In The Painter of Modern Life (1863), an essay about the role of the artist in culture, Charles Baudelaire articulates some ideas about modernity. Central to this essay is the figure of the flâneur. This figure is an idle stroller, an urban explorer who meanders the streets of the modern city, flâneur being derived from flana, an Old Norse verb meaning ‘to wander with no purpose’. According to Baudelaire:

Reveling in incognito and anonymity, the crowd represents splendour and majesty to the flâneur, flowing through the modern city, a ‘river of life’.

As humanity has continued to proliferate and modernise, the crowd remains a central feature of city life. Most of us know what it is like to move amongst a crowd, which is both a subjective and collective experience. You become part of a mindless conglomerate of people, perhaps moving together but to different places, present with each other but simultaneously unknown to one another. You become anonymous.

For some the experience is liberating, for some it is anxiety-inducing. For the flâneur, it brings immense joy. Presently, within our newly COVID-ridden modern condition, the crowd has become a significantly less common sight: it is now a dangerous and oftentimes forbidden place to be, a site of risk and infection carefully avoided by the sensible city dweller. It has developed a sinister edge. To the virus, we truly are anonymous: another face in the crowd; another host and victim; perhaps even, morbidly, another nameless digit due to appear on screens across the nation. What does this mean for how the concept and image of the crowd occupies our cultural psyche?

In the wake of a summer of uncrowded-ness, it was hard to miss the wealth of comparisons made between forced isolation and the paintings of Edward Hopper. With their unnervingly deserted but distinctly urban visuals, they calmly exude that specifically modern and metropolitan kind of alienation. Positioning Hopper perhaps as (to hijack Baudelaire’s phrasing) the painter of our modern life, a Guardian article asks; is he the artist of the coronavirus age? Indeed, both his paintings and our lockdown present us with cityscapes lacking familiar urban multitudes. Missing are the crowds which would normally ebb and flow through any city, a teeming river of life.

In the context of COVID-19, Hopper’s paintings became resonant for all of us, adopting an air of permanence in the face of indefinite isolation. But cities across the world are emerging now from the standstill these images signify. As the crowds and multitudes return, how will we approach them? Will joining the crowd ever feel the same again? For those of us who, flâneur-esque, enjoy moving amongst the crowd, it is impossible now to blithely set up house in the heart of the multitude; there are risks that must be considered. It will be interesting to see how those now interpreting the present, our contemporary painters of modern life, if you like, might re-evaluate the crowd.

Words: Alice Keeling

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