to create the trough of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, a hideous gash from which the Bronx has yet to recover.
Spending the last few weeks looking closely at the development of landscape painting in France during the 19th century, it has become starkly apparent to me how differently the Hudson River School painters responded to their environment. Building, of course, upon European pictorial traditions, Frederic Church, Asher Durand, and their brethren seemed mostly troubled by the impact of man upon the land, as was evident in the exhibition last spring at the Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz. Towns and settlements were depicted, but almost always from a distance, privileging a more pristine tract of land in the foreground, as though the painters almost regretted the incursion of Man on the wild, providential Nature of the American continent.
In France, it seems that people have lived on and in the land for so many centuries that the web of history weaves together both Nature and Culture, so the question of whether people might be present seems much less loaded. In fact, perhaps it was the very paucity of European presence in America that impressed and helped to form what ultimately became the American response to the "wilderness" encountered here, from the concept of Manifest Destiny to the closing of the frontier.
Things are certainly not perfect in Europe, either—the French lag far behind us in their dedication to recycling, for example, and despite the country's unity behind the "black, blanc, beure" multi-ethnic World Cup team, there remains a sad legacy of colonialist discrimination against the French of North African origin. But somehow, at the end of the day, it's the indelible, inexorable presence of history around every corner that leaves the most lasting memory of France for me.