Degas loved taking the bus: “We were created to look at each other, weren’t we?” From the Renaissance to around the beginning of the 20th century, the crowd surges through European art: Brueghel’s peasant fairs and the patrician feasts of Veronese (“if in a painting there is a space left over, I fill it with figures,” he told the Inquisition during a terrifying interrogation in 1573); Manet’s top-hatted concertgoers in “Music in the Tuileries Gardens”; Renoir’s working-class Parisians waltzing across “Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette”. Then suddenly it stops. People en masse are conspicuously absent from 20th-century painting.
What happened to depictions of the social gathering? And why, in unexpected, sobering ways, is the crowd returning to art today?
Walter Benjamin called the crowd the central character of the 19th century. Urbanisation and revolution made it so, especially in Paris, where the crowd’s awareness of itself intensified during a century of uprisings, ending with the bloody Commune in 1871. Impressionism emerged from this insecure society: an art of instability, celebrating transient, democratic pleasures.
One crowd scene at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 was like none encountered before: a flickering vista of a Paris avenue, people and carriages dissolving in autumn sunlight. Monet’s “Boulevard des Capucines” mesmerised and horrified viewers by reducing the throng of figures to what critics called “countless little black licking marks . . . a chaos of indecipherable palette scrapings”. As the artist’s friend Gustav Geoffroy wrote, for years “Capucines” was “the chief argument against M Claude Monet’s painting”. Later it became iconic: the hastily glimpsed stream of modern life carried by a modern technique of rapid, fleeting Impressionist strokes pushed to abstraction. “Capucines” exhilaratingly introduced modern urban experience into painting: the individual blurred within an indefinite swarm.
From Veronese to Manet’s “Tuileries” (1862), crowd scenes had implied cohesion and community. Now the note was estrangement.
Seurat’s pointillist comedy “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” (1884) was the next landmark: 50 Parisians filing past by the Seine, all static, most cast in shadow and faceless — a frieze of disconnection. Seurat stilled scintillating Impressionist effects into solid yet unreal shapes, cut-out people stiff as topiary hedges. It is not quite a picture of social distancing, but no group of figures acknowledges the existence of another.
Seurat had anarchist leanings and immediately swayed the anarchist-Impressionist Pissarro. His greatest series depicts the Boulevard Montmartre 1897-98, combining influences from pointillism and Monet in sparkling bird’s-eye views of what was a 24/7 urban spectacle. Pissarro’s tiny figures are more realised than Monet’s, but rendered remote through painterly screens — of mist, sunlight, whipped-up leaves, electric light in the National Gallery’s unique nocturne. Pissarro was an open-hearted socialist. These cityscapes — attempting harmony, suggesting distance — symbolically close the century.
By then, the two pioneers really pushing beyond Impressionism were recluses: Cézanne, alone beneath Mont St Victoire grappling with formal structure, and Monet, who abandoned painting Paris in 1878, developing another sort of abstraction connected to memory and interiority in Giverny. They were heralds. For the next six decades, Modernist experiment played out in closed rooms rather than on the street — Picasso and Braque’s still lives of atelier props that launched Cubism before the first world war; Matisse’s odalisques in interiors; Surrealism’s dreamscapes; the studio fetishised by Giacometti and Bacon following the second world war.
There were exceptions, usually responses to extreme political situations: high colour, sardonic German Expressionist exaggerations by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (“Berlin Street Scenes”, 1913-15) and George Grosz (“Metropolis”, 1916-17); Picasso’s “Guernica” (1937); the cheerful gatherings in Soviet Socialist Realism. But by the 1940s, who in the west was still painting the crowd?
In Britain, there was one singular outlier. LS Lowry’s matchstick men and women on streets and parks shadowed by factories (“VE Day”, “A Football Match”, “Mill Scene”) are witty descendants of Monet’s “black licking marks”. T J Clark, curator of Tate’s revelatory 2013 exhibition, suggested Lowry chose a repetitive, affectless awkwardness to suggest “the immense social fact” of massed industrial life.
But why, Clark asked, was Lowry “the person to break the silence”? Perhaps because he was stubbornly tangential to modern currents. It is a paradox that Modernism, coinciding with rising democracy and accessibility of culture, fled from representing social experience in favour of introspection. It happened in literature too. “Here Comes Everybody” was the title of the sketch which Joyce developed into the apogee of self-referentiality Finnegans Wake, the initials of its shape-shifting hero Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker hinting at the link — the crowd turned inwards.
If the crowd mostly defies painting, it has become fertile territory for recent conceptual art. In “Crowds with Shape of Reason Missing” John Baldessari montaged crowd scenes from films, then painted out the middle — a central blank. In thrilling panoramas of thousands at work or play — cane weavers in Vietnam, Amsterdam ravers in “Dance Valley” — Andreas Gursky anatomises globalisation in photographic images as detached, as dizzying to the eye and as scarcely believable as Monet’s “Capucines” was to audiences in 1874.
The crowd and its social implications still bother us. Performance art has always depended on questioning crowd behaviour — Antony Gormley’s Fourth Plinth “One and Other” (2009), Tino Sehgal’s Turbine Hall commission of random encounters with visitors “These Associations” (2012). In an age of identity politics, photographers and filmmakers increasingly turn anthropologists of the crowd, too. Take Wolfgang Tillmans, with his gay nightclub scenes, Martin Parr’s British class comedies at the beach or the races and Mark Wallinger questioning national borders in his film of airport arrivals, Threshold to the Kingdom (2000).
Yet contemporary art is not entirely losing the individual in the mass, or the human touch of painting the crowd. William Kentridge’s outstanding hand-drawn multiscreen parade “More Sweetly Play the Dance” — walking wounded, priests, soldiers, ballerinas — references medieval danses macabres, apartheid outrages, the Holocaust. It is an eloquent unfurling of tragedy. It suggests redemption in the unity of the procession, movement and music as gestures of survival. And last year Derek Fordjour’s “Half Mast”, the Whitney Museum’s billboard enlargement of a painting of a crowd of civilians, some individually delineated, others schematic silhouettes, interspersed with memorial balloons and teddy bears, meditated on mass shootings. It was a work of mourning that nonetheless, in brilliant hues and a compressed, shared space, expressed togetherness and optimism. Fordjour and Kentridge are humanist voices offering hope now.
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