16 The New York ReviewWhat Are You Looking At?
Julian Barnes
Gawkers : Art and Audience
in Late Nineteenth- Century France
by Bridget Alsdorf.
Princeton University Press,
285 pp., $60.The flaneur was a familiar figure in
nineteenth- century Paris: a solitary,
quasi- artistic man (though not always)
who strolled the streets like an urban
epicure. A psychogeographer perhaps,
avant la lettre. Identified by Baudelaire
in his essay “The Painter of Modern
Life” (1863), he has become as essential
to our picture of that period as the demi-
mondaine, the fashionable café dansant,
the top hat, and the glass of absinthe.
It’s tempting to imagine tourists in the
first half of the Belle Epoque waiting
on boulevards to see one pass by with
cane, monocle, and superior expression.
The flaneur has also had an echoing af-
terlife: my first novel (Metroland, 1980)
featured two pretentious adolescents in
the London of 1963 who theorize that by
“lounging about in a suitably insouciant
fashion, but keeping an eye open all the
time, you could really catch life on the
hip—you could harvest all the aperçus
of the flâneur.” Their anachronistic
questing is only partially successful.
But there was another character on
the Paris street at that time, who had
already been there for centuries but
was less noticeable and less fashionable.
This was the badaud, or gawker: one
who stands and stares at anything going
on—a carriage accident, a fire brigade
in a hurry, a sudden police arrest, or a
suicide being fished from the river. If
the flaneur is an active idler, the badaud
is a stationary, passive one, ready to
stare open- mouthed at any phenome-
non that offers novelty or puzzlement.
The flaneur is of a higher social class, a
borderline artist, and a loner: you can-
not imagine a concatenation of flaneurs
eagerly exchanging observations. The
badaud, by contrast, is always liable to
form a group or crowd, either for a mass
gawk or some communal response. The
badaud is predominantly male, but
women are allowed to stop and stare and
mingle and gossip as well. Badauderie is
more democratic than flânerie: you need
no qualifications to indulge in it.
Badauds had history as well as num-
bers on their side. My five- volume
1882 Littré Dictionnaire de la langue
française has a mere four- line entry
for flâneur, with no mention of Baude-
laire but instead a single quote from
Charles de Bernard’s novel La Chasse
aux amants (1840). The entry also
is marked with a dagger, indicating
that the word had not qualified for
the Académie française’s dictionary.
The entry for badaud, by contrast, is
a good six inches long, offering quotes
from Corneille, Voltaire, Béranger,
and Régnier. (The earliest literary cita-
tion, at which Littré turned up its nose,
comes from 1534. Rabelais, in Gar-
gantua, judged Parisians “so stupid,
so badaud, so inherently inept,” that
the mildest diversion, like a juggler or
a mule with tinkling bells, would draw
an immediate hungry- eyed gathering.)
Most uses of the word are pejorative,
reassuring both writer and reader that
they are a cut above such ignorant and
probably illiterate street occupants.But these are not entirely passive
human beings: the usual synonym for
un badaud is un curieux, who may lack
the sophisticated investigative gaze of
the flaneur but is not entirely impervi-
ous to his surroundings.
Bridget Alsdorf’s Gawkers is about
the iconography of badauderie. It is a
rich, dense, wide- ranging survey whose
central figure is the Swiss artist Félix
Vallotton (1865–1925): “the foreign
Nabi,” as he was known in that short-
lived group that also contained Pierre
Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, and Mau-
rice Denis. Vallotton was the most
political of this largely apolitical move-
ment. When the Dreyfus Affair broke,
Vuillard, who was Vallotton’s closest
friend, wrote to him, “My heart races
when I read the newspapers and I try
not to let myself get sucked in all day.”
Vallotton’s response, on the other
hand, was to draw ferocious front- page
cartoons for the leftist, pro- Dreyfus
magazine Le Cri de Paris. One of them
shows the corpse of a naked woman
(representing Truth) being hoisted
dripping from a well, with the caption
“So that’s why she never came out”—
“that” being the fact that her torso is
transfixed by a French army officer’s
sword. In 1902 Vallotton produced
twenty- three prints for a special num-
ber of the anarcho- socialist journal
L’Assiette au beurre: here are thuggish
policemen, flagellating priests, fat and
furtive businessmen, sleek lawyers,
unjust employers, cruel schoolmasters,
and trigger- happy property owners.
In one image, a dozen policemen roar
down a street, sowing fear and con-
fusion, above the caption “Le jour deboire est arrivé.” Although, as Alsdorf
observes, “we have no written record of
his political views,” we certainly have a
clear graphic record of them. Vallotton
in these early years was of the anarcho-
left, like his friend the wit and art critic
Félix Fénéon. Later, in a safe yet in-
creasingly frustrated bourgeois mar-
riage, he longed to be more active. He
was appalled by the slaughter of World
War I and frustrated by his enforced in-
action; even the far- from- military Vuil-
lard was sent to guard bridges.Alsdorf’s book is timely: the past few
years have seen a resurgence in Vallot-
ton’s reputation, which has long been oc-
cluded by those of Bonnard and Vuillard.
After his death it took nearly a century
for the Swiss artist to have his first major
public exhibition in the Anglosphere,
shared between the Royal Academy in
London (2019) and the Metropolitan
Museum in New York (2019–2020).
His auction prices are rising fast. And
the more he is shown, the more clearly
he stands separate from his fellow Nabis.
For all their overlap in color- block com-
position in the 1890s, Vallotton, before
and after, was always pulling toward the
hard- edged north rather than the soft-
edged south; he was more often a con-
frontational artist than a seductive one.
Like Vuillard and Bonnard, he painted
street scenes and domestic interiors.
But Vallotton’s streets are full of social
conflict, while his interiors may frame
violently ambiguous emotional scenes.
He was an ideas man rather than a sen-
sualist; and where Vuillard and Bonnard
may be quietly humorous in their play ofcolors and textures, Vallotton is sharply
witty and satirical.
Nowhere is this shown more bril-
liantly than in the black- and- white
woodblock prints he did in the early
part of his career. It is an appealing
paradox that Vallotton loved to fill the
small space of a woodcut—often no
more than nine by thirteen inches—
with crowds of people, whereas his
paintings, generally much larger, are
populated sparsely, if at all. His crowds
are also often in movement: demonstra-
tors fleeing in panic, policemen—typi-
cally low- browed and loutish—slashing
away with batons and swords, passersby
being drawn in by a street huckster.
Deuxième Bureau contains thirty or
so people lining up for theater tickets,
each in a different attitude. In Le Coup
de vent a smaller group is caught in a
gust of wind, holding on to their hats
and to each other, while a little dog has
been lifted off the ground and spins
comically as if in a centrifuge. In L’ I v -
rogne a whirl of small children mock an
elderly drunk who has just come out of
a bar. You find yourself wondering how
Vallotton can get so many effects into
such a small space. Equally surprising
is his ability to convey such a range of
tonality using only black and white. In
Le Bon Marché (1893), female custom-
ers pore over bolts of fabric, and as with
Le Coup de vent, the viewer senses the
different textures of their outfits. You
can’t be sure if this is something Vallot-
ton has achieved or something he has
provoked the viewer into supplying, but
the effect is undeniable.
Vallotton was, as Alsdorf puts it, “the
fin- de- siècle artist most fascinated by
badauds as a social phenomenon with
deep relevance to art.” In L’A c c i d e n t,
a zincograph of 1893, a horse and car-
riage has just knocked a woman down
in the street, her basket spilling its con-
tents around the horse’s leading hoof.
Three men attempt to haul the animal
back, while the coachman pulls madly
on his reins. An adolescent girl comes
toward the incident; a mother and child
watch; two male figures stand on the
pavement; one, perhaps connected to
the woman and child, appears to have
just decided to ignore the incident; the
other, his head cropped by the top of
the print, seems to be in a dilemma,
his body turning backward as if he has
changed his mind and might possibly
help, or at least carry on looking.
Of images like this, Alsdorf reports
that “several writers have described
the elevated perspective that Vallotton
employs in his urban scenes as a mech-
anism of distance and omniscience,
a way for him to remove himself (and
us) from the scene.” This seems over-
interpretative. If you show things from
street level—as in Deuxième Bureau—
you get a mass of overlapping bodies
with the heads at more or less the same
height. If you show things from an ele-
vated viewpoint, you cut out the over-
lapping and can include more people
more clearly, enabling the construction
of a dynamic scene. Why should this in-
dicate a judicial indifference?The concept of the badaud seems more
slippery and metamorphic the closerFélix Vallotton: La Loge de théâtre, le monsieur et la dame, 1909Private Collection/Fondation Félix Vallotton, LausanneBarnes 16 19 .indd 16 4 / 13 / 22 4 : 05 PM