Entry #4 The Practice of Flâneur Demonstrated in Gustave Caillebotte’s Painting

Caillebotte, Gustave. Paris Street: A Rainy Day. 1877. Oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.

MDSB62 Media Portfolio Entry #4—Art
By: Annie Duong 

The Practice of Flâneur Demonstrated in Gustave Caillebotte’s Painting

Artworks such as paintings, drawings, videos, photography, and other forms of art are essential to visual culture, whether they are traditional or modern. The importance of art varies between different cultures. They can be interpreted in many diverse ways depending on the context in which it is placed in, as art does not have a final meaning. Most of the time, the purpose of art is to be looked at. Art has helped shape our visual culture today by introducing technology. As art is developing through technological reproductions, it helps divide our perceptions of our culture into different perspectives through multiple fields of gazes, etc. A particular oil on canvas painting about a couple walking down the streets of Paris by Gustave Caillebotte called, Paris Street: A Rainy Day in 1877, the flâneur plays a role in identifying its everyday life consumerism and the aspects of its culture, and the revolution of modernity.

When looking at the painting by Caillebotte, we get a sense of life in Paris. According to Benjamin Walter, “the flâneur pointed us towards the staging of specific ways of looking” (Hall, 321). Stuart Hall, editor of Representation, stated:

[Specific ways of looking caused by flâneur] were shaped by the new techniques of consumer display concentrated within the new retail and leisure-based districts of the large metropolitan cities like London and Paris, and by the representation of the city and consumption in visual terms within print cultural forms like periodicals. (321)

Hall talks about the gaze of the consumer in the streets of metropolitan cities.  Walter also described flâneur as the ‘consumerism gaze’, which means to stroll through the city streets. For example, when ‘strollers’ look into stores—called window-shopping—but have no intention of buying anything. Paris streets are commonly known to bear a rich inheritance of wealth and makes for an attracting voyeuristic site. In the painting, we can see the couple’s attention is adverted to something off the page, but we cannot see what they are looking at. The composition of this painting makes the viewer feel as if they were in the streets of Paris because the angle of the subject is placed at eye-level, which makes it easy to put it into perspective.

            Caillebotte’s painting represents modernism and urbanism due to the complexities of the modern city that creates new social bonds with others. The urbanism in the modern city preserves an individual’s individuality. Flâneur is also a meaningful concept in architecture. Street observers are often indirectly and unintentionally affected by the structure and design of the building they are passing. In an essay written by Chris Jenks called, “Watching Your Step: The History and Practice of the Flâneur”, he said:

[Flâneur] is an image of movement through the social space of modernity; not dissimilar, perhaps, to the circulation of Giddens’s ‘symbolic tokens’ of money and signs. The flâneur is a multilayered palimpsest that enables us to ‘move’ from real products of modernity, like commodification and leisured patriarchy, through the practical organisation of space and its negotiation by inhabitants of a city… (148)

Jenks explains how flâneur is like a mobile gaze, meaning we are able to move around in the space. The architectures of the social space of Paris allows the flâneurs to get distracted. For example, in Caillebotte’s painting of the streets of Paris, he captured the well known classical Haussmann buildings. In the painting, there are many streetwalkers—other flâneurs—quietly and anonymously observing Paris.

            Gustave Caillebotte’s painting, Paris Street: A Rainy Day, tells the story that the flâneur plays a role in consumerism, and the revolution of modernity through the renovations of architecture.

Works Cited

Caillebotte, Gustave. Paris Street: A Rainy Day. 1877. Oil on canvas. Art Institute of
          Chicago, Chicago.

Hall, Stuart, Jessica Evans, and Sean Nixon. Representation. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: SAGE

          Publications Ltd, 2013.