Unreliable Witness: TheFlâneuras Artist and Spectator of Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Abstract

In studies of nineteenth-century art and of Paris as the century’s paradigmatic capital, there has been a long history of taking for granted that there is a natural sympathy, if not a concrete overlap, between the flâneur and the artist. This association has gone all but unquestioned because it is based on statements by the prestigious advocates the flâneur has attracted – Balzac, Baudelaire, Benjamin. Much has been made of an alignment between flâneurs ’ way of looking and that of artists, or more precisely, progressive artists, both being exponents of what is presented as a quintessentially modern kind of vision. Indeed, such a bond has been claimed as corresponding to a premonitory grasp of the nature of modernity. 1 In what follows, I will show that this preoccupation with the flâneur as role model for artists is based on a consistent misreading of some of the canonical texts on which such a claim relies, and that there are several reasons for concluding that the flâneur is, in fact, an unreliable witness to the art world. This decoupling of art and the flâneur has the beneficial consequence of encouraging a reassessment of the type’s origins and transformations; that is, of reconsidering the historically specific meaning of the term. Indeed, one of the problems with the pairing of artist and flâneur is precisely that such a claim distorts a proper sense of historical contextualisation. As I will show, it is also an example of the process whereby aestheticisation is equivalent to depoliticisation.