2. Impressionism and Naturalism

Herbert, Robert L.

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2. Impressionism and Naturalism

Robert L. Herbert

Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society

The flâneur, the purposeful male stroller, was a principal performer in the theater of daily life in Paris in mid-century, if we judge by his importance in writings of the era. A journalist, writer, or illustrator, he looked about with the acute eye of a detective, sizing up persons and events with a clinical detachment as though natural events could tell him their own...

Author

Robert L. Herbert

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.33-57

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00067.006

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15803

Chapter subject tags:Impressionism (Art)--FranceJardin des Tuileries (Paris, France)Degas, Edgar, 1834-1917Leisure in art--France--History--19th centuryManet, Édouard, 1832-1883Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867Flaneurs--France--19th centuryCaricatures and cartoons--France--19th centuryBenjamin, Walter, 1892-1940Morisot, Berthe, 1841-1895Domestic space in art--France--19th century

2. Impressionism and Naturalism

The only, the true sovereign of Paris I will name for you: he is the flâneur.

—A. Bazin, L’Epoque sans nom, esquisses de Paris 1830–1833, 1833

That kind of man [the flâneur] is a mobile and passionate daguerreotype who retains the faintest traces of things, and in whom is reproduced, with their changing reflections, the flow of events, the city’s movement, the multiple physiognomy of the public mind, the beliefs, antipathies, and admirations of the crowd.

—Victor Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris, 1858

…we like to pose, to make a spectacle of ourselves, to have a public, a gallery, witnesses to our life. So profit from this Parisian mania in order to enrich your album with sketches, your notebooks with remarks, and your cerebral portfolios with observations.

—Alfred Delvau, Les plaisirs de Paris, 1867

The flâneur, the purposeful male stroller, was a principal performer in the theater of daily life in Paris in mid-century, if we judge by his importance in writings of the era. A journalist, writer, or illustrator, he looked about with the acute eye of a detective, sizing up persons and events with a clinical detachment as though natural events could tell him their own stories, without his interference. He was an ambulatory naturalist whose objectivity set the stage for Impressionism. Among the painters, only Manet, Degas, and Caillebotte could be counted among the flâneurs, but the other impressionists adopted the characteristic features of this modern Parisian: objectivity and a devotion to contemporary life. This means that naturalism, a term of literary derivation, should also be used to interpret Impressionism. The appropriateness of the term has already been shown in the previous chapter, when Duranty’s views and Caillebotte’s Man at the Window were juxtaposed. Impressionist painting was noteworthy for its rejection of romanticism and for its wholehearted plunge into contemporary life. The impressionists turned their backs on the drama of romantic painting of the 1830s and 1840s, upon its exotic subjects, its declamatory manner, its appeal to the viewers’ emotions by virtue of displaying the artist-author’s feelings. They also spurned most of the art of the Barbizon painters who had followed romanticism, but who had retained many of its characteristics: “romantic naturalism” is an appropriate epithet for vanguard art of the 1850s. The impressionists overlapped with the Barbizon artists and learned from them but, except for Pissarro and Cézanne, they rapidly left behind the world of peasants, villagers, and pastoral animals, together with the biblical and mythological past that such images evoke. Instead, they turned towards Paris and its suburbs, towards images of leisure and entertainment that Corot or Millet would have regarded with disdain: café-concert, theater, racetrack, riverside bathing, pleasure boating. Brilliantly colored singers and fashionably dressed Parisians supplanted peasant women in homespun; horses were mounted by jockeys, not by farmers; peonies and gladioli replaced cabbages; swimmers and boaters in straw hats were pictured on the water’s edge, not rivermen.

Because parallels with writers are more evident for Manet and Degas than for Renoir or Monet, it is with their historians that we find the furthest advances towards a broader conception of Impressionism. Scholars have pointed out their devotion to contemporary urban settings and have brought out the paradoxical qualities of an art that was “natural,” and yet thrived on artifice; comparisons with Baudelaire and the Goncourt brothers have been revealing. In particular, the idea of the flâneur has been a welcome borrowing from literature, and it is the ideal beginning point for an inquiry into impressionist naturalism.1 The painter as flâneur has been analyzed in Sandblad 1954, Reff 1976, Hanson 1977, and Caillebotte 1976–77. Degas’s associations with naturalist writers have been admirably studied by Reff in an essay of 1970, revised for Reff 1976, pp. 147–99.

The Artist as Flâneur

The Parisian flâneur was the role in which Baudelaire, Manet, Degas, Caillebotte, Duret, Duranty, Halévy, and Edmond de Goncourt cast themselves as did so many of the artists and writers of their era. That it was a role, a pose, was already evident in the 1830s, when the flâneur was first clearly defined.2 Particularly well in Bazin 1833, vol. 2, pp. 298–323. This personage was so much in vogue, it was said, that all the men of Paris imitated him even though few could claim his intrinsic qualities. The flâneur was characterized by exquisite manners and by impeccable dress, on which he lavished a great deal of time. He was devoted to newspapers, in order to be abreast of all current events and current gossip, and since the 1830s was the very decade in which a thriving daily press first became established in Paris, flâneur and journalism were interconnected.3 That this association of writer/artist with newspapers was a fundamental aspect of modern life is shown by its continued importance; one might cite cubist and futurist collage, Dada art, Rauschenberg and Warhol, to say nothing of Hemingway, Orwell, and Benjamin. The flâneur promenaded on the boulevards where he displayed himself while reconnoitering all that went on. In Walter Benjamin’s famous formulation:

The street became a dwelling for the flâneur, he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls…. The walls are the desks against which he presses his note-books; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done.4 Benjamin 1973, p. 37.

The flâneur’s apparently idle strolling was the essence of his character, for he guarded his freedom of action (in an interior such as a salon or restaurant he could be pinned down), while looking about so keenly that he was the best-informed person in Paris. Like a policeman,5 Bazin 1833, vol. 2, p. 308: “préfet de police” (police commissioner). he had acute powers of observation and could deduce much from external details. Paris became a theater for him, and the streets were its principal stages.

Aloof from direct involvement, always detached and unruffled, the flâneur rather consciously emulated the British aristocrat and gentleman. He was, in fact, one of the key players in that social phenomenon, anglomania. The British were the principal foreign investors in French commerce and industry, and were the most influential foreigners in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s. They financed, built, and staffed most of the first French railways, they were major suppliers of agricultural and industrial equipment, they were the source of new ideas about animal breeding, and they were the originators of the terms, and often the conventions, of early modern sports, above all, horse racing, rowing, sailing, and running (“le footing”). The French debt to British manners included the establishment of the first men’s clubs in Paris, so prominent subsequently in the impressionist period: the Cercle de l’Union in 1828, and Le Jockey Club in 1833. The French dandy—at first called a fashionable—was not quite the same as his British model. Comte d’Orsay, Alfred de Musset, Roger de Beauvoir, Barbey d’Aurevilly, and Baudelaire made a considerable transformation of their model. Barbey d’Aurevilly was chiefly responsible for converting dandyism into an artistic/intellectual pose and, further, into “an attitude of protest against the vulgarized, materialistic civilization of the bourgeois century.”6 Moers 1960, p. 264. Baudelaire, thirteen years younger than Barbey, conferred his unique genius upon this pose and is of special interest to historians of Impressionism because of his friendship with Manet. In poems and essays, he gave memorable expression to key concerns of the flâneur: the excitement of Paris crowds, the ability to move anonymously among them, the power of cool observation when supported by underlying passion, the ability to create an enduring art work from a transitory bit of modern life.7 All Manet scholars have discussed Baudelaire, but the first profound discussion of Manet as the flaneur is Nils Sandblad’s (Sandblad 1954). The best recent account of the links between Manet and Baudelaire is by Druick and Zegers: see below, note 15.

By the early 1860s, the Parisian flâneur had absorbed many of the leading characteristics of the dandy. The dandy was not necessarily a flâneur, but the flâneur was almost always a dandy. In his British top hat and formal clothes, however, the flâneur was not immediately distinguished from the mass of French upper-class men of the Second Empire. In other words, an aloof manner, fastidious dress, absorption in newspapers and current gossip, and strolling along public thoroughfares formed the exterior that most upper-class men presented to Parisian society. The flâneur, to those who knew him, could nonetheless be distinguished from his look-alikes by the subtlety of his observations and by the use to which he put them. His conversations were rich in things esthetic and elegant, not in such mundane matters as sales or investments, and he flaunted his wit in artful phrases whose irony was fully appreciated only by the inner circle of writers, painters, musicians, intellectuals, and fashionables to whom they were addressed. These witty sallies were not idly thrown out. They were the coinage of the flâneur’s reputation, and it was upon his reputation, in reciprocal relationship with his talent, that his success depended.8 This interpretation owes a great deal to Benjamin’s famous essays collected in Benjamin 1973. He did not despise money (Delvau’s words cited at the head of this chapter include the verbs “profit” and “enrich”), but despised talking about it. The artiste-flâneur disguised the true nature of his profession by speaking not about the money it yielded, but about the terms of his art. This allied him, in appearance at least, with the aristocrats of old, whose inherited wealth authorized devotion to the arts and disdain of the materialistic bourgeoisie.

We have already seen pictures of the flâneur. He appears in Béraud’s Paris, On the Boulevard (Pl. 22), to the right of center, in a characteristic pose. Detached from the others to show his indifference to the ordinary, he reads his paper. The other figures are mere strollers and gapers (badauds), but, a true flâneur, he is busy with his thoughts and capable, like a detective, of sizing up his surroundings while appearing to be absorbed in his paper. In Caillebotte’s Le Pont de l’Europe (Pl. 27), the artist shows the flâneur in a more active guise, equally characteristic of the role. He is moving briskly along the street, separated from the others by his costume (therefore by his class) and by the purposeful way he reconnoiters his surroundings. He is actually working at his trade for, as Delvau advised, he is stuffing his “cerebral portfolios” with observations to be used later.

Manet was a notable example of the flâneur. In his dress, his exquisite manners, his savoir-faire, and his devotion to shocking the bourgeoisie, he epitomized this urban species. Degas was so much the lone wolf that he deviated from the type, but he shared many of the flâneur’s qualities and represented him often in his paintings. We might first look at his delineations of the flâneur and then at the way both artists interpreted Parisian life as artists and flâneurs.

In his portrait of James Tissot (Pl. 36), Degas shows his painter friend as the dandy he was, a flâneur-dandy who has been out for a stroll, and who has dropped in on his friend for a moment. Degas displays him as though he were a fashion model. He puts his top hat and cape, carelessly but ostentatiously, on the table and gives a rakish angle to his stick, to emphasize his refined indifference. Closer inspection shows that the weight of Tissot’s body, sprawled sideways in the chair, is on his elbow. This, the twist of his upper body, and the drawn-in feet, reveal that he is on the qui-vive, ready to depart at a moment’s notice.

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Description: James-Jacques-Joseph Tissot by Degas, Edgar

36. Degas, James Tissot, 1868. 151 × 112 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rogers Fund, 1939.

Degas has therefore drawn a portrait of a flâneur by putting on show his refined casualness, his status as stroller-visitor, his alertness—and by abstaining from the traditional psychology of expression. Some might accuse him of failing to interpret character because Tissot’s face shows no revealing emotion, but of course a flâneur and a dandy are properly characterized by seeming indifference. And Degas hints at his own aloofness, that of the artiste-flâneur, by sticking to externals, by refusing to become involved with his sitter. He denies Tissot any interior feelings and hides his profession. Tissot is surrounded by paintings, it is true, but these would be associated with the artist whose studio he is visiting. He is made into a painter without paintings, a mere élégant.

By so treating him, Degas seems to put down a rival painter, and yet there is a clue to Tissot’s profession. Just to the right of his head is a portrait of Frederick the Wise, which then passed for a work by Cranach.9 Reff 1976, p. 104. Since Degas’s day, the painting in question has been demoted from Cranach’s work to that of his followers. His prominent moustache prompts a comparison with Tissot’s, so, to the inner circle of his and Degas’s friends, Tissot would have been associated with the sixteenth-century painter. Another piece of wit suitable to the artiste-flâneur is the treatment of the easel to the right. It leans rather amusingly into the composition, reinforcing the tilt of Tissot’s body. The easel’s precariousness is emphasized by the absence of its rear leg. It was once there, but was painted out (a prominent portion shows through along the base of the large canvas behind it): another example of Degas’s wit, or a bit of forgetfulness?10 More likely wit, since Degas was the last artist to be unaware of what he was doing. And he got away with the suppression of the leg, since no Degas specialist has drawn attention to it! Degas also eliminated any legs under the tables in his Absinthe (Pl. 76).

It is as a flâneur that Degas presented another of his artist friends, the printmaker vicomte Lepic. In Place de la Concorde (Pl. 37), Lepic, impeccably dressed in his light walking coat, strides resolutely to our right. He clenches his cheroot firmly in his teeth, squeezes his umbrella between his cocked left arm and his body, and, like Caillebotte’s flâneur (Pl. 27), pushes his right arm behind his back: all indications of his purposeful, absorbed strolling. A veritable distillation of the flâneur, Lepic proves his aristocratic remoteness by showing no interest in whatever has attracted his daughters’ attention. Although they have their own upper-class tone (the daughter to the right emulates her father’s upraised chin), they have the opposite of the flâneur’s indifference. We do not know what has drawn their curiosity—an omission that Degas teases us with—but by looking to the left, they augment Lepic’s detachment. The dog seconds their role, and its pedigreed look makes it a fit companion (Lepic was a dog breeder). The man on the left who stares at this group supplies another contrast to Lepic. He lacks Lepic’s more formal coat, and he stands there as a mere badaud, an onlooker who is easily distracted by what comes within his notice. “The idler [badaud],” wrote Victor Fournel, “under the influence of the spectacle, becomes an impersonal being; he is no longer a man: he is the public, the crowd.” Lepic appears as Fournel’s true flâneur, who observes and reflects, instead of taking part, who is therefore entirely in control and “in full possession of his individuality.”11 Fournel 1858, p. 263.

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Description: The Place de la Concorde by Degas, Edgar

37. Degas, The Place de la Concorde, 1875. 79 × 118 cm. Presumably destroyed during World War II. From Emil Waldmann, Die Kunst des Realismus and des Impressionismus, Propylaen Kunstgeschichte vol. 15, Berlin 1927, pl. 42.

Manet less often represented the flâneur in his paintings, but was himself a very complete exemplar of the breed. “With Manet,” wrote his friend Antonin Proust, “the eye played such a big role that Paris has never known a flâneur like him nor a flâneur strolling more usefully.”12 Proust 1913, p. 29. He recounted how Manet would make quick visual notes while out walking, and in one instance he gave the genesis of a painting. It is The Street Singer (Pl. 38) of 1862:

I have said what a flâneur Manet was. One day we were ascending what has since become the boulevard Malesherbes, 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. Over here a cedar rose up isolated in the midst of a demolished garden. The tree seemed to search under its long arms for the clumps of destroyed flowers. “You see its skin,” he said, “and the purplish-blue tones of the shadows?” Further along, the wreckers stood out white against the less white walls that were tumbling under their blows, enveloping them in a cloud of dust. Manet remained absorbed for a long time, admiring this spectacle. “There it is,” he cried, “the symphony in white major of which Théophile Gautier has spoken.”

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 come pose for him. She simply laughed. “I’ll nab her again,” he said, “and then if she still doesn’t want to, I have Victorine.”13 Proust 1913, pp. 39–40

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Description: The Street Singer by Manet, Edouard

38. Manet, The Street Singer, c. 1862. 175.2 × 108.5 cm. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Sarah Choate Sears in memory of her husband.

The first thing to notice in this citation is that Manet was strolling through a typical piece of Haussmannian Paris: vast destruction making way for a new avenue. His art was born of such transformations, but because he kept the flâneur’s distance, the desolate cedar became a purple tone, and house-wreckers, a “symphony in white.” This displacement of radical change, of destruction, into artistic terms, was a way of refusing direct involvement with it, of guarding one’s emotional reserve. Indirect involvement is, however, vested in the painting that came out of this flâneur’s experience.

Victorine Meurent modeled for Manet’s picture. She is leaving the “sleazy cabaret,” whose interior is visible over her shoulder. In her left hand the model/musician holds both her guitar and a fold of her dress, which she lifts to facilitate the forward movement of her feet. The resultant exposure of her undergarment reveals her lowly status and insinuates sexuality, typical of the flâneur’s conception of such a woman’s availability. Since her figure is essentially static, this suggestion of mobility aids the impression that she is leaving the cabaret (the left flap of the door has not yet swung shut). She is an itinerant who moves from place to place, mingling the illusory joy of her music with the plight of her vagabondage, a fate symbolized by the cherries she is eating, which stand not only for sexuality, but also for being down on one’s luck.14 The multiple meanings of cherries (cerises) in Manet’s era have been confirmed by the historian François Caradec (personal communication, 1986). La guigne is a common variety of sour cherry, but the verb guigner meant “to give a sidelong glance,” in the sense of a malevolent look. Hence to have la guigne and to have la cerise both meant to have bad luck.

Manet’s painting of 1862 is, after all, a gloss upon the extensive reshaping of Paris under Louis Napoleon. He did not represent the demolitions that surrounded him, but an itinerant whose lot in life was a commentary on the upheavals that the city and its people were undergoing. That same year, in his lithograph The Balloon (Pl. 39), he juxtaposed a crippled boy with the balloon used by Louis Napoleon as a symbol of imperial progress.15 Douglas Druick and Peter Zegers, “Manet’s ‘Balloon:’ French Diversion, The Fête de l’Empereur 1862,” Print Collector’s Newsletter 14 (May-June 1983): 38–46. Like the flâneur-writer, he knew how to prompt his gifts with the telling incident, which he then developed into a finished piece. In doing so, he also, like Haussmann, ran roughshod over the historic past. Yes, in The Street Singer there are echoes of Velasquez and Spanish painting, but the brushwork and modeling were daringly abbreviated, and his view of contemporary life was far from the acceptable genre painting of the day. This is because of the absence of a moral statement that could be readily grasped. Like Degas, Manet withheld any particular emotional expression from his model’s face, which is masked by a blank stare. Lack of expression kept the observer at a distance, whereas contemporary urban genre guided the viewer towards a known attitude, one of amusement, condescension, or admiration. In Autumn (Pl. 40), for example, Jules Lefebvre pulled out all the stops of romantic pity. His figure is a homeless wanderer in the woods, cowering in anxiety and loneliness. Manet’s painting strikes us as much more modern for having stripped away such appeals to sentiment. His Street Singer is one of a number of paintings that situated him at the beginning of his career as the flâneur who intended to shock Paris into recognizing his brilliance.

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Description: The Balloon by Manet, Edouard

39. Manet, The Balloon, 1862. Lithograph, 40.3 × 51.5 cm. New York Public Library.

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Description: Girl with a Mandolin by Lefebvre, Jules

40. Jules Lefebvre, Autumn, 1883. 137 × 86.5 cm. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of Christie’s.

Artifice and Caricature

Manet treated Paris as a theater, and on its streets and squares he sometimes found his best lines. His art of this period has been called “realism of the flâneur,” and in Music in the Tuileries (Pl. 41), painted at the same time as The Street Singer, the artist inserted contemporary figures into a composition full of daring abbreviations.16 See the first chapter of Sandblad 1954. Although Manet showed some deference to historical precedent, his picture does not exhibit the usual modeling in half-tones, nor the expected subtlety in drawing (Pl. 42). Its flat, decorative aspect might seem today to suit the somewhat impudent refinement of its figures, but at the time it was painted, its visual shorthand was a startling provocation. In it Manet represented himself, Baudelaire, Aurelien Scholl (one of the most conspicuous of self-proclaimed flâneurs), and other fashionables. They occupy a stagelike space appropriate to the idea that Paris was a theater in which one must always take a role. This idea was not limited to the flâneur, but was so widespread that nearly every visitor to Paris adopted it. Felix Whitehurst likened the women and men seated in chairs along the Champs-Elysées, gazing at the passing spectacle, to patrons of opera stalls, and Henry Tuckerman felt that even “the names of Parisian vocations, places and characters hint a play as those of no other capital can; and the most serious aspects of life inevitably wear a theatrical guise.”17 Whitehurst 1873, vol. 2, p. 95, and Tuckerman 1867, p. 56.

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Description: Music in the Tuileries by Manet, Edouard

41. Manet, Music in the Tuileries, 1862. 76 × 118 cm. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees, The National Gallery, London.

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Description: Music in the Tuileries, detail by Manet, Edouard

42. Manet, detail of Music in the Tuileries (Pl. 41).

To Tuckerman, Parisians treated their city as a theater because they exalted the transitory, the sensual, and the artificial. As an Anglo-Saxon (and presumably also, a Protestant), Tuckerman valued self-denial, thrift, and a preference for the natural, qualities so opposed to those of Paris that his observations have sharp edges, giving them a peculiar utility. If we ignore the pejoratives of his phrases, how apt they seem to Manet and to his Music in the Tuileries. Parisians, he wrote, touch everything with “a certain union of vanity and expressiveness.” Their indifference to rural nature is so widely recognized, he reminds his reader,

that, when we desire to express the opposite of natural tastes, we habitually use the word “Frenchified.” The idea which a Parisian has of a tree is that of a convenient appendage to a lamp. The traveller never sees artificial light reflected from green leaves, without thinking of his evening promenades in the French capital, or a dance in the groves of Montmorenci.18 Tuckerman 1867, pp. 156f.

The artifice that Tuckerman pointed to with mixed admiration and dismay is precisely what Manet, Baudelaire, and other flâneurs were devoted to.19 Tuckerman is not quite the prude that my citations might suggest, and, moreover, he so fervently wished the French to oppose Louis Napoleon that he interpreted their hedonism as political submission. This colored his perceptions, since he believed their saturation in the artificial and the theatrical was merely an extension of the Emperor’s tinselly, shallow regime: “Simplicity and earnestness are the normal traits of efficient character, whether developed in action or Art, in sentiment or reflection; and manufactured verse, vegetation and complexions indicate a faith in appearances and a divorce from reality, which, in political interests, tend to compromise, to theory, and to acquiescence in a military régime and an embellished absolutism.” (Tuckerman 1867, p. 157.) The flat bands of the trees, in Music in the Tuileries, the black clothes, the golden arabesques of those new metal chairs, the bright colors of un-modeled bonnets, ribbons, and sashes, these are the elements of pictorial artifice which lie at the heart of Manet’s innovations. They are both subject and form, salient pieces of that modern life which Baudelaire had been urging upon his contemporaries. It is not despite, but because of their immediacy, their theatricality, their share in a transitory present moment, that they suit both painter and poet. In Baudelaire’s essays and poems there is no doubting the significance of art over nature, of creative consciousness over mere raw material and instinct, therefore of the artificial over the imitative.20 Moers 1960, passim. In his Painter of Modern Life, published in 1863 (the year Manet exhibited his Music in the Tuileries), Baudelaire placed the artist-dandy at the center of his world because he alone could reveal the “eternal beauty and amazing harmony of life in the capital cities,” a beauty and a harmony drawn from the external and transitory manifestations of urban life, those vivid extensions of “universal life.”21 Baudelaire 1964, p. 11.

Tuckerman, of course, was too much the forthright democrat to understand the artist-dandy’s conversion of Parisian vanity and display into an enduring artistic language. Few contemporaries did. Only in recent decades have we come to see that in Music in the Tuileries, Manet set modern art on its path by finding pictorial forms that were inextricably linked with contemporary subjects. The appropriate phrase “realism of the flâneur” does not refer to the hackneyed concept of faithful imitation, but to “a kind of sign-language” Manet employed in this picture, in which color, line, and shape acquired a new autonomy.22 Sandblad 1954, p. 63. This autonomy is not the same thing as “pure” form, of course, and with some effort we can recapture the excitement with which Manet and Baudelaire made enduring painting and poetry out of fleeting glimpses of contemporary urban life.

To capture an elusive but characteristic moment in the life of the city was also the purpose of the caricaturist, that vital modern artist who was the subject of provocative essays by Baudelaire. The rapid growth of caricature from the 1830s onward, and generally also of journalistic illustration, was an essential ingredient in the spread of the daily paper and the weekly journal.23 Wechsler 1982, and Isaacson 1982. The flâneur was drawn to caricature because it so readily matched his interests. The latest gossip, event or personage was rendered with the quickness that suited the urban observer and with the pungency that appealed to his wit. The caricaturist was, in effect, a visual flâneur, and his cartoons appeared in the same journals that carried the essays and stories of the flâneur-writer. The links between caricaturist, flâneur, and painter show most clearly in the concomitant rise of art criticism, for caricaturist and writer alike developed special sub-categories to deal with the headlong pace of art exhibitions, which grew in geometric proportions after 1830. (And caricatures were prominently displayed in windows along the grands boulevards, where one also found paintings and the leading commodities of the day.)

By the 1860s caricatures and journalistic illustrations were such well-established modes of interpreting urban life that their graphic devices began to penetrate the oil paintings, as well as the drawings, of Manet, Degas, and others.24 Art historians first began commenting on this by focusing on specific borrowings, such as Degas’s from Daumier, or Manet’s from popular illustrations, and subsequently by broader inquiries into the whole phenomenon. See Reff 1976 and Hanson 1977, and for broader studies, Beatrice Farwell, ed., The Cult of Images (Santa Barbara, exhib. cat., 1977), Isaacson 1982, and Ross 1982. The pre-impressionist norms of painting in oils were rapidly subverted by qualities associated with the graphic arts, because of the painters’ search for spontaneity (either actual or simulated): direct, “sketchy” line revealing its speed of execution; stress on conspicuous rather than subtle features; reduction of careful three-dimensional modeling; abrupt placement of one color area next to another; scumbled, summary, or out-of-focus backgrounds; juxtaposition of flat, often “decorative” elements without benefit of the full range of devices that were earlier used to give depth and perspective. Resorting to such graphic shorthand gave many impressionist paintings the appearance of small prints suddenly blown up to the size of oils.

The degree to which painting was penetrated by a graphic shorthand associated with caricature can be readily seen in the mature works of Manet and Degas. In Manet’s Rue Mosnier Decorated with Flags (Pl. 35), the one-legged man has the immediacy and the social mordancy of caricature; the abbreviations that render street, flags, and buildings are like a luminous transcription of the backgrounds of Daumier’s lithographs (Pl. 43). With Degas, the relationship to caricature is more pervasive. In caricature his caustic wit found an essential ally, for his work is full of thinly disguised attacks on his contemporaries, so often caught in vulnerable and unflattering moments.25 For example, all of his brothel scenes (Pl. 115), and such paintings as Sulking (Pl. 58), Mme Dietz-Monin (Chicago, Art Institute), or The Stock Exchange (Pl. 56). Even when that is not the case, his works exhibit more than one tie with the tradition of journalistic illustration. He numbered many cartoonists and journalists among his friends, and his portraits of them are cases in point. He presented the cartoonist Carlo Pellegrini in a cunning silhouette that gives the essence of the figure at one glance. The writer Edmond Duranty (Pl. 44) is in the flattering environment of his library, but the books and papers surrounding him have an astonishing freedom from exactness (his manuscript is only a series of inky slashes), and Degas’s careful placing of his head and hands summons up the studies of physiognomics and gesture which are so intimately tied to caricature.26 Degas himself referred to Lavater, the famous phrenologist (Reff 1976, p. 217).

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Description: Friends (What a fortunate encounter…) by Daumier, Honoré

43. Daumier, Friends (What a fortunate encounter…). Lithograph from Le Charivari, 12–13 May 1845. New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery.

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Description: Edmond Duranty by Degas, Edgar

44. Degas, Edmond Duranty, 1879. 100.9 × 100.3 cm. The Burrell Collection, Glasgow Museums and Art Galleries.

In 1879, the same year as the Duranty portrait, Degas represented another friend, the Italian journalist and critic Diego Martelli (Pl. 45). Duranty is surrounded by books, the writer in his own library; Martelli is the visiting journalist more than the man of letters, and Degas hints at the itinerant nature of his profession by poising his stubby body above a floor in steep perspective, so that it almost slides out of the composition. This effect, vital to our reading of the portrait, is abetted by the folding chair, which seems insufficient for Martelli’s chunky frame, and by the fact that he has set aside his work for the moment and is looking down and out of the picture.

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Description: Diego Martelli by Degas, Edgar

45. Degas, Diego Martelli, 1879. 110 × 100 cm. Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland.

The extent to which Degas exploited the transitory, and the risks he took in pushing his painting towards the summarily executed norms of caricature, can be verified by looking at the unclear edges of Martelli’s trousers and their altered interior line, allowed to run “unfinished” over the surface. How different this is from portraits of the preceding generation. Ingres’s Monsieur Bertin (Pl. 46), for example, also represents a journalist, but one who, in 1832, was in charge of the hugely successful Journal des débats. Ingres represents him as the epitome of the tough-minded bourgeois, whose power and sensuality are vested in massive, sculptural solidity. Instead of a folding stool, Bertin is seated in a substantial chair whose heavy, curving back reinforces his bulk. To return to Degas’s portrait of Martelli is to register the enormous shift in artistic sensibilities over the intervening half-century. A newcomer to Impressionism might think that Degas’s Martelli was hastily improvised, and certainly Degas wanted to suggest spontaneity. Four major drawings, however, and a variant in oil, prove the contrary.27 The group is discussed by Ronald Pickvance in Degas 1879 (Edinburgh, exhib. cat., 1979, nos. 55–60, and in Thomson 1987, pp. 27–30. The key features of the portrait were not spotted suddenly in Martelli’s room and then introduced to the composition. They grew instead from a complicated process of invention, rearrangement, and decision and were the result of a studio procedure by which Degas exploited his cunning as a master of pictorial intrigue.

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Description: Louis-François Bertin by Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique

46. Jean-Dominique Ingres, Monsieur Bertin, 1832. 116 × 95 cm. Musée du Louvre.

Like Manet and Baudelaire, Degas was as much concerned with artifice as with nature. (To mock plein-air painting, he once held up a crumpled handkerchief and said it was the only model he needed in order to paint clouds). His pride lay in inventing, not in imitating. This is a simple, but vital distinction to make for him, as for all good artists. In his Place de la Concorde (Pl. 37), it is so easy to accept the illusion of a natural incident that we have to concentrate our attention if we are to see the devices of this shrewd tactician. In the initial discussion of the painting earlier in this chapter, the words were deliberately chosen to make it appear as if Lepic himself were walking to the right, and his daughters were actually looking to the left. We personify painted images this way as a short cut to a discussion of the illusion. It is the artificial devices Degas used that create the illusion, but they are not of themselves natural. The triangle formed by Lepic, his daughters, and the dog, for example, is an oddly flattened and crowded shape. With all that space behind them, why are they thrust forward on the surface like that? The principal reason is that the internal opposition of left and right movements is made more striking and more immediate by being squeezed into such a simple shape, which in turn is compressed by the rectangle of the picture’s edges. Another reason is that the broad expanse of the Concorde is rendered more stark by contrast with the overfull foreground (we deduce that it is the sidewalk or a traffic island). The observer only sees the public space by looking through and beyond these people, so the essential dialogue of the city with its people takes place on Degas’s platform of geometric shapes.

That visual illusions were created with the aid of studio conventions is nothing new in the history of art. What was new in Impressionism was the sense of graphic immediacy that arose from the painters’ turn towards the settings of contemporary life. The artistic controls that lay beneath this apparent spontaneity were at first so apparent that they upset most contemporaries who were looking for familiar modes of pictorial organization. Gradually, however, the bright palette and the immediacy of Impressionism won over the public, and by the early twentieth century it became the most natural way of rendering nature. At that point, with such wide acceptance, the impressionists’ underlying conventions were no longer obtrusive. On the contrary, earlier art now seemed old-fashioned and unnatural. It was especially abstract art that, by comparison, made impressionism seem to be the normal way of representing the world, so much so that vanguard artists and critics believed that the impressionists had merely produced simple imitations of the exterior world. Since the 1950s, historians have had to work hard to demonstrate that Impressionism was not, after all, a kind of mindless naturalism, that it was indeed based on artistic conventions. Paradoxically, we have to make an effort to recover the newness with which the impressionists’ contemporaries saw their painting if we are to understand how their apparent spontaneity and casualness was given conscious artistic shape.

The Artist as Investigator

Among modern historians, it is Walter Benjamin who most brilliantly reconciled these seeming opposites, spontaneity and artistic control. His analysis was directed to literature, but its broad lines are applicable to painting as well. It is essentially a dual formulation: the artist as flâneur, who converts the street to his work-place, the issue already discussed, and the artist as detective, for whom the street is also a work-place. The detective, Benjamin wrote,

only seems to be indolent, for behind this indolence there is the watchfulness of an observer who does not take his eyes off a miscreant…. He develops forms of reaction that are in keeping with the pace of a big city. He catches things in flight; this enables him to dream that he is like an artist. Everyone praises the swift crayon of the graphic artist. Balzac claims that artistry as such is tied to a quick grasp.28 Benjamin 1973, p. 41. Benjamin was probably thinking of the passage from Balzac’s Théorie de la démarche (A Theory of Bearing) which has recently been cited in Wechsler 1982, p. 22: “The observer is incontestably the man of genius. All human inventions come from an analytic observation in which the mind acts with an incredible rapidity of insight. Gall, Lavater, Mesmer, Cuvier… Bernard de Palissy, the precursor of Buffon… Newton, and also the great painter and the great musician, are all observers… those sublime birds of prey who, while rising to high regions, have the gift of seeing clearly in matters here below, who can at the same time abstract and specify, make exact analyses and just syntheses.”

For the artist-observer, Balzac used the analogies of bird of prey, and of the hunter transplanted to the city. Benjamin’s choice of detective stems from his absorption in the literature of the flâneur,29 As early as 1833 the flâneur was likened to a policeman. See above, note 5. perhaps directly from Victor Fournel’s Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris (what one sees in the streets of Paris) of 1858. Fournel begins a key chapter of his book by invoking Edgar Allen Poe’s Man in the Crowd, the very same story Benjamin uses when he discusses the flâneur. In Poe’s tale, the observer/author, from the window of a coffee house, spots among the passers-by a stranger whom he follows, convinced that his exterior announces a mystery to be solved. Fournel continues:

Like Poe, I have often isolated myself in the crowd, out in the street, in order to change myself into a spectator and sit in the pit of this improvised theater….

It would certainly be a very interesting exercise to read the daily occupations, the varied professions, the intimate and domestic life that mark each person, posted on his countenance, as it were, on his demeanor and tone of voice, as on the signboard of a shop; to look into the character indicated by a gait or physiognomy; to ask oneself what long habit of disorder or of probity, what series of virtues or of crimes have come to engrave an indelible and vivid expression on this or that face one is examining….

It is thus that each day at my leisure I take the personal responsibility of doing some Gall and some Lavater. Nothing escapes my look which pierces the most impenetrable shadows…. Each individual furnishes me, if I wish, with the material of a complicated novel; and, like Cuvier reconstituting an animal from one tooth, and a whole world from one animal, I reconstitute all these scattered lives; I make move, think, and act at my will this theater of automatons whose strings I hold.30 Fournel 1858, pp. 269–71.

Fournel’s deployment of terms deserves careful study. He treats the street as a theater; he regards the crowd as would a detective or a caricaturist, bent upon singling out pronounced features (Gall and Lavater were phrenologists who established a “science” of reading character into cranial shapes); he claims for himself a piercing eye, not a passive one; he likens himself to Cuvier the natural scientist, and also to a puppet master who controls his manikins. In all these analogies, the artist-observer finds parallels for his own sense of mastering the urban crowd by converting well-chosen figures to his artistic purposes. Particularly useful to the historian are his comparisons with the detective and the natural scientist. Both are investigators, in whom the naturalist writers found allies.

The role of detective-investigator came logically to such writers as Edmond de Goncourt, and it is all the more striking a role in his case, because of his upper-class refinement. “Today I went searching for the human document in the region of the Ecole Militaire,” he wrote in his diary in 1876:

One will never know, given our natural timidity, our discomfort among the plebeians, our horror of the canaille, how much the cost has been of the evil and ugly document with which we have constructed our books. This profession of conscientious policeman for the popular novel is assuredly the most abominable trade that an essentially aristocratic man can pursue.

However, the attraction of this new society…, then… the tension of one’s senses, the multiplicity of observations and notes, the effort of the memory, the play of perceptions, the rushing and hasty work of a brain which is spying on the truth [qui moucharde la vérité], intoxicates the observer’s sang-froid and makes him forget, in a sort of fever, the toughness and disgust of his observation.31 Goncourt 1956, vol. 11, entry for 22 August 1876.

It is once again Degas, among the impressionists, whom such a passage evokes when we think of painters. Degas’s Women on a Café Terrace, Evening (Pl. 47) seems the kind of “ugly document” that Edmond de Goncourt would have sought out while writing, say, La fille Elisa (1875), a novel about a prostitute.

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Description: Women on a Café Terrace, Evening by Degas, Edgar

47. Degas, Women on a Café Terrace, Evening, 1877. Pastel over monotype, 41 × 60 cm. Musée d’Orsay.

The role of scientific investigator also came easily to writers of the Second Empire and Third Republic. By mid-century, the model of investigation derived from the natural sciences had become all-pervasive. It thoroughly penetrated the arts, and lay behind the rejection of romanticism. Flaubert and Duranty stressed the need for the author to remove himself from the role of editor or judge of the action he described, and to acquire instead the precision and neutrality of the scientist. “Science, art, philosophy, all that is only description,” wrote Duranty. The Goncourt brothers said their ambition was to create a “science,” to make themselves “moral physionomists.”32 Duranty in Le Réalisme, 15 March 1856, cited in Crouzet 1964, p. 441; the Goncourts in their journal, May 1859, cited in Caramaschi 1971, p. 43. They praised themselves for overcoming their instinctive revulsion in order to study medical cases which they used in composing Germinie Lacerteux (1865). In their introduction to that book they defined the novel as a “living form of literary study and social investigation.” Zola admired Claude Bernard’s scientific rationalism and claimed that his novels were based on the experimental method.

The best statement on scientific investigation as it relates to the arts was made by Ernest Renan. In his L’Avenir de la science (The Future of Science), he first claims that old masterpieces of art have lost much of their esthetic value because their original settings are no longer available to the observer: “A work of art has value only in its framework, and the framework of every work is its epoque.” He then continues:

Doubtless the patient investigations of the observer, the numbers accumulated by the astronomer, the long enumerations of the naturalist, are hardly proper to inspire feelings of beauty. Beauty is not in analysis. But real beauty, that which does not rest on fictions of human fantasy, is hidden in the results of analysis. To dissect the human body is to destroy its beauty, and yet by this dissection, science comes to recognize a beauty of a superior kind…. Doubtless this enchanted world in which man lived before arriving at [modern] reflective life… has an inexpressible charm, and it may be that in face of this severe and inflexible nature that rationalism has created for us, some will regret the miracle, and will reproach experience for having banished it from the universe. But this could result only from an incomplete view of science. Because the real world which science reveals to us is far superior to the fantastic world created by the imagination.33 L’Avenir de la science, pensées de 1848 (Paris, 1890), pp. 192, 194–95.

We cannot pretend that Renan speaks for Degas, but the painter, like many naturalists, disowned the “fantastic world” of romanticism, and he would have agreed with Renan’s insistence that accurate observation precede the play of the imagination. A close look at Women on a Café Terrace, Evening will show the value of comparing the attitude of the naturalist with that of the impressionist painter.

In his little composition, Degas situates us along the boulevard Montmartre, at nighttime. In the distance we see a crowded sidewalk and the gaslights of the shops of the grands boulevards. In the lower right corner sits a woman in a position of lassitude, wearing a revealing costume. Facing her is a young woman equally bored, her thumb to her teeth. Next to her is a woman leaving the scene, trailing her purse behind her, while a fourth looks to the right, as though she were about to take the chair being vacated. These two figures slip between the supports of the terrace roof; lacking top and bottom, these uprights lend an odd air of movement and tentativeness to the sidewalk café. To the right, disappearing behind the end of the terrace, is the form of a man striding by.

What should we make of all this? Aided by contemporary representations of costume, and by numerous witness accounts of the boulevard Montmartre, we deduce that the women are prostitutes, “beauties of the night,” to use Alfred Delvau’s phrase.34 Delvau 1867, p. 78: “belles de nuit.” Delvau names five similar cafés along this boulevard, and his description of the Café de Madrid could serve as the legend for Degas’s composition. On its terrace, he writes, “from 11 o’clock at night to 1 a.m.: swarms of young beauties—it doesn’t take too much imagination to call them beauties of the night—display themselves like espaliers on this terrace where, with the pretext of having ice cream or Bavarian cream, they wait for galant cavaliers to offer an arm to accompany them to the next Bignon.” They find their clients among the men who are out shopping or going to and from nearby theaters. These women, like the two to the left in Degas’s composition, come and go from the terraces where they watch out for clients; they change places frequently out of impatience or to put themselves in more advantageous positions. Often they sit and wait, as Degas’s other two are doing. The one in the center has her thumb to her teeth, either to indicate boredom or, perhaps, to vent her disappointment. Georges Rivière, reviewing this pastel when it was exhibited in 1877, interpreted her gesture as meaning “not even this much!”—that is, no customers that evening.35 See Chapter One, p. 18.

The dark form of the man moving off to the right is a clue to the street commerce these women engage in, or at least a hint of it. Contemporary writers tell us of the great discretion observed by the middle-class client who, like a detective, could signal a prostitute without giving himself away to others. The woman who is leaving to the left might well have been given a discreet sign by this man. When one stares at this little monotype for a time, a reciprocity develops between her movement and his. Moreover, in Degas’s brothel scenes (Pl. 115) and in his views of the backstage of the ballet (Pls. 105, 106), the male pursuer is frequently indicated by only a partial view of dark coat, trousers, and shoes. Of course, we cannot insist on a knowing exchange between Degas’s two figures, but the presence of a male passer-by is an essential element of this pastel. Degas makes us into an investigator, seated on that terrace, sizing up various clues in order to understand what is going on about us, wondering if that fleeting figure is Poe’s or Fournel’s man in the crowd. We then realize why Degas once defined his art in these terms: “A painting is a thing which requires as much trickery, malice, and vice as the perpetration of a crime; make counterfeits and add a touch of nature.”36 Lemoisne 1946–49, vol. 1, p. 119: “Un tableau est une chose qui exige autant de rouerie, de malice et de vice que la perpétration d’un crime, faîtes faux et ajoutez un accent de nature.”

In such works as Women on a Café Terrace, Evening, Degas seems to adopt that attitude of Renan’s man of science. He destroys the pre-modern world of fantasy and its noble ideals, among them its concept of feminine beauty and of the uplifting subject. He wrenches us into the present by his odd matter-of-factness, by this “severe and inflexible nature that rationalism has created for us.” Like the naturalist, Degas sets aside emotion. He does not interfere with the subjects of his inquiry and does not judge their actions. He merely presents “the patient investigations of the observer,” investigations only of that which could be present to the eye. He does this even if, to use Renan’s words again, his “enumerations…are hardly proper to inspire feelings of beauty.” Like Renan, he gives up the charm of earlier conceptions and instead lays before his viewer the results of his analysis, disclosing a new and a profound beauty, because “the real world which science reveals to us is far superior to the fantastic world created by the imagination.”

If Degas can reasonably be likened to the natural scientist, as well as to the flâneur-writer and the detective, it is because he seems to survey his terrain dispassionately and then record his findings (we know he creates; he only seems to record) in an apparently neutral fashion, as though giving a report. This neutral vision is so vital to Impressionism that it needs to be given its own term: “detachment.” Although “objectivity” is an alternative—we shall examine the meaning Georg Simmel gave it—it seems to adhere more to the things being observed than to the observer. Detachment, by suggesting the act of disconnecting or disengaging, better suggests the artist’s conscious efforts to suppress his opinions and to remove any expression of the traditional judgments brought to bear on his subject. Curiously, this direct access to the subject, this elimination of authorial commentary, also detaches the observer of the picture from its subject. Failing to have a clear guide from the author as to the attitudes to take, the observer is encouraged to adopt the same detachment. In Women on a Café Terrace, Evening, as we saw, we ourselves have to assume the position of a client on that terrace, trying to figure out what it is we are looking at. In Manet’s Railroad (Pl. 31), we are also put to the test, because we are not supplied with the usual clues that would let us sort out the figures and our relationship to them. “Detachment,” therefore, has the virtue of complexity. It describes the artist’s viewpoint, but also the viewer’s, and accordingly, lets us deal both with the genesis of the painting and its perception. The psychology of the viewer becomes intertwined with the artist’s because of, not despite, his detachment.

The Artist as Observer of Domestic Manners

“Detachment” has so far been discussed in terms of the male investigator whose territory is the street, the public arena. The advantage of the term, however, is its general application. If we study paintings of the domestic interior we shall discover that it applies there equally well, and to women artists, not just to men. Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, for example, exhibit the detachment that characterizes naturalist writers and impressionist painters, whether male or female. Morisot’s Interior (Pl. 48) is a thoroughly impressionist painting. Its contemporary subject, its light-struck palette, and its loose brushwork suggestive of spontaneity, separate it from painting of the preceding generation. Like many works of Manet and Degas, it fails to offer a narrative in the traditional fashion, and its figures neither display emotion nor reveal much character through bodily expression. A woman splendidly dressed in black sits pensively, apparently absorbed in her own thoughts (she is not in mourning because she wears a gold bracelet). She must be a visitor, for she wears a hat and sits erect in the chair. Further back, her hostess, who wears no hat, and whose hair is informally arranged, holds back window curtains and bends her head towards the child, whose apron marks her as a member of the household. We deduce they are mother and child, and their natural relationship, no matter how understated, contrasts with the solitary nature of the woman in black, further marking her off from the shared moments of domestic life in this upper-class apartment (the huge, bronze jardinière alone indicates a rich interior). Perhaps the mother and child are waiting for a new arrival, perhaps only looking out over the city. We are not told, for the anecdote is reduced to such a simple level that no “narrative” is present. The painter seems singularly detached from what she presents to us, and we are permitted to make our deductions without her involvement.

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Description: Interior by Morisot, Berthe

48. Morisot, Interior, 1872. 60 × 73 cm. Private collection.

Equally dispassionate is Mary Cassatt’s Cup of Tea (Pl. 49) of 1880. One young woman, hatless, sits meditatively while the other takes a sip from her nearly drained cup. She is surely a visitor, for she has an alert carriage that contrasts with the well-settled pose of her hostess. Together they have “a refined scent of Parisian elegance,” according to the critic J.-K. Huysmans.37 When reviewing the impressionist exhibition of 1881 (Huysmans 1883, “L’Exposition des Indépendants en 1881,” p. 233). They are both looking off to the right, but since there is no third teacup, it is unlikely that another person is present. Perhaps some little household incident has drawn their attention, but it is equally likely that they have simply come to the end of conversation. The preoccupation with cup and saucer seems to bespeak the tactful young visitor who knows how to substitute gesture for talk.

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Description: Cup of Tea by Cassatt, Mary

49. Cassatt, Cup of Tea. 1880. 64.7 × 92.7 cm. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. M. Theresa B. Hopkins Fund.

In these two paintings we face a domestic world whose elements are reconstituted with the detachment of the naturalist who lays out her findings for us to observe. We are spared the sentiments of the romantic era, and therefore our own attitude is as detached as the artists’. To that extent these two works share much with, say, Degas’s Place de la Concorde (Pl. 37) or Manet’s Railroad (Pl. 31). These four artists were equally devoted to contemporary life, rendered in naturalistic terms, without idealization, without need for “noble” subjects, without literary sources, above all, without the intrusive presence of the artist’s own attitude.

Of course, the detachment that links these artists does not homogenize their temperaments, nor cover over the differences between male and female artists. The masculine qualities of the flâneur, already dwelt upon, are too evident to require further comment. Cassatt and Morisot are rather like the natural scientist, but they are not like the flâneur. Instead of prowling cafés or canvassing public thoroughfares, they lift a bell-jar off the society of upper-class women and examine its ways with an acuteness and a sympathy that few men could attain to (one thinks of the later Henry James, perhaps, but not of Balzac or Zola). The two pictures under discussion single out the rounds of daytime visits among women, a central feature of nineteenth-century social life. Relationships among women are their subjects, and the prominence of social conventions is signaled by a telling use of household furnishings, in Morisot’s painting by the massive bronze planter, and in Cassatt’s by that monumental tea service, almost oppressively large, as though the two young women were its servants.

If we turn to the ways in which men deal with domestic interiors, we shall easily distinguish them from Cassatt and Morisot, without denying common links of naturalism and detachment. Caillebotte’s Man at the Window (Pl. 23) allows the powerful male figure to dominate both exterior and interior. The woman in Morisot’s Interior is also at a window but far from dominating the street, she is sheltered from it and is more thoroughly the creature of a domestic space. Caillebotte’s Interior, Woman at the Window (Pl. 50) has more obvious analogies with Morisot’s picture, but the psychological separation of his two figures is more troubling. Morisot’s seated woman is shown in a moment of unexplained reflection, but the overall setting mitigates her isolation. Because we assume that Caillebotte’s pair are husband and wife, we take the painting as a comment on their relationship. The man’s absorption in his paper divides him from the woman; her gaze out the window implies longing for another space.38 See Kirk Varnedoe’s analysis in Caillebotte 1976–77, no. 47.

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Description: Interior, Woman at the Window by Caillebotte, Gustave

50. Caillebotte, Interior, Woman at the Window, 1880. 116 × 89 cm. Private collection.

Degas, more than Caillebotte, was the male investigator eager to pry into anxiety rather than to celebrate domestic harmony. In Edmond and Thérèse Morbilli (Pl. 51) a rather curious mood is developed. The husband is seated with an assurance that borders on the assertive. This is his space, and he commands it. His dangling hand seems both powerful and sensual. The tan drapery behind him matches the illuminated side of his head so as to bring it forward and also to separate him from the compartment of space in which the woman is found. Her space is a confined one, and its drapery echoes the color of her dress to mark it as hers, a reticent color and space compared to her husband’s sensual tones. She places one hand submissively on his shoulder, and raises the other to her face in a gesture of shyness.

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Description: Edmondo and Thérèse (Degas) Morbilli by Degas, Edgar

51. Degas, Edmond and Thérèse (Degas) Morbilli, 1867. 117.5 × 90 cm. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Robert Treat Paine, 2nd.

The more we concentrate on this picture, the more we feel that the recessive space allotted to the woman makes her husband loom unusually large, almost emphatically so. Degas staged the lighting so that Morbilli’s head casts a prominent shadow on his wife’s face, further subordinating her by making her peer out between two shadows. Neither figure appears to welcome us. On the contrary, they do not smile and the man’s protective, nearly belligerent pose is seconded by the woman’s gesture of shyness, as though they were both reacting to our intrusion. This is all the more extraordinary, because the woman is Degas’s own sister! Why should either figure adopt such poses when facing a brother? We might rather expect the opposite, some sense of a bond with the artist, therefore with the observer (furthermore, Morbilli was a cousin whom Degas and his sister had known for a long time). Perhaps the absence of signs of affection and warmth was owing to the latent jealousy of a brother for his sister’s husband. If so, it would hardly be unconscious, for the artist carefully constructed every feature of this composition. It might be that Degas exploited his own feelings knowingly, in order to create a strangely detached view of a contemporary couple.39 Boggs 1962, p. 18, gives a very perceptive analysis of this picture which underlies mine, although we are not in entire agreement. David R. Smith, “Rembrandt’s Early Double Portraits and the Dutch Conversation Piece,” Art Bulletin 64 (June 1982): 259–88, calls attention to Dutch prototypes for paintings which disclose “an interrupted moment of domestic intimacy” with hints of tension.

His best known representation of domestic strain is Interior (Pl. 52), one of the very rare impressionist paintings that has a precise literary source. Degas referred to it simply as “my genre painting,” but we know that it is based on Zola’s Thérèse Raquin.40 Reff 1976, pp. 200–38. It depicts Thérèse and Laurent who, a year earlier, had murdered her first husband. It is now their wedding night, but guilt has altered their feelings and they cannot abide one another. In this painting Degas’s misanthropy reaches an extreme point and sets him apart from Morisot and Cassatt. He has brought his cynicism in from the street, and in this interior, detachment turns into alienation. Even so, Degas was not isolated from the naturalism that so thoroughly marked his era. Balzac and Flaubert had often dealt with marital dissonance, and his alertness to Zola’s text makes him an ally of the naturalism of his own generation (he was generally closer in spirit to the Goncourt brothers than to Zola, whose penchant for the violent was foreign to him). That he was drawn to domestic discord does not make him more a naturalist than Morisot, but it makes him a different one.

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52. Degas, Interior, c. 1868–69. 81 × 116 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Henry P. McIlhenny Collection.

Degas’s Objectivity: The Artist as Stranger

Although naturalism and its corollary, detachment, are the appropriate terms for Impressionism, their relevance has often been ignored. The sticky issue is “detachment,” because the painters, by omitting authorial judgment, have fooled many into believing that their art was an empty-headed kind of picture-making.41 It is true that Theodore Reff and some other art historians who specialize in Impressionism have reinforced the relationship to naturalism, but in an influential text, César Graña accepted the idea that the impressionists painted their surroundings in a rather unreflecting way. Graña does not condemn Impressionism, but rather, praises it for being “a peripatetic, tremulous art, thoroughly occasional and typically free of philosophical proclamations.” He refuses to regard impressionism as a pictorial form of naturalism, for “not only was naturalism exclusively a literary movement, it was also the ideology of the rebellious intelligentsia of the Second Empire. Impressionism, on the other hand, was, quite obviously, an art created by men who felt socially comfortable and politically unconcerned and who celebrated with a kind of amiable lyricism the bourgeois pleasures surrounding their lives.” (Grana 1971, p. 74.) Because they do not understand the real significance of the Impressionists’ detachment, Graña and other observers do not see behind the glitter of their painted surfaces. (Besides, Manet was a member of the “rebellious intelligentsia.”) The most penetrating analysis of detachment or, to use his word, “objectivity,” is Georg Simmel’s, in his justly famous essays, “The Stranger” of 1908, and “The Metropolis and Mental Life” of 1903.42 In Simmel 1971, pp. 143–49 and 324–39. He was not writing about painters, but his analysis is of great value for the interpretation of Impressionism. Although it grows from his discussion of the newcomer to the city, one free of long attachment to his adopted place of residence, it incorporates key components of the modern urban dweller’s outlook and need not be limited to the “stranger” or to men (whom he always posits, instead of women).43 Simmel’s conception lies behind the analyses, already utilized in this chapter, of Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, both former students and admirers of his (Kracauer 1937 and Benjamin 1973). Graña’s brilliant and sometimes wrong-headed “Impressionism as an Urban Art Form” takes Simmel to task, but also builds upon his ideas. Graña is the first commentator on Impressionism to have linked Simmel’s idea of the stranger to Impressionism (p. 93), by way of their detachment or “dégagé” attitude. He does this hesitantly, since he denies Simmel’s underlying definition of “objectivity” and its ties to the money economy.

“Objectivity,” writes Simmel, “is by no means non-participation,” but is instead “a positive and definite kind of participation.” It characterizes a mind that does not merely register a message, but on the contrary, one that focuses its energies on the subject of its attention by eliminating accidental, temporary, and distracting qualities. Objectivity, in other words, “does not signify mere detachment and nonparticipation, but is a distinct structure composed of remoteness and nearness, indifference and involvement.”44 Simmel 1971, p. 145. In this Simmel rejoins the definition of the flâneur whose acute powers of observation, according to Victor Fournel, are an active force that is projected outwards: “he animates everything he sees.”45 See above, Chapter One, p. 20. Simmel’s views seem to have benefited from familiarity with the writings of the flâneurs. Benjamin, in turn, draws both from Simmel and the flâneurs when he notes that the seeming lack of involvement of flâneur and detective is a disguise for their penetration (see above, Chapter Two, p. 34). He also rejoins the broad current of naturalism in which Flaubert, Duranty, the Goncourts, and Baudelaire all found common cause, despite their differences. They disliked an obvious authorial presence and insisted instead on the apparent neutrality of the writer-reporter, yet they treasured the essential passion that remained artfully hidden.46 For example, in Baudelaire’s famous formulation: “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—such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures….” (From “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” 1863, in Baudelaire 1964, p. 9.) Although physically close to the objects of his attention, Simmel’s observer, quite like the naturalist writer and the natural scientist, avoids emotional engagement with them, that is, he maintains a psychological distance. This distance, viewed from the perspective of some fellow citizens, might seem to result from callous indifference, but it can also be defined as freedom. Compared to ordinary persons, Simmel’s objective individual is freer because “he examines conditions with less prejudice; he assesses them against standards that are more general and more objective; and his actions are not confined by custom, piety, or precedent.”47 Simmel 1971, p. 146.

With the aid of Simmel’s formulation, we can see that detachment is not merely aloofness, but a complex dialogue of nearness and remoteness, of close attention and uninvolvement. In Cassatt’s Cup of Tea (Pl. 49), we are brought very close to the two young women, but we are utterly removed from them. We confront Manet’s Street Singer (Pl. 38) directly, but her blank stare and self-containment detach us from her. Even though the woman in his Railroad (Pl. 31) looks up at us, we are given no hint of recognition, and seem to have chanced upon her as might Simmel’s stranger. More disconcerting still, given the dramatic nature of the event, is the detachment imposed on us by Manet’s cool treatment of The Execution of Maximilian (Pl. 63).

Degas, among the impressionists, is the most complete embodiment of Simmel’s “objective individual.” His Print Collector (Pl. 54), compared with Daumier’s painting of the same subject (Pl. 53), lets us distinguish impressionist detachment from mid-century naturalism. Both collectors are treated as contemporaries, but Daumier distances us from his by using a Chardinesque glow that avoids the immediacy of Degas’s harsh light. His figure is further away, as though we are at the front of the shop, or outdoors, looking through the window. He is unaware of our presence and is ennobled by his devotion to his album. Degas’s collector, on the other hand, is extremely close to us and has engaged our eyes. He is crouched over his folio, sheltering it with his legs. Clearly he is looking at us as a potential rival or, at least, as an intruder (his pose shares something with Edmond Morbilli, (Pl. 51). Of course, Degas did not simply “see” this scene. He created it by combining various observations and studies in a complicated process of great deliberateness. We can therefore be sure that he has calculated his effect of physical nearness and psychological distance. In this urban encounter in a public space, the viewer confronts a stranger from whom he is detached, yet with whom there is this odd involvement. Simmel’s definition of objectivity can be used to describe Degas’s composition: “it is a particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement.”

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Description: The Print Collector by Daumier, Honoré

53. Daumier, The Print Collector, c. 1860. 40 × 32 cm. Paris, Musée du Petit Palais.

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Description: The Print Collector by Degas, Edgar

54. Degas, The Print Collector, 1866. 52 × 39 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Mrs. H.O. Havemeyer, 1929. The H.O. Havemeyer Collection. (29.100.44).

Further insights into the nature of Degas’s collector result from a close look at his surroundings, compared with Daumier’s. In the earlier picture we see only prints and drawings, but Degas’s figure is encircled by curios of different sorts: flower prints, the statuette of a horse, a table heaped with albums and prints, and on the wall above, a miscellany of visiting cards, small prints or photos, and swatches of Japanese textiles (used as covers of small notebooks). These objects suggest a connoisseur, yes, but not Daumier’s kind, devoted to one species of art. He is instead the acquisitor-collector who hunts for the rare, overlooked print, who monopolizes the shop’s folio, and who looks with unfriendly eye on us, setting up a psychological tension that lets us know we face a competitor. He is on the qui-vive, an alert urban dweller who lives by his wits.48 And Degas’s wit, bordering on the ruse, is revealed by the illogical treatment of the wall above the man’s shoulder. The curio cabinet and the table share a common axis, but the wall seems to bend back at another angle, judging by the frame that holds that jumble of small pieces. The ruse succeeds because Degas uses the man’s head to hide the juncture of wall and cabinet.

Another Degas, Portraits in an Office, New Orleans (Pl. 55), is one of the rare impressionist works ever to have entered into a discussion of the new urban objectivity. Rudolf Arnheim interpreted this picture in terms that complement Simmel’s conception.49 “Accident and the Necessity of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 16 (1957): 18–31. It represents Degas’s family’s enterprise in New Orleans. His uncle is seated in the foreground, examining cotton. Near him is his brother-in-law, reading a newspaper, while his brother is leaning against the counter on the far left. The matter-of-factness of this scene, all the odder because it presents the artist’s own family, is one of its leading characteristics. Degas does not link one figure with another in a traditional sense. Instead he examines them with the same dispassionate eye that his uncle turns on his cotton sample. This detachment constitutes a new kind of pictorial order, for the causal and psychological connections among these businessmen are not indicated. Judged by the conventions of earlier painting (therefore of earlier society), the relationships in Degas’s picture indicate, in Arnheim’s formulation, “the atomization of society in an age of individualism.” It suggests “a communal pattern in which all joints are loose. No over-all constellation holds the crowd together, and hence there is no limit to the changes that may occur in the relationships between the participants.”

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Description: Portraits in an Office, New Orleans by Degas, Edgar

55. Degas, Portraits in an Office, New Orleans, 1873. 73 × 92 cm. Pau, Musée municipal.

Arnheim’s perceptive remarks imply a great deal, but he did not look for an underlying explanation for this matter-of-fact rendering of modern businessmen. For that we should turn to Simmel, who probed into the meaning of modern individualism and impersonality. Following Marx, Simmel claimed that it is the modern money economy that lies behind the “objective individual.” Money and commodities dominate the new urban economy, which forms such a huge and complex market that direct contacts between those who make the goods and their customers are no longer common. Monetary transactions take place in abstract ways, thanks to the many intermediaries between maker and buyer, so that the social relationships that once bound them together are done away with. Stock markets replace direct investment in land or business; instead of artisans that one knew, large stores supply furniture and clothing; instead of water carriers and nightsoil men, municipal services take care of water and sewage. Money increasingly substitutes for direct human interaction, and from its abstract nature there flows a broad current of change. Modern city dwellers have been uprooted from any country or village origins, and they discard allegiance to pre-modern values. They invest in new enterprises rather than in landed property, and consequently they object to old customs and laws which prevent assaults on the land represented by mining, highway building, deforestation, or other measures of “progress.” This is why the modern person is free, unattached, in Simmel’s definition of objectivity. Like the flâneur, Simmel’s urban dwellers avoid emotional involvement in order to make rational calculations born of objective judgments. They are willing to take risks on new products or new processes because they are free from the tradition and sentiment that might interfere with their computations:

The calculating exactness of practical life which has resulted from a money economy corresponds to the ideal of natural science, namely that of transforming the world into an arithmetic problem, and of fixing every one of its parts in a mathematical formula. It has been money economy which has thus filled the daily life of so many people with weighing, calculating, enumerating, and the reduction of qualitative values to quantitative terms.50 Simmel 1971, pp. 327–28. The aptness of Simmel’s formulation has been pointed to in Clark 1985, pp. 238–39·

The impersonality of the money economy, in other words, is the setting for the impersonality and the detachment of the individual.

Simmel had more than one city in mind, but Paris in the Second Empire and Third Republic would vindicate his analysis better than most. The wholesale remaking of the city under Louis Napoleon and Haussmann, with its destruction of traditional neighborhoods, helped transform the capital into a society of strangers. The rampant speculation of that era, the development of a “mushroom aristocracy,”51 The phrase is Elizabeth Latimer’s, in France in the Nineteenth Century, 1830–1890 (Chicago, 1892), p. 176. the clash of new and old values, were inextricably bound up with its position as cultural and fashion center of Europe. Zola’s and Daudet’s novels are justifiably full of financial adventurers; speculators and men of new fortunes were prominent among the impressionists’ patrons.52 Marilyn Brown, preparing a publication on Degas’s Portraits in an Office, has identified the members of the municipal committee in Pau who purchased the picture in 1874. They were largely ardent Republicans and progressive businessmen. This was the heyday of speculating in art, and Paris was the central market for that commodity. A conspicuous representative is Ernest Hoschedé, Monet’s patron, whose collection of impressionist and other paintings was engulfed in a notable bankruptcy. Another example is Ernest May, a more successful investor who is the central figure in Degas’s Portraits, At the Stock Exchange (Pl. 56). He was one of the artist’s clients, and a sometime friend, who formed a notable collection of mid-century and contemporary art. Faithful to his own objectivity, Degas represents May not as the connoisseur, but as the stock-market expert. He exposes the source of May’s wealth and lets us deduce that the same calculative abilities lay behind his collecting of art.

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Description: Portraits at the Stock Exchange by Degas, Edgar

56. Degas, Portraits, At the Stock Exchange, 1879. 100 × 82 cm. Musée d’Orsay.

The impersonality that characterizes the money economy, according to Simmel, is only a thin coating over the tension that results from the need to detach oneself from the persons and objects confronted at every turn in the modern city. The anxiety of physical nearness and psychological remoteness is best glossed over by a pretended indifference or, to use Simmel’s preferred term, “reserve.” Detachment and Simmel’s terms “objectivity” and “reserve” are all closely related concepts. Exposed to so many stimuli, the city dweller “would be completely atomized internally and come to an unimaginable psychic state” if she had to reckon fully with each encounter, hence this reserve. Because the effort to achieve apparent indifference is actually full of anxiety, it is sometimes mixed with aversion, even with antipathy:

Our minds respond, with some definite feeling, to almost every impression emanating from another person. The unconsciousness, the transitoriness and the shift of these feelings seem to raise them only into indifference. Actually this latter would be as unnatural to us as immersion into a chaos of unwished-for suggestions would be unbearable. From these two typical dangers of metropolitan life we are saved by antipathy which is the latent adumbration of actual antagonism since it brings about the sort of distancing and deflection without which this type of life could not be carried on at all.53 Simmel 1971, p. 331.

Degas’s Portraits, At the Stock Exchange exhibits this mixture of detachment and antipathy. Not only are May and his friend Bolâtre presented in an unflattering light, but the two men further back on the left (Pl. 57) are literally caricatures of financial conspirators. Caricature bears with it the sense of social attack, of antipathy, adulterated with humor so as to make it acceptable. The frequent appearance of caricature, or something close to it, in Degas’s work speaks for the misanthrope, the detached observer whose emotional solution to the dilemma of nearness and remoteness was a pronounced cynicism. This suits the temperament of the flâneur, who is appropriately defined as having a “disdainful skepticism” and an “unhealthy pride.”54 Fournel 1858, p. 263. Degas’s cynicism was in baleful harmony with his social isolation, and was clearly attached to the money economy. After his family’s banking business went bankrupt in 1874, he was obliged to sell his paintings—”articles” he derisively called them—as so many wares. The combination of sharp dealing and self-consciousness which ever after characterized his transactions reveals the predicament of the scion of a wealthy family, forced to accommodate to the new era.

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Description: Portraits, At the Stock Exchange, detail by Degas, Edgar

57. Degas, detail of Portraits, At the Stock Exchange (Pl. 56).

A banking office, in fact, is the setting for one of Degas’s most striking expressions of anxiety and antipathy, Sulking (Pl. 58).55 Reff 1976, pp. 116–19. The print on the wall reproduces J. F. Herring’s “Steeple Chase Cracks.” The woman was posed by the model Emma Dobigny, and the man presumably by Edmond Duranty (judged by resemblance). For interesting parallels with visiting card photographs of two persons, see McCauley 1985, p. 161. We do not know a particular text or anecdote that might lie behind this picture, but its force as an expression of the instability and tension of modern life must owe something to the family business. When we confront the picture, we realize that we are intruders. The woman is relatively neutral, though not forthcoming in her stare. The man’s sidelong glance acknowledges us reluctantly, while it rejects the woman; his unexplained anger generates great discomfort in us (anger at our interruption, or anger preceding our appearance, or both?). Degas sets up a secondary tension by simultaneously separating the two figures and joining them with the strong axes of the desk and the British sporting print on the wall. All this fictional tension is transferred to us and becomes real, when we read the painting. This sequence of pictures, The Print Collector, Portraits in an Office, and now Sulking, offers convincing proof of the connection between an artist’s own history and the social significance of art. Simmel’s “money economy” was never given more profound embodiment, and capitalism, never a more troubling analysis.

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58. Degas, Sulking, c. 1873. 32.4 × 46.4 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Mrs. H.O. Havemeyer, 1929. The H.O. Havemeyer Collection. (20.100.43).

We can pursue Degas’s biography one step further, to prove beyond doubt that he was an exemplar of the anxious condition of the modern city dweller. His cynicism and temperamental isolation led him, in later years, to retreat from society, to the point of becoming a veritable recluse and a pronounced anti-semite. Before he reached that stage, however, his paintings manifested his underlying loneliness, another feature of the struggle for objectivity and indifference. Louis Wirth, Simmel’s American admirer, noted that the dilemma of nearness and remoteness could induce not just nervous tension and antipathy, but also loneliness: “Frequent close physical contact, coupled with great social distance, accentuates the reserve of unattached individuals toward one another and, unless compensated by other opportunities for response, gives rise to loneliness.”56 “Urbanism as a way of life,” (orig. 1938) in A. J. Reiss, ed., Louis Wirth on Cities and Social Life (Chicago, 1964), p. 75.

Woman with Chrysanthemums (Pl. 59) is one of the many paintings by Degas that produces a disturbing sense of loneliness. It is, to begin with, an odd composition. If it is a portrait, why is the woman not given central place? If a painting of flowers, why is the woman seated there? Above all, why is she looking out of the picture? Her pose, most particularly the way her hand is pressed to her lips, suggests a mood somewhere between melancholy and worry. It is not simply the pensiveness of the woman seated in Morisot’s Interior (Pl. 48). The theme of being alone, with hints of estrangement, is also the subject of The Loge (Pl. 60). It can be regarded at first merely as a piece of observation. From a lower level of boxes, the tops of whose chairs show at the base of the composition, we look up to a private box where a lone woman is seated. Gradually, however, Degas’s clever construction works its way on us, and we become increasingly penetrated by that woman’s lonely condition. This is all the more true because in a representation of a theater, we would expect some suggestion of the social pleasure of a public entertainment. The absence of anyone in the lower box (perhaps this is intermission?) fortifies the lack of companions for the woman above. And why is the observer staring up at her? Is the possibility of our own isolation implied, by our having spied this brooding image? The gaiety of the sculpted front of the loge mocks her aloneness, for in all the space that is available, there she is, squeezed into that corner, her head severed from her surroundings by the dark railing of the loge.

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Description: A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers (Madame Paul Valpinçon?) by Degas,...

59. Degas, Woman with Chrysanthemums, 1865. 74 × 92 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Mrs. H.O. Havemeyer, 1929. The H.O. Havemeyer Collection. (29.100. 128).

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60. Degas, The Loge, 1880. Pastel, 66 × 53 cm. Washington, D.C., Mr. Paul Nitze.

Degas’s responsiveness to moods of loneliness is allied to his frequent probing of tension or estrangement among his figures.57 “Estrangement” and more commonly “detachment” are the right words for Degas, not “alienation.” Except for his Interior (Pl. 52), “alienation” is too strong a term for him. It should be reserved for the next generation, say Van Gogh or Edvard Munch. Degas’s own estrangement should be linked to his anti-semitism, which turned virulent after 1890, as he became more and more reclusive. See the penetrating essay which appeared just as this book was going to press: Linda Nochlin, “Degas and the Dreyfus affair: Portrait of the Artist as an Anti-Semite,” in the exhibition catalogue The Dreyfus Affair (New York, 1987–88), pp. 96–116. He was more a misanthrope than the other impressionists, more a victim of the operations of the money economy, more the member of an uprooted upper class forced to descend to the bourgeois market, more the urban stranger than they. To say this is not, however, to deny him his place in a generation characterized by detachment from history, from religion, from mythology, even from emotional involvement with fictional personages. The impressionists were all naturalists who stared present-day life in its face, who revealed the predicament of modern beings, their contemporaries and ours, forced to confront others whom they do not know, and denied the means of healing over the breach that industrial capitalism opened out among them. Manet’s Street Singer (Pl. 38) and his Railroad (Pl. 31) make us recall our sense of aloneness when we encounter strangers on the street; Morisot’s and Caillebotte’s interiors (Pls. 48, 50) alert us to the fact that modern women and men can live in solitary psychological worlds, despite their apparent togetherness.

In the next chapter we shall see that even in Parisian cafés and restaurants, those arenas of good food and good cheer, the anxieties of modern life are brought forth and analyzed by these prescient artists, and we shall see that Manet, no less than Degas, Manet the convivial man about town—no misanthrope he!—that Manet too was concerned with separateness as well as with union, with loneliness as well as with gaiety. This does not mean that we have to anticipate a dreary wandering through seamy taverns: gaiety is there along with loneliness, cleverness is more in evidence than sordidness. It does mean that Degas’s predilection for the estranged moment, although it has a bitter character all his own, is shared by other painters. Their constructions gain in naturalness, as they gain in beauty, when we recognize their complexity.

1 The painter as flâneur has been analyzed in Sandblad 1954, Reff 1976, Hanson 1977, and Caillebotte 1976–77. Degas’s associations with naturalist writers have been admirably studied by Reff in an essay of 1970, revised for Reff 1976, pp. 147–99. »

2 Particularly well in Bazin 1833, vol. 2, pp. 298–323. »

3 That this association of writer/artist with newspapers was a fundamental aspect of modern life is shown by its continued importance; one might cite cubist and futurist collage, Dada art, Rauschenberg and Warhol, to say nothing of Hemingway, Orwell, and Benjamin. »

4 Benjamin 1973, p. 37. »

5 Bazin 1833, vol. 2, p. 308: “préfet de police” (police commissioner). »

6 Moers 1960, p. 264. »

7 All Manet scholars have discussed Baudelaire, but the first profound discussion of Manet as the flaneur is Nils Sandblad’s (Sandblad 1954). The best recent account of the links between Manet and Baudelaire is by Druick and Zegers: see below, note 15. »

8 This interpretation owes a great deal to Benjamin’s famous essays collected in Benjamin 1973. »

9 Reff 1976, p. 104. Since Degas’s day, the painting in question has been demoted from Cranach’s work to that of his followers. »

10 More likely wit, since Degas was the last artist to be unaware of what he was doing. And he got away with the suppression of the leg, since no Degas specialist has drawn attention to it! Degas also eliminated any legs under the tables in his Absinthe (Pl. 76). »

11 Fournel 1858, p. 263. »

12 Proust 1913, p. 29. »

13 Proust 1913, pp. 39–40 »

14 The multiple meanings of cherries (cerises) in Manet’s era have been confirmed by the historian François Caradec (personal communication, 1986). La guigne is a common variety of sour cherry, but the verb guigner meant “to give a sidelong glance,” in the sense of a malevolent look. Hence to have la guigne and to have la cerise both meant to have bad luck. »

15 Douglas Druick and Peter Zegers, “Manet’s ‘Balloon:’ French Diversion, The Fête de l’Empereur 1862,” Print Collector’s Newsletter 14 (May-June 1983): 38–46. »

16 See the first chapter of Sandblad 1954. »

17 Whitehurst 1873, vol. 2, p. 95, and Tuckerman 1867, p. 56. »

18 Tuckerman 1867, pp. 156f. »

19 Tuckerman is not quite the prude that my citations might suggest, and, moreover, he so fervently wished the French to oppose Louis Napoleon that he interpreted their hedonism as political submission. This colored his perceptions, since he believed their saturation in the artificial and the theatrical was merely an extension of the Emperor’s tinselly, shallow regime: “Simplicity and earnestness are the normal traits of efficient character, whether developed in action or Art, in sentiment or reflection; and manufactured verse, vegetation and complexions indicate a faith in appearances and a divorce from reality, which, in political interests, tend to compromise, to theory, and to acquiescence in a military régime and an embellished absolutism.” (Tuckerman 1867, p. 157.) »

20 Moers 1960, passim. »

21 Baudelaire 1964, p. 11. »

22 Sandblad 1954, p. 63. »

23 Wechsler 1982, and Isaacson 1982. »

24 Art historians first began commenting on this by focusing on specific borrowings, such as Degas’s from Daumier, or Manet’s from popular illustrations, and subsequently by broader inquiries into the whole phenomenon. See Reff 1976 and Hanson 1977, and for broader studies, Beatrice Farwell, ed., The Cult of Images (Santa Barbara, exhib. cat., 1977), Isaacson 1982, and Ross 1982. »

25 For example, all of his brothel scenes (Pl. 115), and such paintings as Sulking (Pl. 58), Mme Dietz-Monin (Chicago, Art Institute), or The Stock Exchange (Pl. 56). »

26 Degas himself referred to Lavater, the famous phrenologist (Reff 1976, p. 217). »

27 The group is discussed by Ronald Pickvance in Degas 1879 (Edinburgh, exhib. cat., 1979, nos. 55–60, and in Thomson 1987, pp. 27–30. »

28 Benjamin 1973, p. 41. Benjamin was probably thinking of the passage from Balzac’s Théorie de la démarche (A Theory of Bearing) which has recently been cited in Wechsler 1982, p. 22: “The observer is incontestably the man of genius. All human inventions come from an analytic observation in which the mind acts with an incredible rapidity of insight. Gall, Lavater, Mesmer, Cuvier… Bernard de Palissy, the precursor of Buffon… Newton, and also the great painter and the great musician, are all observers… those sublime birds of prey who, while rising to high regions, have the gift of seeing clearly in matters here below, who can at the same time abstract and specify, make exact analyses and just syntheses.” »

29 As early as 1833 the flâneur was likened to a policeman. See above, note 5. »

30 Fournel 1858, pp. 269–71. »

31 Goncourt 1956, vol. 11, entry for 22 August 1876. »

32 Duranty in Le Réalisme, 15 March 1856, cited in Crouzet 1964, p. 441; the Goncourts in their journal, May 1859, cited in Caramaschi 1971, p. 43. »

33 L’Avenir de la science, pensées de 1848 (Paris, 1890), pp. 192, 194–95. »

34 Delvau 1867, p. 78: “belles de nuit.” Delvau names five similar cafés along this boulevard, and his description of the Café de Madrid could serve as the legend for Degas’s composition. On its terrace, he writes, “from 11 o’clock at night to 1 a.m.: swarms of young beauties—it doesn’t take too much imagination to call them beauties of the night—display themselves like espaliers on this terrace where, with the pretext of having ice cream or Bavarian cream, they wait for galant cavaliers to offer an arm to accompany them to the next Bignon.” »

35 See Chapter One, p. 18. »

36 Lemoisne 1946–49, vol. 1, p. 119: “Un tableau est une chose qui exige autant de rouerie, de malice et de vice que la perpétration d’un crime, faîtes faux et ajoutez un accent de nature.” »

37 When reviewing the impressionist exhibition of 1881 (Huysmans 1883, “L’Exposition des Indépendants en 1881,” p. 233). »

38 See Kirk Varnedoe’s analysis in Caillebotte 1976–77, no. 47. »

39 Boggs 1962, p. 18, gives a very perceptive analysis of this picture which underlies mine, although we are not in entire agreement. David R. Smith, “Rembrandt’s Early Double Portraits and the Dutch Conversation Piece,” Art Bulletin 64 (June 1982): 259–88, calls attention to Dutch prototypes for paintings which disclose “an interrupted moment of domestic intimacy” with hints of tension. »

40 Reff 1976, pp. 200–38. »

41 It is true that Theodore Reff and some other art historians who specialize in Impressionism have reinforced the relationship to naturalism, but in an influential text, César Graña accepted the idea that the impressionists painted their surroundings in a rather unreflecting way. Graña does not condemn Impressionism, but rather, praises it for being “a peripatetic, tremulous art, thoroughly occasional and typically free of philosophical proclamations.” He refuses to regard impressionism as a pictorial form of naturalism, for “not only was naturalism exclusively a literary movement, it was also the ideology of the rebellious intelligentsia of the Second Empire. Impressionism, on the other hand, was, quite obviously, an art created by men who felt socially comfortable and politically unconcerned and who celebrated with a kind of amiable lyricism the bourgeois pleasures surrounding their lives.” (Grana 1971, p. 74.) Because they do not understand the real significance of the Impressionists’ detachment, Graña and other observers do not see behind the glitter of their painted surfaces. (Besides, Manet was a member of the “rebellious intelligentsia.”) »

42 In Simmel 1971, pp. 143–49 and 324–39. »

43 Simmel’s conception lies behind the analyses, already utilized in this chapter, of Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, both former students and admirers of his (Kracauer 1937 and Benjamin 1973). Graña’s brilliant and sometimes wrong-headed “Impressionism as an Urban Art Form” takes Simmel to task, but also builds upon his ideas. Graña is the first commentator on Impressionism to have linked Simmel’s idea of the stranger to Impressionism (p. 93), by way of their detachment or “dégagé” attitude. He does this hesitantly, since he denies Simmel’s underlying definition of “objectivity” and its ties to the money economy. »

44 Simmel 1971, p. 145. »

45 See above, Chapter One, p. 20. Simmel’s views seem to have benefited from familiarity with the writings of the flâneurs. Benjamin, in turn, draws both from Simmel and the flâneurs when he notes that the seeming lack of involvement of flâneur and detective is a disguise for their penetration (see above, Chapter Two, p. 34). »

46 For example, in Baudelaire’s famous formulation: “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—such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures….” (From “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” 1863, in Baudelaire 1964, p. 9.) »

47 Simmel 1971, p. 146. »

48 And Degas’s wit, bordering on the ruse, is revealed by the illogical treatment of the wall above the man’s shoulder. The curio cabinet and the table share a common axis, but the wall seems to bend back at another angle, judging by the frame that holds that jumble of small pieces. The ruse succeeds because Degas uses the man’s head to hide the juncture of wall and cabinet. »

49 “Accident and the Necessity of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 16 (1957): 18–31. »

50 Simmel 1971, pp. 327–28. The aptness of Simmel’s formulation has been pointed to in Clark 1985, pp. 238–39· »

51 The phrase is Elizabeth Latimer’s, in France in the Nineteenth Century, 1830–1890 (Chicago, 1892), p. 176. »

52 Marilyn Brown, preparing a publication on Degas’s Portraits in an Office, has identified the members of the municipal committee in Pau who purchased the picture in 1874. They were largely ardent Republicans and progressive businessmen. »

53 Simmel 1971, p. 331. »

54 Fournel 1858, p. 263. »

55 Reff 1976, pp. 116–19. The print on the wall reproduces J. F. Herring’s “Steeple Chase Cracks.” The woman was posed by the model Emma Dobigny, and the man presumably by Edmond Duranty (judged by resemblance). For interesting parallels with visiting card photographs of two persons, see McCauley 1985, p. 161. »

56 “Urbanism as a way of life,” (orig. 1938) in A. J. Reiss, ed., Louis Wirth on Cities and Social Life (Chicago, 1964), p. 75. »

57 “Estrangement” and more commonly “detachment” are the right words for Degas, not “alienation.” Except for his Interior (Pl. 52), “alienation” is too strong a term for him. It should be reserved for the next generation, say Van Gogh or Edvard Munch. Degas’s own estrangement should be linked to his anti-semitism, which turned virulent after 1890, as he became more and more reclusive. See the penetrating essay which appeared just as this book was going to press: Linda Nochlin, “Degas and the Dreyfus affair: Portrait of the Artist as an Anti-Semite,” in the exhibition catalogue The Dreyfus Affair (New York, 1987–88), pp. 96–116. »

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