18 The New York Reviewyou get to it. One moment all seems
clear, indeed nicely categorized: Louis
Huart’s Physiologie du flâneur (1841)
distinguishes the sophisticated flaneur
from lesser faux- flaneurs: the musard
(idler), the batteur de pavé (pavement
pounder), and then, lowest of all, the
badaud, who comes in two categories,
“simple” and “foreign” (presumably this
means Parisian versus out- of- towner).
But Alsdorf points out that a couple of
decades later Baudelaire, in his famous
essay, “does not mention badauds at all,
but he folds several of their distinguish-
ing features into his characterization
of the artist as ‘the perfect flâneur.’”
Gawking can be a permanent state of
mind shared by full- time street- corner
loungers; but there are part- time oppor-
tunists as well. Their social status is also
looser than as at first defined.
One of Alsdorf’s primary examples,
Jean- Léon Gérôme’s L’A c c i d e n t (1901;
currently missing and available only
in a black- and- white print version), is
a fait divers in paint and print. Some-
thing has happened in a street: perhaps
someone has been stricken by illness,
accident, or drink—we can only guess,
because the fallen one is made invis-
ible by passersby leaning inward as
in a football huddle. In the buildings
above, onlookers fill the windows and
balconies (and have a better view of
the victim); a woman rushes toward
the huddle, while a policeman also
approaches with a leisurely gait—he
has seen it all before. It is a brilliant
image of gawking, but here the gawkers
are not those street- corner idlers pa-
tronized over the centuries but mostly
middle- class people going about their
business (even if that is only shopping).
Alsdorf’s scope in this beautifully
produced book is considerable: gawkers
appear not just on the streets of Paris,
gazing at accidents and incidents, at
usual and unusual behavior. They gawk
at theater bills, and then go inside the
theater and gawk at the action. When cin-
ema cameras appear on the boulevards,
the gawkers run up to them and gawk
into the lens, only to be reminded—in a
shrewd commercial moment—that the
processed film will shortly be showing at
a nearby cinema, whereupon the gawk-
ers pay to go in and gawk at themselves
gawking at the camera. At times there
seems to be an infinite regression of the
concept, and gawking becomes ubiqui-
tous to the point of meaninglessness.
Alsdorf’s excellent chapter on the
theater contains visual evidence from
Boilly to Daumier to Degas to Cassatt
to Vallotton (who only ever portrayed
the audience, never the stage) to Eugène
Carrière’s extraordinary Théâtre popu-
laire (1895): sixteen feet long by seven
feet high, all brown, gray, and ocher, with
scumbly white highlights, and an extra
reason to visit the Musée Rodin in Paris.
Maupassant wrote that the best place to
study crowds, and crowd behavior, and
the public display of passions was the
theater. (As actors frequently testify,
each audience is different.) Both Boilly
and Daumier show a group of specta-
tors on a “free performance” day, when
those who could not normally afford a
ticket were allowed entrance. Nowadays
we are all too familiar with our own im-
ages; less so back then. As Alsdorf aptly
remarks, Daumier “showed his audience
what they looked like when they look.”
Boilly is a bit snootier, Daumier more
generous and human. Here are people
who have probably never been to a play
before, but does this automatically makethem dumb gawkers, or just first- timers
not yet sure of the social rules? Some of
these theater scenes show attentive audi-
ences, others bored ones; but the latter
response could just be a properly criti-
cal one to a dull play. Crowds are always
composed of individuals; one window-
shopper might be an idle gawker, the
next a potential purchaser making his
or her considered choice. It’s not that
Alsdorf overstates her case; more that
this is a good book to argue with.
But this leads to a wider point of
artistic intention. When Vallotton
hewed his woodcuts, was his purpose
descriptive- satirical or prescriptive-
ethical? Alsdorf sides with those who
believe that he and others who por-
tray badauds are presenting us with an
“ethical dilemma.” Should we—and in-
deed would we—intervene or not whena carriage runs over a shopper? Are we
mere idle bystanders or citizens with
consciences? Or just, as Alsdorf puts
it, “armchair tourists of other people’s
tragedies”? Is the “message” of Vallot-
ton’s prints, as she proposes, that “with
witnessing comes responsibility”?
This seems to me excessive—and in-
deed a bit punitive. Perhaps someone
in 1893, looking at L’A c c i d e n t, might
wonder what he or she would do if con-
fronted with similar circumstances.
(Though is there any evidence that they
did?) But in 2022? Do we really respond
to the print by wondering what we might
do if confronted by a car running over
a shopper? For a start, not by think-
ing, “Here is an ethical dilemma—how
should I behave?” Surely, in any case,
and in any age, we respond instinctively
(which is not to say unethically, rather
that the ethics are in the psychological
background, not forcefully present at
the time). We intervene, or not, almost
without thinking—though also, most
likely, by reaching for an iPhone and
(ethically, practically) calling the po-
lice, or (unethically) filming the scene
and putting it on social media. Such re-
sponses relate to the “bystander effect,”
also known as “bystander apathy,” a
concept posited by two social psychol-
ogists in 1968, according to which “the
number of bystanders around a victim
is in inverse relationship to each by-
stander’s impulse to help.”Alsdorf is an admirable close reader
of images, clever at picking out, in a
mass of bodies, a tiny figure who is doingnothing more than staring back at us, as
if, across the centuries, he has spotted
us gawking at him and is gawking back.
Her considerable attention to Vallot-
ton peaks in a powerful account of the
painting Le Bon Marché (as opposed to
the print). This is considered by many
to be Vallotton’s greatest painting. Cre-
ated in 1898, it was the star of his Lon-
don and New York shows, though it has
now returned to private hands. It is his
only triptych (an occasional form for
the Nabis—Denis did one in praise of
domestic bliss, Bonnard several). In a
traditional religious altarpiece the outer
panels would direct our focus toward
the central image, while the scale is nor-
mally constant across the three panels.
The Nabis acknowledge this precedent
while dismantling it. Outer panels still
relate to the central one, but both scaleand focus can be separate from it: the
largest figure—as in Le Bon Marché—
may well be in a side panel.
Thadée Natanson called Vallotton’s
Intimités woodcuts “stations of senti-
mental life,” i.e., a secular version of
the Stations of the Cross; in Le Bon
Marché, as Alsdorf puts it, “religious
devotion is a shadow structure for the
corruption of modern life.” Its cen-
tral panel has a crowd of shoppers on
a curved stairway, descending into
the heaven (or hell) of consumerism.
The left- hand panel has an apparently
submissive salesman in intimate con-
versation with a female customer; the
right- hand one has a single female fig-
ure with her back to us and facing an
oncoming crowd of customers, as if she
has completed the purchases they are
now pantingly heading toward. The
outer extremities of the side panels
show counters with brightly colored
boxes of wares; those on the left display
prices, those on the right announce
REDUCED and SALE. Fifteen years
earlier, Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des
dames had described the department
store as “the cathedral of commerce”;
Vallotton’s painting is a response and
endorsement. Here elegant, behatted
women pursue goodies where their pic-
torial ancestors had pursued the Good.
As Alsdorf notes, the painting is “a
hinge” between two main strands of
Vallotton’s work up to this date: flow-
ing crowd scenes in a compressed space
and portrayals of couples caught in
often ambiguous, possibly presexual
engagements. In the left- hand panel of
Le Bon Marché, the customer and thefloorwalker are bent over the same ob-
ject, which could be a perfume bottle
or possibly a lipstick; it happens to be
pinky- brown, so, as has been suggested,
there may be a penile innuendo here.
Either way, the couple are engaged in
sealing a deal that will give satisfaction
to both. And whereas in Vallotton’s se-
ries of Intimités, the men are usually in
charge, caught in a persuasive posture
(sometimes with the implication, or ac-
tual sight, of a bed in the background),
here the women are in charge. True,
that salesman is doing his oily best to
conclude the sale, but it is the woman
who has the money, and therefore the
power. And the purpose of it all, as Zo-
la’s title ironically reminds us, is “wom-
en’s happiness.”
But the painting is also about more
than this. In 1880, Zola had written an
essay on money and literature in which,
Alsdorf writes, he “defended modern
capitalism as a liberator of the arts, ar-
guing that money emancipates artists
and their work from ‘humiliating pa-
tronage.’” This was true, though more
for some than others, and the emancipa-
tion was never straightforward; many of
Zola’s literary friends did not fail to note
his patent (and to some, vulgar) delight
in the money and the goods it bought.
Artists, as Alsdorf points out, were often
more ambivalent about this exchange of
master from the patron to the market.
New forms of mechanical reproduction
made their work cheaper and more ubiq-
uitous: the rise in the print and poster
markets, plus the new range of illus-
trated newspapers and magazines, pro-
vided great opportunities. But what if
this sudden new market was as quixotic
as an old patron could have been? Does
the unfettered market rub away not just
at the artist’s sensibility but also at his or
her soul? The real- life Bon Marché de-
partment store contained a picture gal-
lery designed to imitate the Louvre, but
the paintings on display were for sale just
as straightforwardly as bolts of cloth and
suggestive lipsticks were on other floors.
As Alsdorf concludes, the “deflation of
art into commodity is precisely what
Vallotton’s triptych is about.”
In the same year, 1898, Vallotton
painted Misia à sa coiffeuse (Misia
at Her Dressing Table), in which the
pink- clad, Roman- nosed Parisian so-
cialite and tastemaker Misia Natanson
stands in front of a mirror with the tools
of beautification lying in front of her,
doing a final primp before launching
herself into some social event. On the
wall behind her is a tiny black- and- white
print, clearly by Vallotton, though not
immediately identifiable, so perhaps
made deliberately generic by the artist.
This detail might be sly or mocking,
self- promoting or self- punitive; Als-
dorf, I think rightly, takes it as a sign
of Vallotton’s fear that art has or could
become a “bourgeois accessory.” It is as
if the real creator of beauty, and the real
expression of it, in this painting is the
formidable Misia herself.
Vallotton, never as sunny a charac-
ter as Vuillard and Bonnard, was much
given to melancholy and self- reproach.
Ten years before his death, with an
awareness that his career was in de-
cline, he described himself as “one who
watches life from behind a window in-
stead of living.” Perhaps the man who
in his art had portrayed gawkers in all
their open- mouthed, quizzical vacancy
feared that in the end he, as an art-
ist, was not much more than a gawker
himself. Q‘The Accident’; photogravure by Manzi, Joyant, and Cie, after Jean-Léon Gérôme’s
painting of the same name, 1901B. Fontanel /Mairie de Bordeaux /Collection Musée Goupil, BordeauxBarnes 16 19 .indd 18 4 / 13 / 22 4 : 05 PM