As monumentally
straight, stark boulevards brutally erased ubiquitous narrow meandering paths,
and as architecture fell into ashes to make way for a radial concentric
circulatory plan, the aftermath of the revolutionary urban makeover envisioned
by Louis Napoleon III and executed by Georges-Eugène Haussmann during the
Second Empire (1851-70) left modern Paris in a state of socio-psychological
ambivalence for the sake of modernization, paving the way to modernity. On the
new Parisian stage, Impressionist painters, in their own way, capture a
pictorial glimpse of this conflicting--almost apprehensive--tension between the
celebration and criticism of the transformed modern metropolis: firstly, while
Monet extols the railway, Manet, Forain and Daumier respond with pessimism; secondly,
while Renoir and Monet use the bridge to portray enthusiasm towards the new order,
Caillebotte and Pissarro dig deeper beneath appearances to unravel an
unsettling anonymity and social ignorance in city life; finally, while Manet
and Pissarro delight in flux and diversity from crowds and traffic in the
reformed landscape, Caillebotte not only seeks to preserve the moment but also
exposes human alienation amid crowds and traffic on the Haussmannian streets
and boulevards, as it was experienced on the street as well as from the balcony
(window).
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| Catalog 1.
Claude Monet, The Normandy Train
(1877) |
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| Catalog 2. Jean-Louis Forain, A Study of Fog in a Station (1884) |
The groundbreaking establishment
of railway technology in nineteenth-century France became a symbol of Paris
accompanied by mixed feelings. At the Gare Saint-Lazare, Claude Monet paints The Normandy Train (1877) (cat. 1) among
a series of twelve similar illustrations of what stands today as the second
busiest train shed in the capital, in which he sees “new possibilities for
urban building” (Reff 64). The colossal, spacious glass structure juxtaposes
with the semi-camouflaged barrel vaults on the right that appear “modest in
scale and traditional in form” (Reff 64), almost as though the past had been
inadvertently masked in smoke and carelessly forgotten. The swirls of white and
blue hues emerging from the train chimney look like romanticized
interpretations of smoke that seem to blend with the white puffy clouds in the
natural blue sky. This contrasts directly against A Study of Fog in a Station (1884) (cat. 2) by Jean-Louis Forain,
where “yellowish fog pervaded the scene, the orange signal glowing in its
midst…fill the silent void” (Reff 66). For Monet, “the vastness of this partly
enclosed space, filled with steam and smoke and busting with movement, yet open
to the city and the sky beyond” anticipates a promising future for “human
achievement” (Reff 64) and national progress, even if it meant that large
machines were to diminish the role and position of passengers and laborers.
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| Catalog 3.
Edouard Manet, The Railroad (1873) |
At the same site of
the Gare Saint-Lazare a few years before Monet, Edouard Manet, however, in The Railroad (1873) (cat. 3), indirectly
presents the railroad station through thick, black bars in the cityscape with a
subtly threatening tone. The close-up of the bars and the two female figures at
the forefront reminds of a cage or a prison. The massive plume of smoke obscures
the object of the train itself, leading the viewer into a state of mild
confusion with regards to the source of the smoke, what the smoke had been
doing on the street, as well as which side of the fence was ‘caged’. A similar
mystery applies to the relationship between the two protagonists. In the
foreground, the woman stares straight at the audience while the little girl
gazes in the opposite direction at the commotion on the other side. There seems
to be neither acknowledgement nor association between the two characters,
although so near yet so far, just as the viewer chances upon this painting and
happen to momentarily distract the lady-reader from her page, but still remaining
as mere strangers. In this sense, both sides of the iron grill are ‘imprisoned’
by the uncontrollable force of industry inflicting both the physical city and
Parisian society. In a shared, neutral urban space, feelings of confinement
from the menacing iron grill, the separation between foreground and background,
and the division between the bourgeois females and the diminutive workers,
barely distinguishable, at the center-right altogether allude to a
“discontinuous, unclear, an odd mixture of immediacy, and lack of psychological
contact” (Herbert 29). While Monet revels in human accomplishment, Manet draws
a parallel between the “movement and steam, its comings to and fro, its moments
of sitting idle while waiting” (Herbert 28), which resulted from the railroad
with the dispassionate and anonymous passing by of strangers that marked modern
Paris from ‘old Paris’.
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Catalog 4. Honoré Daumier, The Departure of the Train (1860-65)
|
Like Manet, Honoré Daumier aims to “explore the
full range of emotion, from boredom through impatience to anxiety, experienced
by people of all classes of society” (Reff 60) with the rise of the railroad.
In The Departure of the Train
(1860-65) (cat. 4), the artist depicts a crowd of passengers moving inside the
station in a single direction with an urgency of time, determination,
competition, expectancy and almost impatience, as emphasized by their
forward-surging bodies (Reff 60). The candid visual representation of a
leftward-sloping diagonal line and triangular area of illumination further
contributes to the rigidity and resolve of people who structure their lives around
time and a schedule, a new phenomenon introduced by the railroad. In the Forain
painting, “all [the passengers] turn away to watch the train approaching out of
the fog—all but one [young woman] who turns toward us” (Reff 66), nobody knows
her motives or thoughts. This enigma emanating throughout the metropolis, shrouded
in the wonderment of progress in the Monet painting, echoes Manet and Daumier in
the intense individualized drama of railroad travel disappearing into and emerging
out of a dirty haze.
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| Catalog 5.
Claude Monet, The Pont Neuf (1872) |
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| Catalog 6.
Auguste Renoir, The Pont Neuf (1872) |
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| Catalog 7.
Camille Pissarro, The Pont Neuf
(1902) |
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| Catalog 8.
Camille Pissarro, Afternoon Sunshine (1901) |
As railroad transport
took flight, the bridge, such as the Pont-Neuf and Pont de l’Europe, became a major
thoroughfare for both pedestrians and vehicles. Monet and Auguste Renoir paint
their own versions of The Pont Neuf (1872)
(cat. 5, 6) in different seasons and weather, but both relish in the new Paris
for its bustling strollers, the “vitality…renewed activity and patriotic
pride”, especially after a loss in the civil war (Reff 42). Particularly for
Renoir, under the radiance of sunshine, he views modern Paris as “a city rich
in history and tradition, yet equally rich in its present resources,” teeming
with refreshed wellbeing and energy (Reff 42). Somewhat less emotionally
invested, on the other hand, Camille Pissarro approaches the very same site
(cat. 7) under various weather and seasons from a downward-looking vantage
point on the bridge and its diagonal position in the urban topography (Brettell
148), highlighting the “symmetry and circularity” (Brettell 160) and “the
interaction of bridge traffic and river traffic, the perspective vanishing onto
the opposite bank, the milling crowds, the smoke puffs in the sky and the
dramatic clouds” (Brettell 148). Albeit the seemingly similar motifs to that of
Monet and Renoir, there exists a shade of gloom in the colors that Pissarro
applies, even in his Afternoon Sunshine
(1901) (cat. 8) rendition. A dense intermingling of spectators, horses, carriages
and ambiguous lampposts fuses together into one big hubbub. The melting away of
distant buildings and blending together of crowds along the boulevards lends a
sense of disappearance reminiscent to that of the fog in the rail station, and which
match the rising smoke in the same picture.
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| Catalog 9.
Gustave Caillebotte, Le Pont de l’Europe
(1876) |
From an even more
complex perspective on the subject of bridges, Gustave Caillebotte exhibits Le Pont de l’Europe (1876) (cat. 9) with
a dominant focus on the compositional ‘X’ of the iron structure that corresponds
to an equally commanding attention on the bourgeois top-hatted gentleman on the
left. The uncompromising horizontals, verticals and diagonals in the girders
and railings evoke a consistent mood with the black iron bars in The Railroad by Manet. Similarly, the way
the working-class man leans against the metal railing and gazes afar into an
unknown distance resembles the posture of the little girl in the Manet painting
who peers between the bars into ‘the other side’. In this way, both
Impressionists convey the notion that “the workers are treated as idlers,
absorbed in a familiar environment, and lacking the flâneur's powers of detached analytical observation” (Herbert 24). Yet
while Manet blatantly discloses the division of social classes through the visible
medium of bars, with middle-class in the foreground and working-class in the
background, Caillebotte simply reproduces an honest reality as he confronted it
on an average day: the hierarchy of classes sharing a same public space but who
each instinctively kept their distance, both physically and attitudinally. In
the Caillebotte representation, the dog in the center “acts as a spatial arrow
in its parallel thrust along the shadow line” (Varnedoe 98), enforcing the suggestion
of motion to the otherwise rather frozen moment, but also acting as an
intermediary between the middle and lower classes on the left and right,
respectively. The artist intensifies the anonymity and aloofness that Manet manifests
in The Railroad. When Monet, Renoir
and Pissarro absorb the panoramic and aesthetic awe of Paris transformed, dwarfing
the crowds with dabs of smoky colors, Manet and Caillebotte, looking past the
grandeur, contemplate the people in their fashion and behavior to discover an
increasingly unsettling abyss within oneself and between classes under the
impetus of modernization.
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| Catalog 10.
Edouard Manet, The World’s Fair of 1867
(1867) |
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| Catalog 11.
Camille Pissarro, Boulevard Montmartre
(1897) |
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| Catalog 12.
Camille Pissarro, Avenue de l’Opera
(1898) |
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| Catalog 13.
Camille Pissarro, Boulevard des Italiens
(1897) |
Amidst the thriving
energy of traffic, movement, commerce, culture and ambition propelled by the
anticipation of the machine, industry and technology, and facilitated by Haussmannian
thoroughfares, Paris witnessed a burst of cosmopolitan diversity unparalleled
to any other of the time. Such was the spirit in The World’s Fair of 1867 (1867) (cat. 10) by Manet when the world
flocked to Paris for “the Second Empire’s exposition
universelle on the Champ de Mars and his own retrospective exhibition
across the Seine” as he demonstrated the “luminous atmosphere and confident
execution, a faith in those values that the exhibition stood for—universality,
progress, and hope” (Reff 36). The conviction of infinite possibilities in the
future could be translated into the character of Haussmannian boulevards, for Pissarro
perceives the new roads as “capable of producing an infinite number of
possibilities [on the canvas]…under different combinations of light, weather
and seasonal change” (Brettell 60): at Boulevard
Montmartre (1897) (cat. 11), he sees “the lines of the boulevards almost
right up to the Portre Saint-Denis, or certainly up to the Boulevard
Bonne-Nouvelle” (Brettell 59); at Avenue
de l’Opera (1898) (cat. 12), he observes “the way the individual components
(pedestrians, carriages, omnibuses, and wheelbarrows) formed a set of patterns
all of their own, free, yet organized [and] autonomous” (Brettell 82); and at Boulevard des Italiens (1897) (cat. 13),
he shows “the daily, undistinguished, yet endlessly fascinating…kind of
traffic, the carnival procession and its dense throngs…of restless activity
extending infinitely in all directions” (Reff 50). The rhythm of his hurried
strokes imitate the irregular movement of people, carriages and buses, almost
as though recording the buzzing rhapsody of the metropolitan lifestyle.
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| Catalog 14.
Gustave Caillebotte, A Traffic Island,
Boulevard Haussmann (1880) |
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| Catalog 15.
Gustave Caillebotte, Paris, A Rainy Day
(1877) |
Contrary to the
boulevard series by Pissarro who loves the dynamic and flux of city traffic, A Traffic Island, Boulevard Haussmann
(1880) (cat. 14) by Caillebotte elicits a sense of ‘metropolitan nakedness’ replacing
the absence of large hordes, buildings, nature, and crisp horizontal lines.
From a vertiginous angle, the artist-flâneur
displays an oval traffic island, “formerly existed at the juncture of the
Boulevard Haussmann, the rue Scribe, and the rue Glück” (Varnedoe 151), using a blend of
bluish-grays and pinks, predominantly saturated by faded khaki, and blacks for the
lampposts and the people. The oval island, surrounded by wide-cut intersecting boulevards,
assumes a stage for either three identical top-hatted bourgeois gentlemen at
one moment, or possibly, the same man at three different points in time: one
with his back turned away from the viewer facing northeast, the second facing
in the opposite direction in the southwest, and the third on the road,
‘off-stage’, with his lower body cut off by the frame. Noticeably, the framing
of this painting, along with the three aforementioned boulevard landscapes by
Pissarro, The Departure of the Train
by Daumier, The Railroad by Manet,
and Paris, A Rainy Day (1877) (cat.
15) by Caillebotte, all employ the unconventional method of ‘cropping’, such
that what exists beyond the frame remains unknown to the audience; the Impressionist
painting effectively represents a fragment of reality, proposing the increasing
impossibility to capture a traditionally ‘complete’ external landscape in the
flux of urban sprawl. Back in A Traffic Island,
five lampposts serve as props on the oval stage, one in the middle and four at
four corners of the oval, which recall the eyes of the Panopticon,
corresponding to a political order of absolute control and complete
transparency under the authority of Baron Haussmann and Napoleon III. Furthermore,
the detachment between a single individual and his surroundings, the isolation of
one to another, and the randomness of a tiny person wandering through massive
thoroughfares altogether transpire out of an “eerie… urban emptiness” (Distel
171). The oval then conjures familiar nuances of socio-political and
psychological entrapment in the city, ironic against the backdrop of industrial advancement,
which hark back to the iron bars in The
Railroad by Manet and the iron
‘X’ structures in Le Pont de l’Europe
by Caillebotte.
As in A Traffic Island but unlike the works
studied earlier, the crowd in Paris, A
Rainy Day, a Caillebotte masterpiece, appears silent and uncommunicative,
as though one is invisible to another, each shielded and protected by the
umbrella to mark out a tangible and unwelcoming personal territory. Nobody,
including the viewer, knows where each is going, except the individuals
themselves. In contrast to the focused stares in The Railroad by Manet, the middle-class pedestrians in this
painting come across as distracted, occupied and uninterested: the couple on
the right glance to the side, each in slightly different directions, while the
man to the left of the lamppost simply looks down. Recalling the passengers in
the Daumier painting, no one truly lives in the present, instead they move
about linearly in the physical landscape with their psyche confined and
reserved in an unreachable dimension. The recurring symbol of the lamppost here
not only accentuates the verticals and horizontals, but also performs as an
illusory device of both the bond and the division between two sections of the
canvas, especially emphasized by the mint cut between cobblestone road on the
left and the smooth pavement on the right, as though the two disparate
paintings may be joined together into one via the lamppost—such was the orderly
streetscape of Baron Haussmann. The immaculate, cold cobblestone surfaces, wet
and shiny with rain, mimic the regularity, monotonicity and emotionlessness of Haussmannian
splendor. Comparably, the uniformly dark costumes and umbrellas of the bourgeoisie
that reflect a degree of acceptance, conformity, perhaps even pride, in
response to the dullness, rigidity and indifference of the reformed topography.
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| Catalog 16.
Gustave Caillebotte, The Man at the
Window (1875) |
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| Catalog 17.
Gustave Caillebotte, Man on a Balcony (1880) |
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| Catalog 18.
Gustave Caillebotte, A Balcony, Boulevard
Haussmann (1880) |
As Caillebotte turns
to study the streets from the window and later the balcony in The Man at the Window (1875) (cat. 16), Man on a Balcony (1880) (cat. 17), and A Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann (1880)
(cat. 18), he amplifies--and exposes even more plainly than the disposition of
the worker seen in Le Pont de l’Europe--the
phenomenon of urban detachment by showcasing the solitude of even middle-class
figures who survey at a high vantage point from (the interior of) apartment spaces
into the vast fabric of the city-scape below them. Like the lamppost in Paris, A Rainy Day, the ‘X’ in Le Pont de l’Europe, and the iron bars
in The Railroad by Manet, The Man at the Window features a “huge
stone balustrade [that] provides a massive line of division between the world
inside and the world beyond” (Varnedoe 89). While the lone spectator in the
painting, with his back turned away from the viewer, corresponds to the little
girl in the Manet painting, the viewer of the latter work only perceives the
seer, but the viewer of the former work can see both the seer and what he sees:
at a distance, a tiny bourgeois female silhouette traversing the boulevard. Again,
the idea of strangers anonymously watching other strangers runs parallel to the
relationship between the Impressionist artist and their subjects. The friction
here, though, lies between the comfortable but dark, closed private life versus
the open societal life with its unnaturally “bare, bright, restlessly angular
boulevards” (Varnedoe 90). The urban onlooker, in this painting as well as in Man on a Balcony, by withdrawing from
the Parisian boulevards and retreating indoors into an elevated space, appear
relatively more attuned to their minds and senses, more attentive to their
psyche than when traveling on the streets, but nonetheless, idle and cheerless,
and at the same time, still a part of the new Paris via the medium of the
balcony (window). The balcony then acts as a semi-private-semi-public
intermediary between indoors and outdoors, between comfort and danger, and between
knowing and unknowing. However, this carries a disquieting notion that one can
never escape the creation of Haussmann and all its implications, especially effects
on the human condition, because the balcony can also serve as that “narrow
platform that extends the private space of the home out over the public space
of the street” (Varnedoe 147); the concept of ‘no escape’ subtly alludes to the
Panopticon-like lampposts in A Traffic
Island, and the barrier imageries in Pont
de l’Europe and The Railroad by
Manet, and also overlaps with the political function of the new wide-cut boulevards.
While Man on a Balcony portrays an unblocked
view of the city, the other two paintings feature a “mass of tree foliage,
dabbed thickly in high-key greens, completely [blocking] the view of the
boulevard below” (Varnedoe 149). The tension between the natural and the
organic versus the artificial and the bullet-straight lines may be evident in
the balcony railings in the three canvases: in the first, the curves of the
balustrade bars and the chair inside contrast the diagonals, horizontals and
verticals outside; in the second, the even more curvaceous balcony décor that mirror
the entwining vines of the plant and copious leaves on the tree dominate the
rigid lines; but in the third, the steep diagonal of the balcony railing
returns and clashes directly with the abundance of foliage. Can one understand,
to an extent, the man-made city of artificial construction and unyielding
geometry as separating the individual human from his natural state of wellbeing,
whatever that may be? Compared to the blank, mysterious, and seemingly ignorant
and indifferent demeanors of people at the railroad, on the bridge and in the
haphazard crowds, Caillebotte, through three balcony (window) scenes, underlines
the growing reality of urban melancholia, implying “both a heightened
self-consciousness and an exacerbated awareness of the isolating power of
fleeing distance” (Varnedoe 90), spreading across social classes. On the surface,
the impeccable artifice of new Paris seamlessly veils the tragedies and losses of
old Paris in a deafening silence, yet in the face of human alienation on a
personal, interpersonal and socio-psychological level as illustrated by
Caillebotte, the reverence to and awesomeness of the infinite possibilities that
arise from ‘a new world’ as suggested by Pissarro, Manet and Monet suddenly become
hollow and meaningless.
The urban landscape of
Haussmannian Paris offered a variety of geometrical circulation patterns that gave
physical structure to the kaleidoscopic character of a ‘new Paris’: the
‘X’ at Pont de l’Europe, the oval traffic island, the pristine horizontals and
verticals that separated roads from pavements, the giant plus-sign (Varnedoe
111) in Paris, A Rainy Day, the
orderly, inverted ‘V’ at Boulevard Montmartre, the more organic, circular set
of roundabouts at Avenue de l’Opera, and both the curvilinear and dead-straight
diagonal balcony designs found on facades. While modern Paris opened a vista of
promising prospects, Caillebotte stood out from the other Impressionists in his
bold and relentless mission to uncover and understand the psyche of
city-dwellers, across the social strata, whose daily lives had forever been altered
by the chaos of railroad travel, the irreconcilable distance between social classes
on the shared bridge, the estrangement of crowds, the psychological isolation
of the individual, and the impassivity of streets and boulevards.
Images from Artstor.
