Paradis ordinaires

This book asks the question: why have artists represented the public gardens with such consistency between the mid-nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth? The list is long indeed including painters, often famous, who signed works on these "green spaces". The public garden offered artists a miniature theater of urban civilities, illuminating the uses and sprains to the rules. Continuing the investigation beyond the Second World War, this study ends with the Situationists and their celebration of "square wave."