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 flaneur, 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 Felix Vallotton, Pierre
Bonnard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Honore Daumier, Edgar Degas,
Jean-Leon Gerome, Eugene Carriere, Charles Angrand, and Auguste and
Louise Lumiere. From morally and intellectually empty to sensitive,
empathetic, and humane, the gawkers these artists portrayed cut
across social categories. They invite the viewer'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.
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