5.1 Metropolis: Urbanization, Flaneur, Public Space, Parks, Commerce, Gaze & Glance Flashcards
Fredrick Law Olmsted, Central Park New York (1861)
imag
Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884), Post Impressionism
rigorous technique, stiff formality of figures, solemnity at odds with casual nature of impressionism.
perhaps intended to idealize leisure of mixing classes, but some think he was satirizing the sterility and rigidity of the parisian middle class, and their encroachment into working class preserves.
Seurat found impressionism too shallow and improvizational. Interested in color theory and enlivening potential of adjacent colors. In pointillism (or divisionism) sought to create retinal vibrations by juxtaposing small strokes of pure color which would mix in the mind and eye of the viewer, with an effect he believe to heighten luminousity and intensity.
Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge (1892)
Flaneur
a french noun meaning “stroller” or “saunterer”. A literary type initially described by Baudelaire as a citizen of the modern metropolis, both spectator and and partipant in the spectacle of city life. This man, typically costumed in jacket, top hat and cane, is emblematic of the new urban life that emerged out of Napoleon III and Hausmann’s rebuilding of Paris in the mid nineteenth-century. This figure can be seen strolling in Gustave Caillebotte’s Rainy Day at the Place d’ Europe (1877). Edoard Manet’s The Balcony (1868) also exemplifies the culture of the flaneur.
Wikipedia:
In the 1860s, in the midst of the rebuilding of Paris under Napoleon III and the Baron Haussmann, Charles Baudelaire presented a memorable portrait of the flâneur as the artist-poet of the modern metropolis:
“ The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, 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 centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but 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 that he has ever found, or that are or are 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 it were an immense reservoir of electrical 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.[5]
Pointillism
The technique of applying small dots or dabs of pure colors are arranged in a pattern that allows the viewer’s eye to do the color mixing. Seurat, influenced by impressionism and theories of color opposition, pioneered the technique in the 1860s. His Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte (1884-86) is exemplary.
How did changes to the urban settings in the 19th century change the mode of living for the residents?
Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann’s reconfiguration of Paris dramatically transformed urban life in Paris. Multi-story apartment buildings created greater urban density, and brought members of the growing middle class into its urban center. Grand boulevards, with the sewer system now buried below ground, made walking (or strolling) enjoyable in a way it never had been before, and the balconies of apartment buildings venues from which people could both see the spectacle unfolding on the streets, as well as be the spectacle themselves. The creation of public parks, which were seen by some as essential to maintaining a healthy connection with nature, brought well-to-do people out of their drawing rooms, and members of all classes to recreate and socialize out of doors. While this class mixing occurred in the streets, some new social forms arose that Paul Sedelle’s Grand Magasins du Printemps (1881-89) innovated a new way for Parisians to purchase goods, and to be seen while doing it. This first-ever department store allowed Parisians purchase a wide range of goods offered at fixed prices in one luxurious location, an innovation that would not have been possible without the availability of mass-produced goods and expendable incomes of the middles classes generated by the industrial revolution. These changes to urban life were not limited to Paris. New York’s Central Park and John Wanamaker’s Grand Depot in Philadelphia represent the same types of changes to urban life on the other side of the Atlantic.
Post-Impressionism
Late 19th C.
Art as expression of an interior world and imagination
Imposed new scientific rigor on representation of world
