Promenades of an Impressionist

Huneker was the American who brought European modernism to jaded Manhattan, and this book crackles with the electricity of that first encounter. Written in the final years of the nineteenth century, it documents an artist-critic's wanderings through the Paris art world at the moment Impressionism ceased to be scandal and became canon. The prose here is not mere description; it is advocacy, provocation, and aesthetic confession rolled into one. Huneker begins at the Paris Autumn Salon, where Paul Cézanne's work stands as a gaunt thrown at the feet of the Academy, and expands outward to examine the radicals who preceded and enabled him: Rops's demonic engravings, Monticelli's opulent decay, Rodin's hands that seem to think aloud. This is criticism as performance, each essay a small act of rebellion against the philistines who couldn't see what Huneker saw: that art was not decoration but declaration. For readers who want to understand how modernism actually felt to those living inside it, these pages offer something rare: the thrill of witnessing the old gods fall.