The Pulse of Paris: in colors, chaos, and connection
Monet, Manet, and Lautrec
Remember Brushes & Beats? Those French guys who started painting what they felt rather than what they saw? Well, we’re coming full circle back to them.
Last Sunday, I visited the Musée d’Orsay for the first time (during the Louvre robbery, no less), and to say I was impressed would be an understatement. Yes, it’s one of the most famous museums in the world, and yes, it was expected that the collection would be fascinating... but for me, it was more than that. It was personal. An intimate experience that pulled me back to the moments when I used to study art history.
Sitting in a small classroom in Cluj, listening to passionate lectures about the essence of each art movement, I used to dream of seeing all those paintings in real life. Because standing next to these artworks means standing closer to the artists themselves. Unlike the images you see online, each painting hides a world within its details. The size of the canvas, the faint sketch lines beneath the paint, the play of brushstrokes that shift with distance, all come together to form a spectacle. And if you know even a few details about what you’re looking at, it turns into a scavenger hunt on canvas, where every subtle mark reveals a trace of the artist’s intention.
At first glance, Impressionism might seem boring - the same lilies painted over and over again, landscape after landscape. But the real magic lies beneath the surface. Before Impressionism, compositionally speaking, the subject was often separated from its background. Although themes like middle-class leisure or urban life had already been explored, the Impressionists broke that boundary.
Through short, thick strokes of paint, they captured the fleeting essence of a moment. By placing colors side by side and blending them as little as possible, they allowed light and movement to merge everything together. Their gift was in seizing what felt like a snapshot of a larger reality, as if time itself had paused on the canvas.
Yet beyond the shared techniques and criteria that define the movement lie the deeply personal stories of the artists themselves, stories that reveal not just how they painted, but how they lived, offering a window into what life truly looked and felt like in their time.
Monet faced repeated rejection from the Paris art establishment, especially from the Salon de Paris (the most prestigious art exhibition in the Western world at the time), and from the academic art elite. He had no idea then that he would become a defining figure of a movement he had yet to implement. His obsession with light, fleeting atmospheres, and perception over detail became the very embodiment of Impressionist philosophy.
His art stands as living proof of the saying, “the right package at the wrong door.” Monet’s story remains one of unwavering passion and faith, a reminder that true vision often goes unrecognised until the world learns how to see it.
Much like today’s Lyas’ La Watch Party, in 19th-century Paris existed Le Salon des Refusés, a space that challenged the authority of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. It became a refuge for the artists rejected by the official Salon, giving them a platform to show the world what it had refused to see. Among them was Édouard Manet, whose Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass) caused an uproar. The painting depicted a nude woman casually lunching with two fully dressed men, her body sharply illuminated as she stared directly at the viewer. Its monumental size, over two meters, was traditionally reserved for religious or historical scenes, not modern life.
Though nudes were nothing new, placing one in a contemporary, everyday setting crossed every boundary of the time. Ironically, the controversy worked in Manet’s favor, as Le Salon des Refusés drew more visitors than the official Salon itself.
What fascinates me is how a simple shift in perspective, like a butterfly flapping its wings, can trigger a cultural hurricane. Visiting a museum like the Musée d’Orsay feels like walking through these plot twists of art history. Each painting invites you to participate, to feel. If you look long enough, you form a connection. Because the point of art isn’t just to decorate a space, it’s to communicate what lives inside you. To challenge, to stir, to make you see differently.
Moving through the gallery, we encounter the true “freak of the show,” Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, a master of illustration and painting, particularly celebrated for his vibrant crowd scenes. One of the most renowned Post-Impressionists, he remained a figurative painter in the vein of Manet and Degas. But compared to his contemporaries, Henri’s life was far more scandalous than his art alone.
He lived fast, painted fiercely, and defied every convention of his era. Born into French aristocracy yet marked by illness and physical deformity, he found freedom in the bohemian underworld of Montmartre. There, cabarets, dancers, and prostitutes became both his muses and companions. His art captured the raw pulse of Parisian nightlife - unfiltered, provocative, and profoundly human, transforming scandal into beauty and vice into immortality.
What I love most about his work is the contrast he creates between subject and color. He paints nude prostitutes in soft pastels, communicating a sense of comfort and belonging. He mastered dynamism, whether it’s a woman getting dressed in a bedroom or a full crowd dancing on a cabaret night. Lautrec's art has always sparked something in me; his colors speak volumes, but so do his themes.
Before Modernism, paintings were “meant” to capture a fragment of life, but that fragment often represented the bourgeois, and every detail behind it was carefully arranged, almost like set design today. Lautrec gives us a glimpse of 1800s Paris as it truly was, without wrapping it up or placing a fancy ribbon on it. And though their subjects varied, all the Impressionists shared the same goal: Monet explored light, Manet captured modern life with boldness and immediacy, and Lautrec revealed the pulse of society’s hidden corners: unfiltered, and alive.