Gawkers: Art and Audience in Late Nineteenth-Century France by Bridget Alsdorf (review)

Bridget Alsdorf begins her wide-ranging and impressive study of onlookers in latenineteenth-century France with a discussion of an 1892 woodcut by the Franco-Swiss artist Félix Vallotton, entitled La Foule de Paris. In many respects, this is a book about Vallotton, whose work looms large in each of the four chapters, alongside figures such as Honoré Daumier, Pierre Bonnard, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The book’s focus on ‘gawkers’ or ‘badauds’ allows a subtle interrogation of the social and cultural dynamics at play in nineteenth-century Paris via a marginal position, which, in turn, allows more marginal artists, such as Vallotton to come to the fore. For Alsdorf ‘the badaud has always been the flâneur’s other side’ (p. 11), and while badauds ‘abound in late nineteenth-century art and literature, [...] they have received only a minute fraction of the attention devoted the flâneur’ (p. 9). Her beautifully illustrated, carefully researched study makes an excellent case for taking this topic, and also the artists who treat it, into the critical mainstream. The first chapter focuses on the ‘Accident’, analysing the faits divers and tragedies which captured the public and artistic imagination, such as, for example, the 1895 train crash which saw a train break through the north façade of the Gare Montparnasse and land on the street below, ironically killing a newspaper seller. The next chapter, ‘Audience’ investigates both theatre and street scenes, looking at artists ‘who not only represented theaters and the crowds who animate them, but who more specifically understood this subject in relationship to the theater of the city and the viewing of art’ (p. 71). For Alsdorf, ‘the trope of the theater audience is at the heart of this book’s larger investigation of badauds as a model of modern subjectivity’ (p. 69) and the badaud’s marginal and shifting perspective has clear implications for both artistic form and modern subjecthood. Chapter 3 dives into an exploration of street theatre, drawing links between the theatre of everyday Parisian life and the aesthetic form of works by Vallotton and Bonnard, as well as a fascinating glimpse into early cinema in the analysis of films such as Concours d’automobiles fleuries (1899) and Charmeur d’oiseaux (1896–97) by the Lumière brothers. ‘Attraction’ is the title of the final chapter, which ‘represent[s] badauds in relation to advertising — posters, kiosks, fairground tents, shop windows and department store displays — as a means of questioning the relationship between art and its audience’ (pp. 173–74). Here, Alsdorf discusses a series of images related to consumerism, including Vallotton’s exceptional Le Bon Marché (1898), which captures the world of Zola’s 1883 novel, Au Bonheur des dames. Alsdorf ’s fine monograph allows a fresh perspective on late-nineteenth-century France, on its spectacles and streets, and on the figures which depicted and shaped a rapidly changing world. It is a welcome addition to a growing body of work that seeks to offer a counterpoint to the vision of leisure and flânerie that has dominated discussions of late-nineteenth-century French art, and will no doubt benefit scholarship in French studies, art history, and theatre studies.