“The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work I done”. (Benjamin, 1969, p.37)
A city explorer, a symbol of modernism and of the city of Paris. The figure of the flaneur, although difficult to describe, is still today associated to the city stroller, of walking while embracing the urbanized and modern world.
“ (...) Charles Baudelaire’s flaneur- a casual wanderer, an observer and reporter of nineteenth-century Paris.” (O’Mara, 2019, p. 99)
The concept of the flaneur was brought to the academy light by Walter Benjamin. Since then, it has been studied fervorously which resulted in the publication of many books and other academic essays which consequently led to many and divergent interpretations of what truly meant to be a flaneur
Regarding my artistic practice, however, I retained this idea of walking in the streets and blending between the crowds as the most important aspect in waht my practice concerns.
“And so, walking or quickening his pace, he goes his way, forever in search. In search of what? We may rest assured that this man, such as I have described him, this solitary mortal endowed with an active imagination, always roaming the great desert of men, has a nobler aim than that of the pure idler, a more general aim, other than the fleeting pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that indefinable something we may be allowed to call “modernity”, for want of a better term to express the idea in question. The aim for him is to extract from fashion the poetry that resides in this historical envelope, to distil the eternal from the transitory.” (Baudelaire, 1972, p.16)
Artists and authors
Charles Baudelaire
Walter Benjamin
Claude Monet
Pierre Bonnard
Van Gogh
Books, exhibitions and others
Obrist, H (2015) Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects. London: Penguin Random House UK
Le Bon, G. (2008) The Crowd a Study of the Popular Mind. Radford: Wilder Publications
Solnit, R. (2001) Wanderlust a History of Waking. London: Granta Books
Baudelaire, C. (1972) The Painter of Modern Life. London: Penguin Classics