Pierre Bonnard, Woman with an Umbrella (Femme au parapluie), 1895
Visual spectacle
Printmakers like Pierre Bonnard focused primarily on the visual spectacle of the passing crowd.
They set out to capture the movements of passers-by in shadows and silhouettes.
Bonnard presented a strolling Parisienne in Woman with Umbrella as a lively and elegant, but sharply delineated expanse of black, and in doing so created an icon of modern urban life.
Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, The Street (La rue), poster for the printer Charles Verneau, 1896
Social types
More engaged artists presented the street as a place of encounter for different social types. While the lives of the social classes — and the sexes — generally remained strictly separate, everyone mixed when walking in the street.
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen depicted this quite literally in his monumental poster La rue, where the proletarian and the capitalist, the Parisienne and the laundress, mingle on the same street.
Further reading
- Charles Baudelaire, ‘A une passante’, in Les Fleurs du mal, 1857 en Le Peintre de la vie moderne, 1863
- Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, Berkeley 1998
- Ursula Perucchi-Petri, Die Nabis und das moderne Paris. Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton und Toulouse-Lautrec, aus der Sammlung Arthur und Hedy Hahnloser-Bühler und aus Schweizer Museums- und Privatbesitz, Bern 2011