Digitally Visualizing Destruction

The following sections use a digital mapping platform to analyze the ways in which this group of artists rendered sites associated with this recent history of death, destruction, and despair. Due to the large number of paintings, events, and significant geographical sites analyzed in this project, this research is presented using three separate maps. By plotting all 45 artworks and 18 locations on the first map, one is forced to confront the jarring extent to which these events impacted this group of artists. Because this capstone examines the impact of both the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, analyses are further divided on to two separate maps that visualize the destruction caused by each. The second map solely focuses on the paintings that depict locations impacted by the Franco-Prussian War, while the third map explores the sites impacted by the Paris Commune and corresponding works. Each painting is plotted by location with some locations having larger groups of works than others. 

The analyses that accompany the paintings plotted on these maps first introduce the viewer to the political turmoil that occurred at that site before exploring the relationship of place to the depicted imagery. The works and analyses on all three maps are accessible by clicking on the painting itself directly from the map, or one can scroll through by clicking on the arrow at the right of the screen to view the works and analyses one by one. In addition to the visualization of this research, these maps enable the study of not only a particular painting and its depicted location, but as one moves from place to place, these maps trace those distances, urging one to further examine the relationships among and between the works and places. By visualizing this connection, these maps offer a new way of studying and understanding Impressionism.

Alphonse Liébert, Les Ruines de Paris et de ses Environs, 1870-1871. Albumen silver prints from glass negatives, 19 x 25 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.

J. Andrieu, Désastres de la guerre: Palais de St-Cloud, vue générale, 1871. Ottawa, National Gallery of Art

Ignacio Léon y Escosura, Les Tuileries: Pavillion de Marsan, albumen silver print after a painting, 1871, from La Guerre et la Commune, plate 29. Montreal, Centre Canadien d’Architecture.