 Good evening everyone. My name is Martha Lucy and I am deputy director for education and public programs here at the Barnes tonight's lecture is a kind of Preview for our upcoming exhibition person of the crowd the contemporary art of Flannery the exhibition which opens on February 25th brings together the work of 50 international artists contemporary artists who work in a variety of media photography video installation performance But what connects all of these artists is that their work all of their work somehow springs from their engagement with the street or with public space or with the crowd And with the idea of wandering and observing and chance and counter things that we associate with the 19th century figure known as the flanneur Our speaker tonight will tell us more about this figure and the phenomenon of Flannery in 19th century Paris Terry Dolan is professor at Temple University and a very well-known authority on 19th century French art She has published widely most recently a book called Manet Wagner and the musical culture of their time and Perspectives on money published by Ashgate in 2012. This is in addition to dozens of articles and essays Terry is also known as an outstanding teacher. She's won several distinguished teaching awards From Temple and this is not easy to do when you're also so committed to to your research I don't know how you do it Before I welcome Terry to the stage. I just want to talk a little bit more about the show and what it involves This is a show that that is happening inside the building, but also Out in the streets of Philadelphia. We'll be having performances By historic performance artists recreations of these historic performances out in the streets We have projects where we're bringing kind of Audiences and participants and school children Into the barns digitally through these kind of social media projects that we're doing There are lots of films and lectures planned It's gonna be a very lively spring here at the barn So please take a look at the microsite for the exhibition that just went live today. It's personofthecrowed.org And and take a look and see what we've got going on none of this would be possible without a Major grant that we got from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage So please welcome Terry Dolan Thank You Martha It's really an honor to be able to speak here at the barns and I think that the You'll be seeing a lot about the exhibit because it's going to take over the city It's really going to go beyond the of the museum here at the the barns foundation rather and into the city It's a very very exciting kind of concept and I'm thrilled to be able to To be able to speak about it tonight. I really oh, no, what did I do? I? Told them yeah, there we go. I When I looked at this Which was done by the the man I did my doctorate on I've been obsessing about this talk And I realize I've been working on this for over 40 years, but it's just I'm just not going to change But what I wanted to do tonight is to give you a background the historical background on the flunner as it arose in the art and the literature of the 19th century Which was a stimulus for this show And it said that the flunner is a word that one can explain but that one cannot really translate and So one asks why this figure has been so so closely associated with the modernist vision of Paris in the 19th century The flunner if you look it up in the dictionary was simply a man who strolls the streets of the city keenly observing the life that surrounds him often with the intention of turning the information he collects into literature and art The flunner encounters a wide variety of characters and spectacles as he makes his way through the old and new streets of Paris Throughout the century and like the city itself. He takes on renewed meaning through his encounters The flunner in 19th century Paris personified urban culture and modernity It was usually a man of comfortable means The educated flunners walk supplied him with images and text to be decoded to allow him to situate himself within the changing metropolis Unlike the tourists. He's not seeking knowledge. He's seeking experience Recreating these walks in painting prints stories and poems Artists and writers themselves so often flunners depicted the passionate wanderer as he contemplated the evolving social and economic life of his times This evening I want to explore the type as it emerged in the art and literature of 19th century Paris The city that Walter Benjamin the German philosopher and cultural critic called the capital of the 19th century From the observation of these figures and their activities We come to a fuller understanding of how the economic and aesthetic Conditions of modernity came to be mirrored in the art and literature of the time Although the flunner has a prehistory that dates back to the 16th century The type really begins to develop in the 18th century in the writings of a la renais le sage Louis Sebastian Mercier and restitue de l'abattant the flunner saw its true incarnation received most of its visual and Literary attention as a product of 19th century Parisian culture The pavement basically became a theater that paraded its sights smells and sounds to the urban stroller Victor for now in his 1858 books a convoy What one sees in the streets of Paris described flunnery in the following terms quote Have you ever reflected on all that is contained in the word flunnery? that charming word adored by poets and humorists to make interminable expeditions through the streets and promenades to Wander nose in the air Both hands in one's pockets and an umbrella under one's arm as befits any candid soul To walk straight ahead if per adventure without thinking where to go and without hurrying in the manner of Jean de la fontaine going off to the Academy To stop at each up to look at the images at each street corner to read the posters At each stall to touch the books To watch a group circled around a clever rabbit and to join in without a human care Given over to the spectacle with all the senses and heart To follow at will along the docks the music of a regiment passing by or to lend an ear truly to the cooing of The primadonnas at the cafe morel to savor the variations of an organ de bobberine To stand and file around the outdoor jugglers to run when one sees running to stop when one wants to sit when one locks What pleasure dear god and quote Reading that I realized that for now was probably paging through the the the this little book Louis. Oh arts 1841 physiology de flunner When he wrote these words in 1858 These physiologies were inexpensive small books that focused on a single type characteristic of the city more than 125 Physiologies were printed between 1840 and 1842 and it is estimated that approximately 500,000 copies circulated in the 1840s The authors and illustrators of the physiology sought a classification of the social types that populated Paris after the revolution The readers of these small volumes is engaged in an aesthetic and literary flannery of the social mores of the time as the images and texts unfolded before their site These taxonomies of stereotypical characters focus on the lifestyles fashions Occupations and habits as they make their life in the city during the July monarchy Between 1800 and 1870 the Parisian population grew exponentially with the influx of provincial and international immigrants These anecdotal accounts set the figures in the city to give them a social Legibility that disclosed their place in the function of urban life as a change from a monarchal authoritarian society under the rule of kings to a Republican form of government That struggled to give voice to the people The first edition of Louis-Ouart's Physiology du Flannery in 1841 sold out its first print of 10,000 copies giving testimony to how popular the type of the flannery was Who are explained that everything the flannery from the flannery was a text of observations? The flannery collected and consumed the signifying cultural signs of the metropolis The entire collection of physiologies could be described as a flannery of the July monarchy society as The stroller through the streets would encounter the shopkeepers the florists all the figures that make up the economic and social panorama of Paris Just as a physiologist studied the normal function in living systems So the flannery surveyed and dissected the modern city to discern its patterns Around 1840 we learned that it was elegant to take turtles for a walk Which would demonstrate the very leisurely pace Taken by the flannery. This would again change in the next age This type of social observation provided a motivation for writers such as honoré de Balzac Georges-Saint, Téville Gaultier and Alexandre Dumas among others in his 1829 physiologie de mariage Balzac highlights what he calls the flannery's gastronomy of the eye He said to walk is to vegetate to flannery is to live and He was the author of the human comedy the 91 volume work of novels and stories that brought to life the period of the restoration between 1850 to 1830 and the July monarchy between 1830 to 1848 Thank God the man did not have a word processor because I studied it from my dissertation and was compulsive about reading just about everything you wrote During his flannery is the author laid the foundation for creative production by collecting observations whose details would later emerge on the page as fictional narratives based on the discursive accounts of these urban signs The mundanities of daily existence and has character stutter study and the umbrellas and brooms Wielded by the realist propagandists of the tales Gradually replaced the swords and weaponry of the romantic swashbuckling tales of the past In a chapter on the flannery in the sixth volume of Paris de Saint-et-Un Paris of 101 the anonymous author wrote quote The flannery can live anywhere Can be born anywhere, but he can only live in Paris He is a specifically Parisian type and what this distinguishes him from the dandy who derives from the English model Bob Rummel Who claimed it took him five hours to dress? You blame this on women five hours for Bob Rummel to get dressed He also recommended that boost be polished with champagne So Michael Moore would know that if that happened to me that I would become a compulsive bootlicker a Disinterested aristocratic reserve and preciousness of mannerism distinguish the dandy who often looked down on bourgeois society Although the French flannery is always properly clothed He does not deliberately seek attention through dress and is most often unremarkable in the crowd of passers-by as Deborah Parsons observed in her book Street walking the metropolis She says quote an important difference between the dandy and the flannery Is that the flannery observes while the dandy displays himself for observation end quote In the provinces as PJ Stahl explained in 1844 in Ludiabla Paris Parisian You more or less know the people who pass by you But in the city the physical contact could be close, but the psychological communication increasingly different This became dramatically evident when Louis Napoleon Bonaparte nephew and heir of Napoleon the first Organized a coup d'etat and had himself crowned emperor in December of 1852 The following June he appointed Georges Eugène Aussmann to aerate and open the spaces of Paris To connect and unify its different parts into one whole and to make it more beautiful The dark alleyways and narrow streets gave way to wide new boulevards opening up public spaces lined with chestnut streets Railroad stations constructed with iron and glass transformed Paris into the most modern city in Europe in 1860 Paris doubled in size when Napoleon the third annexed its suburbs enlarging the city from 12 to 20 arrondissement The streets were lined with houseman's apartment buildings which accommodated the burgeoning influx of population seeking opportunities in finance real estate speculation and commerce New social cultural and economic sites dramatically changed the experience of the Flanere and Artists and writers began to embrace the subject in their art Scenes of metropolitan modernity came to replace romantic subject matter as the city loomed ever more largely in the consciousness of the Parisian public Literary discourse and imagery of the Flanere came to symbolize urban experience as the figure voiced ideas about the interface between the Individual and the greater population that crowded the new streets of Paris One of the most articulate exponents of the practices of the Flanere was the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire Whose writings conveyed the changed experience of life in the modern city For him the Flanere was a key figure of his time and Baudelaire's very first art review of the Salon of 1845 He called for a painter to interpret the epic quality of modern life Complaining about the lack of new subjects and ideas in the works on exhibit He wrote quote and yet we are surrounded by the heroism of modern life There is no lack of subjects nor of colors to make epics end quote the true modern pound painter sounds very much like the one who will depict the Flanere as Quote Baudelaire writes he will know how to tear out of actual life It's epic side and make us see and understand with color or drawing how grand we are in our neckties and varnished boots The artists of Baudelaire's time portray contemporary scenes of public official subjects But the subject matter alone did not render a painting modern especially Baudelaire at it since the government commissioned them Baudelaire sought the particular beauty that characterized the distinctive spirit of the age He expanded on this idea a year later in a salon of 1846 Ending it with a chapter entitled on the heroism of modern life Where he urged the artists and writers of his time to portray the fashion morals of the passing moment and all of the suggestions of Eternity that it contains end quote Fashion played a role in this and he remarked on male clothing clothing quote the dress coat and the frock coat not only possessed their political beauty Which is an expression of universal equality, but also their poetic beauty And this became the the substance of the impressionism fashion show that was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art It originated at the Chicago Art Institute and also was in Paris several years ago Baudelaire found his ideal modern artist in a water colorist and draft draftsman Constantin Guise who featured in Baudelaire seminal essay entitled the painter of modern life written in 1859 and published in 1863 it's often very encouraging for a scholar to know that somebody with a brilliant mind like Baudelaire takes a long time to get published Baudelaire introduced Guise to the reader in terms of flannery quote He said the crowd is his element as the air is that of the birds and water of fishes His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd For the perfect flanar for the passionate spectator It is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude Amid the ebb and flow of movement in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home To see the world to be at the center of the world and yet to remain hidden from the world in Partial natures which the tongue can clumsily define The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito The lover of life makes the whole world his family Just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women He has ever found or that are or not to be found or the lover of pictures Who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though are an immense reservoir of energy Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness Responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life end quote The watercolors and drawings of the sites Geese recorded on his walks through Paris show him indeed to be a passionate observer in Baudelaire's words He rises above the mirror stroller as he converts the flannery into a strategy of representation. I Quote again Baudelaire who prioritizes walking in his search for modernity quote and so away He goes hurrying searching but searching for what? Be very sure that this man as I have depicted him this solitary gifted with an act of imagination Consciously journeying across the great human desert has an aim loftier than that of just the mere flanner and aim more general Something other than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance He is looking for that quality, which you must allow me to call modernity For I know no better word to express the idea. I have in mind He makes it to his business to extract from fashion Whatever element it may contain of poetry within history due to still the eternal from the transitory By modernity, I mean the ephemeral the fugitive the contingent The half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable end quote The flannery prior to the second empire and houseman's revan renovations Contended himself with primarily describing what he saw in a panorama of the city As a popular cultural archetype He was a bourgeois peripatetic observer who was most often lightly satirized and exuded an era bon amie Describing rather than analyzing the light that an unfolded before his eyes while on his walks as Balzac described it in 1829 quote It is plan a it is to enjoy it is to gather witty episodes It is to admire sublime scenes of misfortune love joy graceful and grotesque portraits It is to plunge one's gaze into a thousand lives for a young man. It is desire is to desire everything For an old man. It is to live through the lives of young people. Oh How many answers has a flunner artist not heard to the question we have been considering end quote If the flunner early on had any problems at all they were primarily the hazards of the street Rather than the psychic wounds that were opened up by the Disarticulations Displacements and mutations of the experience of the city scape that followed elseman's renovations and Baudelaire's poetic experience of the city During the second empire we find the July monarchy flunner as posed here With this comfortable urbanity and air of connoisseur of connoisseurship Upended in the verbal and visual representations of the flunner The city had become a more profound and often more disturbing construct to be continually decoded It was in the crowded city that the flunner experienced the new and the ephemeral that Baudelaire defined as the modern Scholars and critics have pointed to Edward Manet as one of the prime examples of an artist Artistic flunner and a fulfillment of the Baudelaire in call to be the painter of modern life Baudelaire disdain the painter of eternal or everlasting things as he said of heroic and religious subject matter Manet embraced the very type of subject matter that coursed through but Baudelaire's lyric poetry of the city Manet's studio mate and earliest biographer Antonin Proust Positioned flunnery as the essential dynamic of Manet's art quote Manet's eye played such an important role that Paris has no other flunner to match him and no flunner for whom this activity was more useful and quote Proust described Manet's walks and indicated how significant they were for the artist to mine his urban subject matter an Early description is an early examples his description of Manet thinking about color and then finding the subject of his 1862 street singer while on a stroll with Proust who wrote quote I have said what a flunner Manet was One day we were ascending what has since become the boulevard malaria in the midst of demolitions Intersected by the yawning gaps of already leveled properties The Monceau district had not yet been laid out at each step Manet stopped me a woman was coming out of a sleazy cabaret Lifting up her skirt holding a guitar. He went right up to her and asked her to compose for him She simply laughed. I'll nap her again. He said and then if she doesn't I have Victorine end quote And of course Victorine is the one who poses for the these scandalous at that time Luncheon on the grass to Dejeunesse or Laird and Olympia Manicourt the street singer as she emerged onto the street the doors of the cafe still swinging behind her and Marking her passage from exterior to from interior to exterior In a moment she would disappear from view On to her next performance where she could perhaps earn a few more sue to sustain her meager lifestyle The view of the painting becomes the flunner who catches a glimpse of her as she will merge with the crowd and disappear from the site Managed social reaction to the renovations of Paris became evident in his painting of the old musician of the National Gallery in Washington Where he documented the subaltern figures who roamed the streets and were displaced from the sums slums They inhabited when house mom demolished 117,000 buildings Though they made their living on the streets of Paris and were a familiar sight to the flunner They were forced off of them to make way for alzman's wide boulevards and stacked apartments The figures in the painting all Bohemian types Personify the realities of poverty and brutal change caused by alzman's renovations Manet distorted scale and ignored traditional perspective as he grouped them haphazardly Across the surface of the largest painting in his career Allowing his deliberate Stylistic awkwardness to connote the social alienation Forced upon them by the widening gap between the rich and the poor that became even more Accentuated in the new Paris of the artist's time Manet's music in the Tuileries has been seen as the embodiment of the flunner vision of the crowd According to an 1862 article in the boulevard the Tuileries gardens was one of the favorite locales of the flunner Antonin Fruist wrote that Manet and Baudelaire were in very close communication While the artists worked on music in the Tuileries Scholars have read the painting predominantly through the words of Baudelaire Seeing it as a confirmation of the poet's essay the painter of modern life Indeed the flunner realism the sources in Constantin Guise's imagery The emphasis on contemporary in fashion and setting and the notion of the crowd Articulated by Baudelaire all eminently conformed to Manet's portrayal of the chic Parisians gathered in the the Tuileries garden Thumbnail sketches of Manet's contemporaries populate the crowd and Baudelaire is seen standing next to the writer and art and art critic Théophile Gautier and in conversation with Baron Isidore Taylor who played many influential roles in the cultural life of Paris in a support of music theater and the visual arts Manet positioned himself on the far left side of the painting with himself half in and half out of the picture Art historian James Rubin sees this as an early example of the artist's self positioning as a marginal flunner That is as both a part of the world and yet it's objectively distant observer He claims that Manet acts here as a hinge between the world of the viewer and the viewed Thematizing flunnery and helping propel the viewer's reading from left to right across the freeze like composition Manet's radical style in this work has been cited as the earliest example of modernism and I believe the eye of the flunner in him contributed significantly to this Historical subjects illustrating sacred and profane history and stories from ancient mythology Locked up most of the first place prizes at the Salon which was the venue where the public crowded the rooms to view works chosen by a jury Appointed by the government to showcase the preferred art of the time More than 4,000 works were displayed at the Salon of 1861 the year before Manet completed his music in the Tuileries The official taste in painting when Manet began his career emphasized the subject matter that was aimed at edifying and instructing the mind of the viewer Yet one can see in the lascivious nudities of Bougarou and Cabinelle that the lore of antiquity titillated more than edified the viewer Presumed male in Manet's time The critic actor Kalyos in 1861 proclaimed the nude the paradise of painters in antique mythological and biblical subjects In a Salon review of Bougarou's work Kalyos flushed his knowledge by stating that the subject came from Ovid, not Virgil That the fawn had led the Picanti deep in the woods and had her drink a lot of wine She is in his power and with a satisfied eye he traces the conquest of drunkenness on her features I can see his eyes are not on her face A few paragraphs later he gushed with enthusiasm over Cabinelle's nymph captured by a fawn praising the seductiveness of the brown arms of the fawn Then writing quote the nymph white as milk struggles painfully in the arms of her captor The vaporous lines of their bodies form a delightful contrast with robust and sensual forms which surround them The painting will only improve he concluded with the golden patina of time The visual evidence of these date rapes is ignored by the critic in favor of a formalist reading of line and narrative And here we can see that the paintings are red rather than seen as they are and this is what modernity will change Manet's music in the Tuileries embraced the Baudelairean call to paint the present Manet renounced any fine detailing of features such as seen in Jean-Louisier Rhum's frying before the Areopagus Where the faces of the men leering at the nude clearly capture their various reactions with virtuosic skill The features of Manet's figures disappear beneath the botches of paint but quickly onto the canvas Some of the individuals have blank canvas in lieu of face While passages and other parts of the painting are difficult to decipher such as the black strokes on the white cloth And the detail on the right that seems to belong to no person or no object in particular Every crease in the blue cloth being yanked off the body of Jean-Rhum's frontally displayed figure is crisply delineated The folds in the clothes of Manet's seated women are barely indicated Their white-loved hands mere blobs of paint that indicate rather than define the fingers that hold their fans The public expected to be able to read a credible depiction of reality off the surface of the canvas That was there to tell them a story such as Paul Baudry's portrayal of Mara's assassin Charlotte Corday With its traditional modeling transitional gradations between colors and unbroken modeling of forms When compared with Manet's broad expansive paint that constitutes the clothing of the two-seated women in Manet's painting With crude dabs of shading that suggest more than they define the folds of the cloth One can understand the confusion of one critic who disdained the canvas as color that was caricatured While another contended that the canvas hurts the eye as carnival music assaults the ear A recurrent theme of Aussmann's modernization of the city highlighted the increased pace of life Manet's brushstrokes mimed this rapidity and the blur of the crowd as seen through the eyes of the flutter What Manet initiated with his canvas which is now seen as a forerunner of impressionism Is that how something is represented is as important if not even more so than what is represented His suggestion of ephemerality by the brevity of the brushstrokes heralded the distinctive style of impressionist painting Sketch-like facture suggested speed of execution The summary and out-of-focus background connoted the quick glance of a moving figure across the scenery It is in other words the vision of the flunner The quintessential urban and modern type translated onto canvas The reality of the appearances of people and objects at a given moment in Second Empire Paris For the avant-garde optical truth, optical truth trumped academic learning with a new generation of artists Claude Monet quickly joined Manet in embracing subjects of modern Paris as we see in his 1867 view of the Cade du Louvre The novelist and art critic Emile Zola, in his review of the Salon of 1868 Claude the aspect of fluttery in the city when he wrote that Manet quote Monet quote loves the horizons of our cities, the gray and white touches of houses under a clear sky He loves the people in their overcoats, busy scurrying through the streets Like Manet's music in the Tuileries, the scenes cropped on both sides and suggest the expanded view could continue along the banks of the Seine Without the centralized focus that dominated academic paintings of the time The randomness of the glance mimes the scanning eye of the flunner whose presence on the quay is recorded by Monet from the balcony of the Louvre Like any artist of his time, Monet had to write to the authorities for permission to paint at the Louvre What is fascinating is to see him turn his back on all the old masters contained in the galleries behind him And fill his canvas with an image of life, of the animated life of his own time as it occurred on the street Rather than in the Roman amphitheater or Greek Agora that populated the paintings in the galleries behind him The early impressionists according to the art historian Meyers Shapiro discovered a constantly changing phenomenal world Of which the shapes depended upon the momentary position of the casual or mobile spectator Again, we get back to what is a flunner The increased temple of flunnery is caught by Monet in his 1873 Boulevard de Capucine Shown at the first impressionist exhibition in 1874 When a group of artists banded together and displayed their art in a photographer's studio rather than submit their work to a salon jury Monet temperate his brush to convey the fleeting movements on the widened boulevard behind beneath Hausmann's signature apartment buildings The atmospheric perspective that blurs the details of the buildings and trees Enhances the awareness of the image as a brief moment in time The critic Louis Leroy characterized the figures as black tongue-lickings Thinking that perhaps Monet had broken his brush so in his haste to finish the painting he dipped his tongue in paint and licked the surface of the canvas And he wondered if he really looked this way when he walked along the street A comparison with the photograph demonstrates how Monet attempted to express the fleeting aspect of movement Of rapid tempo that is part of the experience of such an environment One of Monet's contemporary critics, Ernest Cheneau, went against the tide in praising the work saying The extraordinary animation of the public street, the crowds swarming on the sidewalks, the carriages on the pavement and the boulevards waving in the dust and light Never has movements elusive, fugitive, instantaneous quality been captured and fixed in all its tremendous fluidity As it has in this extraordinary marvelous sketch that Monet has listed as the boulevard de Capucine At a distance one hails a masterpiece in this stream of life This trembling of great shadow and light sparkling with even darker shadows and brighter lights But come closer, it all vanishes There remains only an indecipherable chaos of palette scrapings The comma-like brushstrokes and splotches of pigment mark the rejection of academic shackles And demonstrated Monet's concern to convert immediate personal visual experience into paint Rather than just to tell another story from the past Auguste Renoir had studied with Monet and early on and was influenced by urban landscapes As you can see in his 1872 view of the Pont Neuf Even though Renoir turned his back on Ausman's Paris by painting the oldest bridge in the city With the unrenovated houses in the background instead of the newer façades He does demonstrate an interest in the street and the activities of the Flanar Against the stolid architecture of the city Renoir emphasized the walkers, whose movements are caught by the artist's improvisatory brushwork That evokes the cadence of modern everyday life in the Paris of his time We see another version of the idea of how the Flanar's individuality merged with the crowd In Renoir's Le Grand Boulevard at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Renoir despised Ausman's buildings It is God who first made the first architecture Look and see if everything is alike in monotonous Do you see all the trees as being alike? Do you see the leaves of any one tree as having the same form? Renoir criticized the loss of historic buildings And the erections of structures that he thought were cold and lined up like soldiers at review Thus in this painting he minimizes the new buildings by obscuring the regularity With the trees that line the boulevard And scattering the dark accents of pedestrians making their way through the street The spontaneity of the artist's brush captured through the Flanar's eye Succeeded in rendering not only a street scene But the sensation of the metropolis refracted through a particular consciousness Edgard de Gaulle's Place de la Concorde, Vicont Le Pique and his daughters Renders different stages of Flanarine By the contrasted poses of the man with his jaunty cigar And umbrella tucked under his arm Suggesting the disarmingly leisure lifestyle of the Flanar As he saunters confidently to the right The tall figure cropped at the left of the frame Stands immobile for a moment before deploying his cane to cross the empty space The two children's oppositional poses contribute to the sense of random And disjunctive movement possible in the city The decentered composition figuring a large empty space With its combination of stasis and movement Captures the essence of urban modernity With its transitory and sensory experiences The socially secure Flanar of the earlier part of the century Comfortably as constant in his social class and space Now circulates in a metropolitan ambience That is ambivalent and ambiguous As a pedestrian, our entry into the Place de la Concorde Is blocked by the father Surely he will turn around and gather his daughters Who are pulled with their dog headed in a different direction One of the organizers of the Impressionist Exhibition In the later 1870s was Gustave Caillabat In his work, Hausmann's streets and buildings played a major role The male figure striding purposefully in his Pont de l'Europe Has been identified as a self-portrait of Caillabat And as also he was seen at his time As an impeccably dressed bourgeois Flanar Walking across the bridge That was a ten-minute walk from the artist's home and studio The bridge functioned as a major focus of activity Since so many streets crossed there And Caillabat clearly allowed the industrial severity of the girders To dominate the painting and compete with the pedestrians Completed in 1868, the Pont de l'Europe Stood as a symbol of Second Empire advancements in technology A contemporary critic with the pseudonym Jacques Took on the role of the Flanar As he described the painting as quote A young man of leisure walking ahead of an elegant Exquisite beneath her speckled transparent veil A common little comedy that we have all observed With a discreet and benevolent smile End quote The relentless procession of iron girders In the form of an X on the right Dominate the painting and are echoed in the X Formed by the edge of the sidewalk Crossing through the arm of the Flanar To his top hat The downward slope of the building Over his shoulder meets the gray of his beard And leads the eye to the shadow of the man In the Greek coat seen from behind The city controls the Flanar As much as the Flanar tries to control the city The clothing of the figures marks their different Stations in society as bourgeoisie and workers And this along with the multiple viewpoints Of time and space in the painting Mirrored the newly contextualized mingling of classes Made possible by the widened boulevards And large intersections of Paris That provided new viewpoints and insights To the Flanar As the viewer of the painting We directly face the Flanar And will be forced to negotiate her way As we pass them on our own Flanarie Jean-Béreux's version of the Place Épont de l'Europe Painted during the same period Adheres to the anecdotal standards Of salon painting Observation of a traditionally centered Detail-oriented and correct Perspectival version of a contemporary site He relegated the obtrusive girders To the background where they function As a lacy decorative background Rather than the signifier of industrial progress That they do in Kayaba's visual account The protocols of fashion announced That bourgeois figures all derive From the same class Even the dog with its prancing great gate Who appears to belong to the woman Who looks carefully down on it is I'll bet its name is Fifi Where the unattended dog, sorry Or the unattended dog in Kayaba's work Is probably some male name Butch male name such as Deuce or Zeke If it has any name at all And is most likely a mutt Kayaba provides a close up In a variant of this painting Épont de l'Europe Where the viewer as Flanar Is in the company of three male figures Who depict different states of viewing And walking in the city We are placed directly across From the man dressed in an overcoat In top hat Who has stopped to look through the iron trellis At the Garcé-la-Zarre That became the subject of one of Manet's paintings In 1873 And a series of twelve of Monet's paintings In 1877 The bright blue smock and bowler Had with the man to his left Leaning over the railing At the tracks below him A third man steps Perfectly past the other two His profile hastily cropped By the left edge of the painting That suggests movement beyond the frame As he continues across the bridge The color tonalities And shades of blues and grays Unifies the scene And connotes the democracy Of mingling classes Encountering each other in the street Kayaba has structured The different acts of walking In the picture As he summarized three stages Of flannery from left to right In striding, resting, and pausing Perhaps Kayaba's best known painting Is Paris Street rainy day At the Chicago Art Institute It's on the scale of a salon History painting very, very large And its large dimensions attest To the importance that modern Subject matter held for the new Generation of painters To counter what they perceived In the Bible A variety of figures Walk through the huge intersection Of the Carrefour de Mosqueau Like the eyes of the figures In the painting, ours are pulled In a variety of directions As we negotiate the damp paving stones The cavernous view of the streets Plunging between the looming buildings The rapidly approaching upright Of the green street lamp That will impose its immovable presence As soon as we make our way around We will be forced to step out into the street As another pedestrian with an umbrella Is on our right And is already tilting his To avoid bumping into the couple Whose attention has been distracted By something they see, but we cannot Again, Kayaba has made us a flanner And placed us directly on one of the Newest streets in the Paris of his time It was during the 19th century In France, according to Jean Baudrillard The French and French artists In the Paris of his time According to Jean Baudrillard The French sociologist, philosopher And cultural theorist That modern society realizes itself as such Thinks itself in terms of modernity Social transformations made available Ever-changing sensory perceptions For the flanner As this urban analyst observed the evolution Of class division Conventional gender behavior Along with alternations in the alterations And the concepts of public and private space The modernist treatment of Monet's Tongue-lickings, flecks of paint Cano flanners traversing The newly-built Boulevard de Capucine Captured the depersonalizing sense Of the modern experience Jean Baudrillard's version glosses Over the city's anxieties With a cheerfully pecan display Of a grinning man in military dress Who has just passed a man tipping His hat at a female worker Whose large bustle implies An alleged sexual desirability For the modern artist Not only what one saw, but how one saw And represented it through a motive Perception attuned to urban life Could result in a new sensation of seeing Attuned to the changed metropolis Reading about Jim Jarmus's recent film Patterson, haven't seen it yet But it's on our list My sisters and I go to the movies A lot together and it led me back To one of my favorite poets William Carlos, William's poem That I knew called Patterson When he wrote that quote A man in himself is a city Beginning, seeking, achieving And including his life in ways Which the various aspects of the city May embody, end quote I would add woman here As the female viewer known as the Flaneuse Had also acquired an agency in our age An agency in our age That she did not possession In earlier centuries The subject of another lecture altogether And a discourse that surely will arise In the Barnes' forthcoming experience Of viewing the city I so look forward to all the footnotes That will be generated from the forthcoming Flaneuse, so brilliantly conceived Of by the Barnes, where everyone From all walks of life can certainly Participate. Thank you. Several of my former graduate students Know this, heard of all of this I'm surprised they came They could have just slept through The whole thing. I'd be glad to take any questions. Anybody have any questions? Yes. Well, I'm glad that you're with the Woman's March. I'll be partisan about that, but It was really just the style of time. Those are done by a caricaturist His name is Gavarni And he did a very stylized type Of drawing that way And men, of course, wanted the tapered Waste and the sort of affected pose But it did not apply any kind Of homosexuality at that time Any other questions? Yes. Well, certainly, the bourgeois class Of course arose after the French Revolution And this is where clothing became Such a signifier of class Because, again, you always knew Who everybody was by their clothing This is where the physiologies helped out But as Baudelaire says, the bourgeois Man adopts the frock coat And the varnished boots And so men who were even more Ornately dressed during The reigns of the kings With their costume became much planer So, yes, so masculinity I mean, certainly it is There's a wonderful book by a woman Called Abigail Solomon Godot Who teaches at the University of California Santa Barbara called Mail Trouble And what she does is to trace That whole evolution of the change And the perception of the mail Both in art as well as in the society Of the time after the French Revolution No, not all. There might be a lot of prints And woodcuts and watercolors You know, that's a good question. I don't know of any. Well, I would quote Baudelaire From the Salon of 1846 About sculpture in the 19th century And it entitles a chapter Why sculpture is a board And so, I never like Because we have such a good Sculpture department at Temple That, you know, it isn't true I mean, it really comes to life Again with Rodin You know, during the 19th century The friend on Udon Who just blows me away By how fabulous he is as a sculptor But after Udon and, you know, Some sculptors in the early 19th century Sculpture goes underground Until Degas and Rodin Begin to revive it And then it really almost takes The lead of the avant-garde I can see in the 20th century Sculpture really becomes a very potent force And I think has remained so Ever since. I cannot think of one image And Domié has some wonderful caricatures From the Salon Of the crowded Salon that I showed And he said, one figure says Let's go to the sculpture room There's never anybody in there We can sit down, you know, type of thing Because it was seen as just, you know Monuments and heroes And people with swords And riding horses and things like that Whereas, again, Rodin And Degas really began to bring it Into a totally different dimension Of the Flunner I mean, in like Charles Marvie And other in French photographs There are, you know, people in the street Which would be identified as Flunner So there are photographs of them But what I was trying to do Was to really show how it impacted Modernism in painting And really in many ways That the view of the Flunner And Baudelaire's very crucial text On Flunnerie in the painter of modern life Became a touchstone of modernism But do they exist? Yes, they do I didn't bring them in I just, you know, I didn't really have time I really wanted to focus on painting And that issue, there's so much more I mean, I could do a course on the Flunner You go into this And you realize, well, you know, I could Benjamin the Flunner I mean, there's so much that you could do It's like, I'm always conscious Of what I'm leaving out Well, the Flunner was a specifically French type I think the English were more interested In the dandy and the aristocrat Because they still had the royalty I can't think of any, I mean, you know And Italian painting is, Italian painting Was still very much the Nazarenes At that point was not, was still, you know Embedded more in the past Rather than embracing modernism Except for some genre paintings So they were slower to bring it And the Italians, it had to come From the Macchioli, I mean, Jerry When does that start? That's later in the century Mm-hmm Yeah, well, the Flunner is never bohemian The Flunner is always bourgeois Very much, and tried to, you know, Try to be incognito And this is what again distinguishes him From the dandy, he always wanted to be noticed You know, when things of Oscar Wilde Or there's this wonderful figure Of Huisman of the Conta Montesquieu Who is the basis of Huisman's Against nature of Rabour And his Flunnery is around his own house He plans a trip to London But it all takes place in his mind He's still in cheese And, you know, that transports him Through, you know, to London Because he doesn't want to leave his house So, yeah Yes, he did, yes he did And then he turned around and went back Yes, thank you, William Yes, yeah Mm-hmm Yes, yes I'm sorry, could you repeat that? Uh-huh Mm-hmm Well, Baudelaire defines beauty as dual Of the eternal and the transitory Mm-hmm Well, you know, actually one sees it In, one begins to see it At the beginning of the 20th century I think specifically of the German expressionists Of people like Kirchner Angstvorderstadt And the German expressionists Very, very powerful and wonderful painting Israel and Monk You know, Monk's the screen Is an expression of that kind Of anxiety in the city In French art, you know, you go from impressionism And then with the post-impressionists They all leave the city And they go down, I mean, Van Gogh goes to Oral Go-Gang goes to Tahiti Cézanne goes back down to Ex-En Provence They seek, they're so disgusted with the city What they were, maybe not disgusted But the city was very expensive They never want to generalize about that But there are so many reasons Why they seek the provincial But really at the beginning of the 20th century What you have is really the German expressionists That begin to put that on the map The De Bruca and de Blau Rider William Well then just leave, William No, no Yes, yeah There's a wonderful book by Evan White You know, The Walker in Paris And I mean the whole idea I mean Paris is a walking city There's just no question about it It just is a city where, I mean It's not a transportation But it's such a beautiful city It just invites a kind of flannery There, but yeah, in 1920 They're looking for something else But I think it's going to be a lot of fun To see what happens in the city Because the Barnes is bringing in a videographer From New York Who's going to, you know Martha can talk about this more than I can But we'll document The interviewing people on the street They're going to be posters I mean it's really going to be a very February 25th, I think to May 7th So, you know, I'm really looking forward to You know, being part of it Some will happen here They have people like Fido Akanshi Eleanor Anton The list of artists that they've brought together Is just really extraordinary So it's a very exciting concept And I think, you know I asked Martha on the phone yesterday And it was Tom Collins I said who thought of this I thought you might You know, maybe it had come from Martha and she said no, it was Tom That thought of this And you'll see it's going to be a really It'll get a lot of publicity I think Yeah Any other questions? Yes I'm sorry Katherine, I can't Right Of course not because she could not be Unaccompanied on the street The flanner could wonder wherever he wanted The woman could not And I did a lot of work And I was going to incorporate it But I thought, you know, it's just too much You know, to deal with that in one lecture But the flanners according to Wolf and to others Elizabeth Wilson Is an impossibility in the 19th century Because of the She was confined to the home I think of somebody like Rosa Banner The painter who had to get a permission To travel in St. Paul It's still against the law to wear pants But I do arrive You know, in them Because she could not paint In her big skirts So she had to get permission to wear trousers And so she had to apply to the government To wear them because she could not First of all she could never go out Unaccompanied Same thing with Baird-Mauriceau They did not have access to the cafes Or they could not do a kind of flannery You know, and if they were alone As the woman on the bridge is The Paris street rainy day I mean, the point till you're up You were suspected of being a prostitute Because those were the only ones And so you were ready there for the pickup And so was Cherché La Femme And so that's the difference Why the flanners at that point I mean, it's a really interesting topic You know, one that Is being written about more And I know more will come out about that And now of course women do I can enjoy flannery Because we have more freedom But in the 19th century it could not happen As for a proper one And as I said the flanner Is always, he's always male And he's always bourgeois And so for the female bourgeois She could not be unaccompanied On the street And that's the difference Thank you, Martha Mm-hmm Mm-hmm Mm-hmm, terrific Yeah, I mean still it's very very topical You know, it's a rich subject to get into Thank you very much