Museum Art Review

"Rue Ravignan"- Maximilien Luce

     On my trip through the museum, the painting that interested me the most was "Rue Ravignan, Paris" by Maximilien Luce. He made the painting in 1893 and he used oil paint on a canvas that was 21" across. He was known as a neo-impressionist artist and use the style of pointillism in most of his paintings, which was making a whole painting out of a series of dots. His painting stood out to me the most because neo-impressionists usually painted cheerful, urban scenarios, but this was not the case in his painting. He still chooses an urban setting and uses the pointillist style like his counter parts, but the difference is that he turns the elegant, beautiful street of Rue Ravignan and turns it into a dreadful place full loneliness and sorrow. Somehow he still manages to keep some of the vibrant colors that you would see in a normal painting of this type however. Under close observation, you see series of dark reds and blues that make up the silhouettes and also yellows and turquoises to make up the small lit up areas down the street. They seem to mark the different aspects of the painting because when looking at the painting a little farther away, all the colors blend together and show the distance of the buildings from each other and also the intensity of the lamps down the sidewalk. He also seems to use one implicit point of perspective for this painting, you may notice as you follow the rooftops and street lamps that they all meet up at the last street lamp on the street. Also at that point it seems that everything is being sucked in by the darkness and the lamps lights, the working class,  are struggling to keep the darkness, the aristocrats, from taking over this once joyful scene. The overall seen here is very abstract because many who have been on this street know that the seen he is depicting is not very accurate for this place. Many of them would describe the scene as beautiful and luxurious. During Luce's life, however, he was known as an anarchist and so the message I believe he is trying to show here is his hatred for the mix of beauty achieved by the wealthy aristocrats present on the street of Rue Ravignan and showing how it would be without order, just a sad, lonely place that no one would want to end up at. He had developed a great interest in the French working class men and women, sometimes depicted in his work, since he was young and would participate in anarchist groups. Therefore, this painting could be his way of striking back at the French upper class which usually roamed Rue Ravignan in Paris.