More from Explosive Acts

 Renoir°s Dancing at the Moulin de la Galette, Montmartre, which he paint-
ed in 1876, two years after the first Impressionist exhibition. What he shows,
are the wide open-air gardens filled with dancing couples, surrounded by
trees hung with lanterns. In the foreground a group of young friends have
red round a table to drink and talk, an enchanting evocation of a sunny
Sunday afternoon passed in good company, a carefree idyll on a par with the
artist’s scenes of boating parties on the Seine, of hot, lazy summer days by
river, those expressions of youthful charm that have nurtured a vision of
Paris, as a world of innocence, lost for ever with the outbreak
the First World War and the brutal arrival of the modern age.
Renoir's Impressionist technique reinforces such a mood; its soft, fluid
colors add to the dreamlike quality, an effect imitated by countless photo—
graphers and film cameramen smearing Vaseline on their lenses to replicate
that sun—drenched, wine—hazy feel for fashion shoots and television com-
mercials. Not for Renoir the sad-eyed tarts and their hard—faced pimps, the
sallow butcher’s boy with his ill-fitting jacket and his bad teeth, the old hag
who has drunk too much and who probably has not washed in a month.
Indeed not for Renoir any of the real characters who regularly attended the
weekend dances — most of the people concentrated at the front of his paint-
ing were friends who had been persuaded to go with him, so that they could
take up the same positions over the several weekends that it took to finish so
large a work. They were used to it — Renoir often asked them to pose in the
large abandoned garden behind his house near the moulin, a house he had
chosen when the idea of the painting first came to him, a time recalled by
friend, Georges Riviere, who remembered days
". . . spent happily between the old lodging in the rue Cortot
and the Moulin, where Renoir worked in the afternoons at his
great canvas of the Ball. We carried this canvas from the rue
Cortot to the Moulin every day because the picture was paint-
  ed entirely on the spot. This was not always very easy-going
-  when there was a wind blowing and the big stretcher threat-
ened to fly away like a kite above the Butte."
We can identify some of the friends in the painting, Riviere sitting with the
  painter Henri Chervex at the table and a dancer called Estelle on a bench, but
  this use of models makes the scene as artificially conceived and executed as
 any academic work, with none of that spontaneity that was thought to be so
 important to the Impressionists. Such a painting has less to do with realism
 than with the old idealism, the notion that art should be a begetter of well-
being and joy, rather than the vehicle for portraying the truth about con-
temporary life that Baudelaire had proposed.
From this perspective Princeteau was more of a Realist than Renoir — his
hunting scenes might exist within a sealed—off aristocratic enclave, but they
represented what was there, not some parallel fantasy of what ought to be
there. Of course Renoir and the other Impressionists had gone much further
in their use of colour and light than Princeteau whose brighter palette and
sketchy brush—strokes were due to the rapid way he worked rather than to
any deep interest in luminosity. But to someone like Henri, the difference
would not have seemed as great as it did to those students working in the
ateliers of the grand masters of history painting, where dark tones and heavy
shadows were the rule, and where Impressionism appeared a dangerous
revolutionary force. To Henri, there was little incentive to rebel against
someone who was quite so easy-going. Unlike the strict disciplinarians of the
Ecole de Beaux-Arts or the little dictators who ruled over their private
ateliers, insisting that their pupils mould themselves into the ‘house’ style by
imitating the masterls works, Princeteau saw nothing wrong in Henri trying
out the styles of the other occupants of the Cite, some of whom were pro-
ducing work quite different from his animalier interests and who, at a
personal level, did not share the social milieu that Adele assumed to be that
of the entire block. Indeed, Henri had discovered that there was another
friend of Alphls working in the Cite des Artistes, though not one that Adele
would ever have chosen as a tutor for her son.
Jean-Louis Forain was hardly the sort of man anyone would have associ~
ated with Alph. A character straight out of some scurrilous story of the
Bohemian underworld, Forain was a working—class boy from Reims who had
taught himself to paint by copying pictures in the Louvre after his family
moved to Paris. True, he had been spotted by Carpeaux, the most fashion-
able sculptor of the Second Empire, and offered free lessons, but Carpeaux
was a drunk and for some unspecified reason threw the young man out, as
did his parents, whereupon he became a vagrant, forced to live and sleep on
the streets of the capital. All told, Forain had led a bizarre existence up to
1884 when he took a studio near Princeteau, an odd decision given his
origins and the fact that he was never an animalier or a peintre sportzf. He
occasionally painted racecourses but it was the fashionable crowd that inter-
ested him rather than the splendid horseflesh, and even then he was more
likely to offer a somewhat sarcastic view of the follies of the rich rather than
a portrait of the beau monde in all its glory, an approach that reflects the two
streams in his art.
*****
The new illustrated journalism
was about to transform society as much as radio, cinema and television
would do in the coming century. The popular illustrated press would be 3
crucial element in the social and cultural changes that make the fin de siécle
so fascinating — an upheaval that would touch everything from politics to art
and would, as he correctly saw, be the forerunner of a much larger revolu-
tion that was already percolating in and around Montmartre.
What Salis and Bruant and their many imitators were unwittingly
unleashing was a phenomenon that would dominate almost every aspect of
life in the newly industrialised world: mass popular culture. Not the old,
slowly evolving folk culture of earlier ages, not the ‘High Culture’ of a
ruling élite, but something entirely new, growing so rapidly and with such
broad influence that nothing would remain immune to its pervasive appeal.
The first manifestation of this revolution was the sudden appearance of a
widely circulated illustrated press whose growth matched the earlier explo-
sion of newspaper and magazine publishing and whose influence was to
prove equally far—reaching and unpredictable. Again, this was largely a
result of technical innovations. Various photographic processes, most
notably photogravure, replaced the old laborious wood-block engravings.
The use of zinc plates, instead of stones, for lithography provided flexible
sheets that could be bent into cylinders, which meant that illustrations could
be run off on the same high—speed circular printing presses as the rest of the
publication. The most spectacular result of these innovations was undoubt-
edly the Petit ]0urnal’s Sunday colour supplement, and its subsequent
imitators, but there were also illustrated equivalents of the small literary
magazines, produced for artistic or political reasons, whose influence was far
greater than their limited circulation. The earliest artists who interested
themselves in these new developments were inevitably those already
working in the field of commercial illustration - Forain, Caran d’Ach
Henri-Gabriel Ibels and Steinlen were already producing black-and-white
drawings with a distinct social or political message in the Daumier tradition
and easily made the transition to colour. Allied to the new print journalism,
the new illustrated press also involved itself with politics and scandal, using
the naturalist style to depict the underworld of crime and vice, a preoccupa-
tion with the sordid and the decadent that would make Forajn, for a time at
least, the most popular artist in France, a household name, when those who he
himself adlnired, like Degas, languished in obscurity.