Gawkers explores how artists and writers in late 19th-century Paris represented the seductions, horrors, and banalities of street life through the eyes of curious viewers known as badauds.
In contrast to the singular and aloof bourgeois flâneur, badauds were passive, collective, instinctive, and highly impressionable. Above all, they were visual, captivated by the sights of everyday life.
Beautifully illustrated and drawing on a wealth of new research, Gawkers excavates badauds as a subject of deep significance in late 19th-century French culture, as a motif in works of art, and as a conflicted model of the modern viewer.
Bridget Alsdorf examines the work of painters, printmakers, and filmmakers who made badauds their artistic subject, including Felix Vallotton, Pierre Bonnard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Honore Daumier, Edgar Degas, Jean-Léon Gerome, Eugene Carriere, Charles Angrand, and Auguste and Louise Lumiere.
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