Color in the Age of Impressionism by Kalba Laura Anne

Author:Kalba, Laura Anne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press

FIGURE 63

“July 14th Celebrations, Fireworks on the Eiffel Tower (Drawing by Parys, After a Photograph by Albert Londe),” Le Monde illustré (1888). VA275C-(1)—FOL, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

Seeing the Eiffel Tower change its appearance, wrapped in the colored illumination of aerial fireworks and Bengal lights, became a highlight of Bastille Day celebrations as well as an important part of the festivities marking the Universal Expositions of 1889 and 1900 and myriad other celebrations in between (fig. 64). By the 1890s, the association between fireworks and the Eiffel Tower became so entrenched that it made sense for the Ruggieri Company to use the image of the tower in its catalogue, reminding clients that Ruggieri had been the firm originally in charge of the flashover illumination of the tower (fig. 65). The tower served as a convenient symbol of the company’s technical expertise, mirroring the liberal values of economic and scientific progress promoted by the monument’s backers. And yet, the spectacles that Ruggieri and rival companies staged at the Eiffel Tower also revealed the polysemous and fundamentally fantastic nature of the tower. Red-hot anvil, brilliant fountain, multicolored bouquet of flowers—the appearance and identity of the tower were as varied as fireworks’ colors. Indeed, all the while solidifying the Eiffel Tower’s identity as a national monument, the fireworks shows staged there encouraged viewers to imagine the tower as a pure representation of indefinite color, as documented, for example, in Georges Seurat’s The Eiffel Tower (1889), which depicts the monument in the artist’s trademark pointillist vocabulary (fig. 66).

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