View of Paris 1886

Vincent van Gogh’s ‘View of Paris’ is made with oil paint, a substance that might seem conventional for fine art, yet it carried the force of industrialization within it. Unlike earlier egg tempera, oil paint was a factory product, available to any artist with the money to buy it. Look closely, and you can see how Van Gogh has used its buttery consistency, laying it on in thick strokes. This direct, almost sculptural handling of the paint is crucial to the picture’s impact. The gray tones evoke the city’s architecture, but also a sense of urban life as anonymous, hard, and unrelenting. In choosing this viewpoint – gazing out over the rooftops – Van Gogh is aligning himself with the working classes, for whom the rooftops were the closest thing to nature they might encounter. By attending to the materiality of paint, and aligning it with a particular social outlook, Van Gogh collapses any distinction between the means of production, social context, and fine art.