passer-by
The greatest spectacle in fin de siècle Paris was the crowd passing by on the boulevards.
In his famous poem A une passante, the poet Charles Baudelaire described how he suddenly caught sight like ‘a lightning flash’ of that one woman in the crowd ‘by whose glance I was suddenly reborn’.
Artists followed in his footsteps, intensely observing passers-by and incorporating them in their cityscapes.
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Social Types
Printmakers like Pierre Bonnard focused primarily on the visual spectacle of the passing crowd.
They set out to capture the movements of passers-by in shadows and silhouettes.
Bonnard presented a strolling Parisienne in Woman with Umbrella as a lively and elegant, but sharply delineated expanse of black, and in doing so created an icon of modern urban life.
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Visual Spectacle
More engaged artists presented the street as a place of encounter for different social types. While the lives of the social classes — and the sexes — generally remained strictly separate, everyone mixed when walking in the street.
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen depicted this quite literally in his monumental poster La rue, where the proletarian and the capitalist, the Parisienne and the laundress, mingle on the same street.
Further Reading
Charles Baudelaire, A une passante, in Les Fleurs du mal, 1857 and Le Peintre de la vie moderne, 1863
Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities. Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, Berkeley 1998
Ursula Perucchi-Petri, Die Nabis und das moderne Paris. Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton und Toulouse-Lautrec, aus der Sammlung Arthur und Hedy Hahnloser-Bühler und aus Schweizer Museums- und Privatbesitz, Bern 2011
