Title Monet’s Industrial Landscape. I merged an image of a waterfront factory with Claude Monet’s famous painting Impression Sunrise because that is exactly what Monet was reacting to. The billowing smokestacks in the harbor of his painting was the point for both what he was painting – the new industrial factories of the 19th century and the techno-economic impacts the developments were having on the world.

Title: Monet Train Station. The techno-economic influence is in the composition itself. The core technology of the age was steam and railroads. The painting is of locomotives sitting in the new train station billowing smoke.

Title: The Electric Lautrec. The Moulin Rouge not only stood at the top of a hill in Paris but it was also an early adopter in electrical lighting. The Moulin Rouge was clearly visible at night with the hundreds of light bulbs on it. The bright lights must have burned themselves into Laurec’s brain. He would go onto to paint the majority of his works about the dancers and the customers at the Moulin Rouge at night.

Title: Monet’s village. Clearly he paints what was a sleepy village now ringed with industrial smokestacks.

Title: Monet’s Train Idling in Field. As evening descends, Monet painted a train with its lights on looming like it is alive pouring smoke into the evening dusk.

Title: What Cézanne subtracted from Mont Sainte Victoire. The mountain of Mont Sainte Victoire was Paul Cézanne’s muse. He painted that mountain over 200 times. The mountain had a large aqueduct on it with a rail line atop of it. Cézanne therefore had to delete more than 200 times any trains and the undulating smoke from every one of his compositions. There may not have been a train chuffing through every time he painted his beloved mountain. However the painting of the mountain betrays what his conscious was truly focused on. He abstracted the mountain using straight lined brushstrokes. Cézanne was the inspiration for the Cubist school which followed him. The Cubists totally hard edged compositions extended what Cézanne started. The new industrial world was no longer soft contours from organic farming and sleepy village shapes but now hard edged metallic man made shapes. To illustrate this point see the next image which shows the brush strokes more clearly.

Paul Cézanne’s Montagne Sainte-Victoire, from 1904. The image is provided to underscore just how hard edged Cézanne’s compositions became. This is how he influenced the Cubist school. The source for the image is Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_C%C3%A9zanne#/media/File:Montagne_Sainte-Victoire,_par_Paul_C%C3%A9zanne_108.jpg’s

Title Gauguin’s steam visions. Gauguin famously left Europe as it had become to busy and noisy for him with as a result of the new industrialization. He took steamer ships to Tahiti where he painted visions of what Tahiti looked like before the industrialized Europeans had arrived.