Imagendering II

16      The nineteenth century had to teach people to come to terms with mass society and the resulting visual encroachment on private space. People were forced into greater reserve and the idea that one can be nowhere as lonely as in a crowd quickly took hold of the collective imagination. On the other hand, crowds could also provide effective hiding places where one could seek refuge in anonymity. Urbanism liberates identities, this experience is simultaneously one of disturbing loss and one of exhilarating opportunity. Edgar Allan Poe had expressed this feeling in his short story "The Man of the Crowd," in which a man walking the streets attracts a shadow existence, somebody who follows him and imitates his irregular perambulation. Poe's short story is often called the first description of the flaneur in literature. The flaneur was the epitome of the new spectatorial attitude to city life (Benjamin 567). The provocatively aesthetic attitude to the urban scene was a favourite pastime of gentlemen and indeed a male prerogative.

17      Art historians have presented considerable evidence to suggest that Impressionism "was a defence against the threat of rapid urbanization and rapid industrialization" (Chadwick 232). The changing face of cities and their instable social relations were presented in impressionist painting as a modern culture of increased leisure and consumption (Herbert 305). The impressionist style with its blurred representation of reality significantly changed the pictorial appearance of familiar social relations. Whether the artists were aware of it or not, the impressionist style produced an ephemeral impression that imbued the social relations depicted with a precarious volatility and transience. Thus many paintings by impressionists like Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassat must be seen in the context of the restructuring of public and private spheres. Although women's role as spectacle continued to dominate the period's visual culture, the increasing participation of women in public life challenged notions of female passivity and restraint.

18      As cultural changes, such as urban crowds, crime detection, and photography, brought the power of observation into general consciousness, art and aesthetic theory started to invite reflections on the process of viewing. Paintings by these impressionists made viewers adapt to a dramatically changed concept of realism opposed to the conventional idea that the message or subject of a painting is paramount. Broken brushstrokes called attention to the surface, distracting from the things represented. Sometimes the latter could only be identified at a certain distance from the canvas, a distance quite unusual for the contemporary visitor to the crowded Salon or the Royal Academy. This technique demanded participatory activity of the spectator or at least foregrounded the act of viewing. The most prominent feature of impressionist painterly experiments could be called a reorganization of the visual relationship between picture and beholder, a reorganization which disrupted the gaze of conventional pictorialism which had been completely devoted to the content. The unprecedented inaccessibility of surface, now covered in pastuse patches of paint, shocked viewers who were accustomed to fine "finish" as a manifestation of artistic technique. The particularity of impressionist technique provoked a creative response of the viewer who is invited to consciously reflect his or her own process of viewing to an unprecedented degree.

19      The second half of the nineteenth century was a time when the arts responded assertively to the challenge of the revolution in visuality that had taken place. Photography especially, which had rapidly disseminated into all major cultural areas, significantly altered ways of seeing and representing. Because it was thought of as an automatic self-revelation which could record reality more faithfully, photography may have played a liberating role for the arts, freeing painters from the duty of mimetic representation. In painting, the fleeting, transitory moment already captured by photography became more important in impressionist records of the play of outdoor daylight. Subjects in all the media became more contemporary and every-day. In literature, narrative techniques tended to reject the homogenizing panoramic vision of classic Victorian novels in favour of a single subjective perception. The subjective personal focus emerging in literary fictions of the late nineteenth century must clearly be seen in the larger context of a cultural re-conceptualisation of visuality. Foregrounding point-of-view in fictional narratives, such as Henry James's significantly titled The Portrait of Lady, shifted the centre of interest from action and plot towards the individual perception and consciousness of heroine. It is no coincidence that at the centre of the reorganization of the gaze in painting and fiction were female figures. The discussions of the "woman question" and the feminist movement had created a destabilization of strategies of the gaze and its attendant anxieties and desires.

20      Some painters responded to this situation by not only adopting the new broken style, but also by challenging traditional viewing expectations in terms of subjects. Prevented from asking men from outside the family or "dubious" models to pose, and limited in their access to the public life of bars and cafes, women artists often concentrated on the home. The social meanings produced by Mary Cassat's and Berthe Morisot's canvases, e.g. "Mother and Sister of the Artists" (1870) and "A Cup of Tea" (1880), transform informal interiors into a public statement. Through their compressions and juxtapositions of the pictorial spatial system they created an atmosphere of uncomfortably encroaching boundaries of feminine space, a mood somewhat at odds with prevalent notions of haven and retreat. Even more interesting is their depiction of a female venture into new territories, which Griselda Pollock has analysed. She demonstrated how impressionist women artists devised new options for the female gaze within the developing consumer society. Although women's role as spectacle continued to dominate the period's visual culture, the increasing participation of women in consumer culture challenged notions of the relegation of women to completely private sphere. Female spectatorship, becoming a social reality as female shoppers usurped the leisurely stroll of the previously exclusively masculine flaneur, also became a subject of female painting (Chadwick 242). Female artists like Mary Cassat and Berthe Morrisot explicitly pointed to hierarchies of the gaze in metropolitan public life which were by extension the same hierarchies produced in front of their canvases. Mary Cassat's "Woman in Black at the Opera" (1880) is an ironic response to male scopic power over the female body as an object of observation and evaluation. Many other painters were critical of notions of one-way rights of looking in anonymous metropolitan surroundings (Nochlin 23).