1887 -1935 · Notre-Dame, Commune, boulevards and modern construction sites

Luce paints Paris from the street and the quay: monuments, workers, crowds and electric nights make up a capital crossed by work, political memory and light.

Maximilien Luce was born in Paris in 1858 into a family of artisans and first learned wood engraving. This origin nourishes his attention to trades, working-class neighborhoods and the material transformations of the capital. Introduced by Camille Pissarro into the neo-impressionist circle in 1887, he applies colors separately to capture the atmosphere, sunsets and new urban lighting. Notre-Dame de Paris and the Quai Saint-Michel series combine warm monuments, blue shadows, second-hand booksellers, omnibuses and passers-by. Montmartre seen from rue Cortot opens the city towards the industrial plain. A street in Paris in May 1871 looks back on the repression of the Commune, experienced in his childhood: bodies in the street give political memory a gravity without heroization. The quays, the Pont-Neuf, Saint-Gervais and the nocturnal boulevards extend this Paris to modern traffic. Luce also paints the construction of rue Réaumur and the late Haussmann construction sites, attentive to the workers who built the city. His anarchist commitment led him to be arrested during the villainous laws of 1894; he responded with lithographs on Mazas prison. After 1897, his touch widened, but the social intensity remained. Paris appears as a living, luminous and conflicting organism. The selection "Paris by Maximilien Luce" notably compares Notre-Dame de Paris and Montmartre, from rue Cortot. View towards Saint-Denis. His reading favors space.

Luce's Paris can be read in its stones and its men: cathedral, pavement, construction site and boulevard together carry the memory of the capital.