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Gawkers: Art and Audience in Late Nineteenth-Century France

By (author) Bridget Alsdorf

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How the urban spectator became the archetypal modern viewer and a central subject in late nineteenth-century French art Gawkers explores how artists and writers in late nineteenth-century Paris represented the seductions, horrors, and banalities of street life through the eyes of curious viewers known as badauds. In contrast to the singular and aloof bourgeois flÃ¢neur, badauds were passive, collective, instinctive, and highly impressionable. Above all, they were visual, captivated by the sights of everyday life. Beautifully illustrated and drawing on a wealth of new research, Gawkers excavates badauds as a subject of deep significance in late nineteenth-century French culture, as a motif in works of art, and as a conflicted model of the modern viewer. Bridget Alsdorf examines the work of painters, printmakers, and filmmakers who made badauds their artistic subject, including FÃ©lix Vallotton, Pierre Bonnard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, HonorÃ© Daumier, Edgar Degas, Jean-LÃ©on GÃ©rÃ´me, EugÃ¨ne CarriÃ¨re, Charles Angrand, and Auguste and Louise LumiÃ¨re. From morally and intellectually empty to sensitive, empathetic, and humane, the gawkers these artists portrayed cut across social categories. They invite the viewerâ€™s identification, even as they appear to threaten social responsibility and the integrity of art. Delving into the ubiquity of a figure that has largely eluded attention, idling on the margins of culture and current events, Gawkers traces the emergence of social and aesthetic problems that are still with us today.