Flaneurs @War No. 1
Today in Commercial Modernism we explored shifting cultural and technological frames for visual reportage. Civil War illustrator-correspondent Alfred Waud produced onsite sketches close to the action. Above, a Waud sketch from the first day at Gettysburg, on brown paper in pencil with Chinese white. Waud also produced written accounts to support the illustrations he sent back to the shop:
CULPEPPER, Friday, September 18. Your artist was the only person connected with newspapers permitted to go upon the recent advance to the Rapidan. An order of General Meade’s sent all the reporters back. It was a very wet and uncomfortable trip part of the time. I did not get dry for two days; and was shot at into the bargain, at Raccoon Ford, where I unconsciously left the cover and became a target for about twenty of the sharpshooters...
Above, Waud captures a cavalry unit on reconnaissance at Raccoon Ford. His written account (cited above and below) and the wood engraved translation of his sketch appeared in the October 3, 1863 edition of Harper’s.
The caption below the illustration reads, “Army of the Potomac–General Buford Attacked the Enemy at Raccoon Ford, September 14, 1863–Sketched by A. R. Waud.”
On Sunday, September 13, 1863, soon after our troops advanced from the Rappahannock, they became engaged with the enemy....General Buford made an attack to unmask their force at Raccoon Ford, while another cavalry division was doing the same at Somerville Ford; since which time shelling and sharp-shooting has been constantly kept up on the river banks. General Custer charged right up a hill to the enemy's battery, taking three guns and a number of artillerymen...
The cannon group that dominates the sketch appears bottom left on the printed page.
Wars and conflicts generally mean good business for publications and outlets like these. Above, an auspicious launch for DianShiZhai Huabao, a Shanghai pictorial (previously discussed) which in its first issue (1884) describes a battle in the Sino-French War, then raging; a matter of pronounced public interest.
The Japanese version of war "reportage" wedded the international vogue for illustrated newspapering with the craft tradition of Ukioy-e woodcuts to produce dramatic images of naval battles in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95. (When in Shanghai looking through pictorial coverage in FeiYingGe Huabao for 1895, I was curious to see if that conflict–a disaster for China–showed up in its pages. A cursory review suggested no. But I did not have the chance to look through DSZHB in search of the same information.)
The class had been assigned Baudelaire's The Painter of Modern Life as a reading. That essay, written in 1860 and published in 1863, pairs nicely with Manet's Olympia (1863), as the painting captures the frank engagement with the present for which the poet called, and was experienced as such an affront to the civilizing pretensions of art.
But Baudelaire's putative subject was the unnamed illustrator Constantin Guys, who did significant work for the London Illustrated News, particularly in Crimea. The essayist is less concerned with military reportage than with the immediacy and the evanescence of a cultural moment. Of Guys he writes:
The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd: For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world–such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito...
"Any man," he said one day, in the course of one of those conversations which he illumines with burning glance and evocative gesture, "any man who is not crushed by one of those griefs whose nature is too real not to monopolize all his capacities, and who can yet be bored in the heart of the multitude, is a blockhead! a blockhead! and I despise him!"
This imperative–to engage what is, who is, how things look–suggests journalistic output. But other modes emerged, too. There are connections to be drawn between American illustrators and American painter-reporters of the Ashcan School, for example in the person of William Glackens. Glackens traveled to Cuba to cover the Spanish American War for McClure's in 1898; later he focused on his painting career, but not without an editorial edge. The Shoppers (1907) above, suggests a point of view on the Gilded Age.
John Sloan, another of the Ashcan Clan, worked for Philadelphia papers but painted New York.
Sloan's political interests led him to work as the art director at The Masses, a socialist publication. His Ludlow Massacre cover is among his best known works.
But let's come back to Baudelaire and Guys. Baudelaire credits the illustrator with prodigious powers of observation, thoroughly attuned to his modern moment.
By 'modernity' I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable. Every old master has had his own modernity; the great majority of fine portraits that have come down to us from former generations are clothed in the costume of their own period...This transitory, fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid, must on no account be despised or dispensed with.
Toward the end of class we posed questions of our own period. What would the Constantin Guys of our time notice? Which customs and costumes, which artifacts, what speech, what ways of holding oneself, which contemporary textures, would our illustrator note and record? The beginning of that discussion focused particularly on technology: its manifestations and uses. Such an observation might have credibly been offered in any of the last 100 years. Which technology, what manifestations, and which influences upon contemporary life?
Secondly: what's behind the half-and-half formulation of the now and the ancient, the "contingent" versus the "immutable"? How shall we parse that equation in today's terms?
I invite comment on these questions. With more time to reflect, what do you really think about this? What might be the difference between a superficial answer–iPhones!–versus a more searching one?
Presently, a second installment which extends the technological and cultural dimensions of our discussion of visual reporting, from Alfred Waud to YouTube.
Alfred Waud, Attack of the Louisiana Tigers on a Battery of the 11th Corps at Gettysburg, (July 1, 1863) ink and Chinese white on brown paper
Waud, Reconnoisance [sic.] by Buford’s Calvary Towards the Rapidan River, ink and china white on brown paper
Waud,Army of the Potomac–General Buford Attacked the Enemy at Raccoon Ford, September 14, 1863, wood engraving in Harper’s Weekly, October 3, 1863
Wu Youru, Forceful Attack at Bac Ninh, DSZHB No. 1, 1884
Nakamura Shuko, Great Japanese Naval Victory off Haiyang Island, woodblock print, 1894
Edouard Manet, Olympia, oil on canvas, 1863
Constantin Guys, Reviewing the Regiment, inkwash illustration, n.d.
William Glackens, The Shoppers, oil on canvas, 1907
William Glackens, Loading Horses on the Transports at Port Tampa, Inkwash and Chinese white, field sketch on assignment for McClure’s Magazine, 1898
John Sloan, McSorley's Bar, oil on canvas, 1912
John Sloan, Ludlow Massacre, magazine cover forThe Masses, June 1914