How one sees is affected by what they know, their beliefs, and how words are used to explain experiences. Seeing, as John Berger writes in his famously written book, Ways of Seeing (1972), is what establishes an individual’s sense of place in the world. Images, like words are a means of representing or interpreting one’s understanding or experience; these images can be recreated and reproduced, yet each one embodies a way of seeing. To look simply anticipates that an individual may set their gaze in particular direction. But to look means that the observer is consciously aware, awakening their senses to an experiential process. An image becomes a statement of how ‘X had seen Y,’ as a result of one’s consciousness to their environment, awareness of history, and current events[1]. In 1972, Berger invited his readers to see and understand the world differently, having a profound influence on the popular understanding of visual imagery. His focus on small gestures and scenes within media outputs explained that there are subtextual narratives embedded within them, to be consumed and interpreted by viewers. An earlier application of these sentiments can be found within Charles Baudelaire’s agent known as the flâneur. This individual is understood in Baudelaire’s text, The Painter of Modern Life (1863), to exercise what Berger cites as ways of seeing. The flâneur is the X individual who can move among the crowd from the nicest gala to the lowest brothel, undetected. Armed with an inventory of knowledge and keen awareness, he is the observer of the urban scene and can decipher with exactitude who a person is based on their dress alone. As a man of the crowd, he captures the evanescence of modern cultural life, while also creating a representation of it, his image externalizes his ways of seeing; reflecting the mentality of a modern age, advanced by technological influence, of which spurs consumerism, fashion and advertising. By understanding this perception of sight, observers will regard these works as valuable documents of world ideologies held by their creators.

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Modernity, as described in Walter Benjamin’s essay The Arcades Project (1927-40), is not only a fleeting concept, but also one that involves constant destruction. For Baudelaire, modernity denoted the ephemeral and the immutable. When embracing modernity, the perceptive individual must embrace all of it. In his essay, Baudelaire cautioned his readers to never shy away from modernity; stressing that the celebration of achievements in modern life should be encouraged, but, that should not erase or ignore the less-desirable aspects that accompany it. The concept of the artist as flâneur is understood in both Benjamin and Baudelaire’s poetry where their representation of the character not only is a translation from French to the “stroller”, but as the artist who is concerned with the aesthetics and relations of the crowd in modern society. He is the “passionate spectator….to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world…[rejoicing] in his incognito[2].” This paper argues that both Edouard Manet and Andy Warhol were both flâneurs, representing their eras of both their positive and negative experiences through their artworks. By decontextualizing A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882), and Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962)in relation to Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life, and Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, analysis of their cultural significance referencing the period of conception will make evident that both artists embodied ways of seeing in what Baudelaire and Berger speak towards conscious perceptivity. These artists represented their modern experiences from their eras with specific insight to consumerism and its innate and seemingly entrancing relationship to modern life.

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            Baudelaire’s description of modernity was that of the “transient, the fleeting, the contingent[3]”. It is ephemeral and constantly changing, it is the element that is perpetually ‘eroticizing the new’[4]. For Baudelaire, modernity is a mode of experience, one seen predominantly in fashion, which is defined by disappearance and appearance; it is a state where nothing is fixed[5]. Baudelaire’s argument about modernity is regarded by scholars as a response to the transition into capitalism, of which created a need for artists (as Baudelaire stressed them to do so) to make sense of the changing public environment. For Baudelaire, the city was a swarming labyrinth, a city of dreams where one could experience the crowd – and subsequently could get lost in it. The Arcades Project was Benjamin’s desire to represent the experience of 19th Century Paris, attempting to unveil the ideological image of modernity to reveal its cause and effects; he defined the arcades as kaleidoscopic distractions that are ephemeral. Where ‘progress’ is characterized by the phantasmagoria of the shopping gallery that lead individuals away from reality. Benjamin’s writings confronted his readers with imagery that was meant to wake them up from idyllic dreams of capitalism which disrupted notions of progress. His use of dialectical imagery examined the presence of the arcades in 19th century Paris as a result of the boom in the textile trade. As Industrialization improved methods of production, individuals moved to the city and began to work in factory settings to produce and sell goods at an accelerated rate as opposed to working from the rural home[6]. The arcades were seen as centres of luxury goods trade, where shops would advertise their merchandise in sheltered walkways. Benjamin saw the reconfiguration of public space as a prime definition of modernity; he saw the stores as sellers of dream objects luring in the masses with attractive and deceptive surfaces to distract from its origins of production[7]. The shops were built from glass and iron, symbolic of progress and modernization in the 19th Century. They were filled with commodities born from industrial production. When Benjamin had come across the Paris arcades, he had found them abandoned. By the time he wrote of them, consumers had moved on from them. The arcades were forgotten in favour of new department stores. The decaying arcades were an archive of “the dreaming collective,” leaving behind remnants of their desires[8]. This dreaming collective of bourgeois culture willfully surrendered themselves to the commodified world. These are the individuals who gave into the phantasmagoria of production, living collectively. In this concession, Benjamin revealed the relationship of modernity and capitalism; there is always a demand to sell more to make more profit. As a consequence, that demanded the need to promote the ‘new’ – or, the wish image, something that would identify with one’s desires, prompting consumers to buy the object in hopes of fulfilling it. Yet, this object must first be advertised as an object of desire. These arcades were less a collection of shops housed under a roof, but more of a dream world much like Baudelaire had expressed the urban environment to be. Benjamin likens his dreaming collective to that of mad individuals who know no history, as these people see events pass before them as always identical and yet always new – “the sensation of the newest and most modern is, in fact, just as much a dream formation of events as the eternal return of the same”[9].

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The urban sphere was an ideal setting for the flâneur, an individual who blended with the masses as a secret agent of perception. The Baudelairean flâneur is regarded as an individual who walks about the city casually – almost to the point where they are not distinguishable from anyone else; he notices the slightest change in fashion, gifted with the ability to see in ways that the passive collect cannot. Baudelaire’s allegorical city and cafes are the territory of this perceptive agent, taking in their pleasures yet remaining detached from them. The flâneur’s gaze is what Benjamin applied in his analysis of modernity, to heighten tensions between social status and the developing city. The flâneur himself, is at the margins of society, and “sought his asylum in the crowd”[10]. As Benjamin observed in Baudelaire’s works, the growing city may attempt to alienate the flâneur, but it hasn’t overwhelmed him. The man of the crowd does not only walk amongst the throng, he is perceptive to modern urban life. In Baudelaire’s writings, he formulates a connection between the artist and flâneur, establishing them as observers as well as purveyors. The flâneur not only sees, but also sees creatively, he must immerse himself into the present and represent the modern age: “The pleasure which we derive from the representation of the present is due not only to the beauty with which it can be invested, but also to its essential quality of being present”[11]. The quality of being present is that of the essence of the flâneur – a person immersed in the modern masses, capable of representing the modern age. He must capture the fleeting fabric of modern life on the fly; he must be quick in capturing the images or scenes he wishes to show. For this reason, his style and technique are important; characterized by brisk technical work. He is the artist “responding to each one of [society’s] movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life,” he is “at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself, which is always unstable and fugitive”[12]. Baudelaire did not imply that what the artist represents is a carbon copy of their experience; rather, in his musings the art is argued not to be an exact copy of nature. For the writer, the artist’s role as flâneur is to grasp the passing moment and to capture its mood as how he perceives it. For these reasons of artistic technique, Baudelaire has identified his flâneur as the Impressionist painter, an active voyeur of the urban mundane.  

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Impressionism was marked as a break from traditional academic rules of classical painting; there was a focus on the representation and use of colour, which changed the process of painting itself. Quick application of paint was key for capturing the fleeting impression of a scene – with specific focus to colour and light. The result of an impressionist piece was to emphasize the artist’s perception of what they were rendering: “They emphasized overall [moods] or ‘impressions’ rather than closely rendering details, and focused on the changing qualities of light”[13]. A contributing factor to Impressionism’s creation was the reaction to “the contemporary socio-political climate and technological advances”[14]. The birth of Modern Art is invariably linked to the Industrial Revolution, rife with rapid changes in manufacturing, transportation and technology. These new advances profoundly affected the social, economic, and cultural conditions of Western life[15]. Before the 19th Century, artists were commissioned to make artwork by wealthy patrons or institutions such as the church. As such, much of the art created depicted religious or mythological narratives that were intended to instruct observers. As new modes of technology profoundly changed ways of living, 19th Century artists began to make art based on their personal experiences. Artists began to explore concepts of symbolism and personal iconography as avenues to depict their subjective understandings, which challenged classical ideologies of realistically depicting the world[16]. Such artists included Edouard Manet. In line with the 19th Century artist, Manet experimented with the expressive use of colour and new techniques which defied traditional artistic conventions.  His was a technique that attempted to capture the fleeting moments of modern life.[17] Born to a bourgeois Parisian family, his choice of becoming an artist was opposed by his parents, who begrudgingly let him pursue his love of painting. Beginning in 1852, Paris faced massive modernization where its once cramped medieval alleyways were demolished to make way for wide boulevards full of shops and cafes[18]. At the centre of this change, Manet’s decision to oppose traditional artistic methods coupled with his bold brush stroke and ‘irreverent’ subject matter caused public outcry[19]. His loose brush strokes and simplification of details as well as contemporary subjects such as beggars, people in cafes, and bullfights vastly departed from the Realist style that reigned prior to Impressionism. Similar to Baudelaire, Manet sought to give expression to the modern experience that emerged in Paris in the 1850s. Manet’s oeuvre is reflective of his flânerie, as manifested in his use of theme, atmosphere, subject matter and of course, the application of his perception – his mode of seeing - as attuned to modern urban life. Manet’s last painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergere eloquently depicts the mood of 19th Century Paris: fantastic public spaces, prostitutes, dandies and other facets of the modern crowd.

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The Folies-Berger was a mix of things, a café, cabaret and even a circus. It was a place of mixing class as well. Bourgeois men (and men of other classes) would go there to meet women of ‘varying degrees of availability’[20]. The bar attracted a multiplicity of customers, ranging from different degrees of profession or class. The painting is a culmination of the modern world - of the urban leisure and spectacle. Manet, like Baudelaire, represented the wealthy flâneur and transformed his experiences into his paintings: “His perspective in doing so has an ambivalence similar to Baudelaire’s – the unconditioned affirmation of modern circulation is contravened by the perception of destruction resulting from Haussmann’s ‘demolitions’”[21]. As Baudelaire described the creation of the new cafes and destruction of the streets, Manet would often frequent the Folies-Bergere – as many artists would, these bars became a meeting place for artists. Many of his paintings of café settings were based on sketches made on the spot – such representations reflect the illustrated journal of a flâneur. Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergere, is best decontextualized in order to be recognized as a device used to articulate the social and aesthetic discourse of 19th Century modernity[22]. For many, the urban reality was unsettling and full of disturbing uncertainties as many moved away from traditional beliefs/values as a result of industrialization[23]. Manet confronted these torrential worries in his painting’s composition: blots of colour in the background mirror of the painting, meant to be the faces of clientele, double as a representation of the incoherence of the city. Few faces are discernable while the mirror itself poses uncertainty as it depicts a reflection that seems impossible. The barmaid looks into this abyss of consumerism – “The room is without beginning or end; it remains unclear whether the mirror on the wall offers a view of one or two floors of the establishment”[24]. The barmaid is situated in the foreground of the painting amid all the movement, she is seemingly alone given the atmosphere that surrounds her. She becomes the individual lost in the crowd of the dreaming masses in Baudelaire’s city.

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In Bar at the Folies-Bergere, Manet employed his technical skill to heighten the viewer’s awareness of social class based on observations of fashion. Baudelaire was keen on his flâneur’s sense of fashion in order for him to distinguish classes amidst the trickery of makeup and dress. The poet defined fashion as something so transitory, that it was marked as the epitome of ‘modern’. For Baudelaire, makeup and fashion deviate from nature, emphasizing and accentuating appearance, the changing of surfaces – a series of images and illusions[25]. Manet’s composition of Bar at the Folies-Bergere arranged the piece as an optical illusion; mirrors and dress are used as a means of deception to which the viewer is expected to decipher. The commodification of fashion resulted from the Industrial Revolution, transformed appearances, intensifying self-representation; with the appropriate dress, anyone (in theory) could pose as a different class than they were. With sharp recognition of modernity’s effect on aesthetics, Manet’s challenges active observers to locate themselves within the painting in order to experience the world he has rendered from a flâneuristic perspective. Manet illustrated modernity in fragmentation to represent the ephemerality of place and time. What first strikes observers is the barmaid in the foreground. A man in the mirror with a top hat gazes her at as she stares into the crowd. It is questionable if Manet situates his viewers as the voyeur with the top hat, yet unless the mirror is meant to be read as warped, it does not seem likely as the reflection of the bottles do not match the angle of the barmaid’s body. The barmaid looks directly at the viewer, suggesting that Manet has painted the image from a viewpoint opposite of the barmaid. However, this gaze is contradicted by the reflection of the items on the bar and the man in the top hat. The reflection is angled and does not seem to fit the pose that she maintains when focusing on the viewer. Historically, Manet has been known to ask his models to pose for him in studio. In all likelihood, the barmaid in his painting was one of those models and may have affected the points of view in the artwork. Yet, what is more likely is that Manet had intentionally designed the mirror’s contradictive reflection to make a point about the overwhelming or consuming nature of the modern city[26].

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Conceivably, the Barmaid may be looked at as Baudelaire’s ‘hero of modern life’ – the prostitute. However, her gaze suggests that she is not so much controlling her surroundings, but is imprisoned by them. In recognizing the barmaid as Baudelaire’s prostitute, the observer can read into it, Baudelairean aesthetic criticism of the physical and moral corruptions of the metropolis. In this regard, the barmaid/prostitute becomes less a spectator of the crowd, but a spectacle herself. In fact, Manet surrounds the barmaid with dozens of eyes among the masses that she faces, further solidifying the relationality of her similarity to an item behind a shop window. The barmaid suits Baudelaire’s concept of woman as prostitute – of which is synonymous with commodification. The prostitute is the image of modernity; she is a commodity, selling herself as a wish image in order to entice buyers. The barmaid’s dress is meant to be appealing to bourgeois clientele. It is a fashion that is “presumably mandated by the establishment that hired her and was geared toward making her appealing to the public in order to further sales”[27]. To the Baudelairean prostitute, fashion is essential because it proposed ideologies of who the wearer was, and how to address them/their class/profession. Not only is the barmaid’s attire suggestive of her commercial existence, she is also composed among an abundance of goods (fruits, flowers, and alcohol), which are easily accessible and more widely available with the advent of new technology and mass production. Manet’s use of open space helps to accentuate these goods, subliminally advertising that they may even be in reach of the painting’s spectator. The artist’s choice of composing the items in the foreground in such a manner, imitates a common design technique in advertising posters during the 19th Century era. In most cases, posters of that nature would also position alcoholic bottles next to an attractive woman in a close visual proximity to the spectator. This was a strategy known in the urban city where advertising to the masses began to evolve as a result of industrial technology[28]. The large mirror in the background is filled with bright-reflected lights that seem to suggest an association with shop windows. A correlation between Manet’s painting and Benjamin’s The Arcades Project may be drawn in that the shop windows in Haussmann’s Paris had the ability to attract buyers with use of wish images and attractive displays:

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“Sumptuous displays of goods in the context of gigantic exhibition spaces with large crowds were at the core of the emerging discourse of mass consumption during the second half of the nineteenth century in Paris, both in department stores and in the world expositions. The latter, as Walter Benjamin noted, ‘were places of pilgrimage to the fetish commodity,’ […] the display of goods in commercial settings, had much in common with exhibit design at world fairs, where the vitrines often looked like shop windows or, in some instances, actually simulated them”[29].

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Observing the relationship of the Bar at the Folies-Bergere and Haussmann’s Paris Arcades offers the association of the barmaid as an object on display, to be purchased in a commercial environment meant to sell items of modern production. She too, is then the product of mass production as well as Benjamin’s prostitute. For Benjamin believes that the female body has lost its aura of natural femininity and thus became merchandise, wherein her beauty has transformed into a type of cosmetic disguise. To him, the prostitute is the only merchant who along with her merchandise, also sells herself:

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“Benjamin’s most explicit conflation of woman and commodity is in a fragment from The Arcades Project, in which, continuing the analogy of flâneur and botanist, he states that the arcade presents an ‘organic and inorganic world’ full of ‘the female fauna of the arcades: whores, grisettes, old witch-like saleswomen, female second-hand dealers, gantieres, demoiselles’ as well as the inorganic souvenirs in the shops, all of which, it is implied, are equally for consumption”[30].

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To further historically contextualize both Benjamin and Baudelaire’s writings on prostitutes, many barmaids during the industrial revolution would double as prostitutes to supplement the low wages received[31]. Arguably, Manet is using knowledge about modern barmaid’s use of sex to supplement meager wages as a means of representing the harsh reality of modernization. A reality in which to survive, she must lose certain freedoms of herself – such as the choice to avoid commodifying herself, where she must act in specific ways to entice business – in order to survive. She thus changes her identity, creating a divide from her true self in order to become the commodity self. The barmaid, recognized as the prostitute, embodies Benjamin’s approach of ‘commodity fetishism’ where commodities and money are regarded as a fetish that prevent one from seeing the truth about money and society. In the case of the barmaid, her clientele is a class of people exploiting her for her goods and services. She is no longer treated as a person, but paired with a commodity. The barmaid is the ‘fallen woman’ in the urban world; “Her lowly labor marks her as a displaced member of urban society; her inevitable degeneration is likewise marked by the very urban conditions in which she hoped to better herself. More often than not the anti-heroine succumbs to prostitution for material and social gain”[32]. If one concedes that the barmaid as a prostitute-commodity born of a harsh reality in the industrialized world, they then agree that Manet presents his audience the seedier side of the often-glorified contention of modernization. Moreover, Manet’s subtle references to the Goddess Venus through botanical symbolism must not go unnoticed. Plants are often used by artists to depict metaphors of virtue or vice[33]. Upon the bar, accompanying the barmaid are flowers – a corsage between her breasts and a white and pink flower in the vase in front of her. A white flower is a symbol of purity and radiance, while a rose alludes to her role as a Madonna figure. The colour pink is largely understood as a reference to love and marriage to which the subject in portraits commemorating a marriage are often holding[34]. By reading the flora as virtuous, it may be negotiated that Manet’s barmaid is a character of the Baudelairean concept of ‘double vision’. In Baudelaire’s work, he sees man as naturally evil, “Evil is done without effort, naturally, by fatality”[35]. This mode of thought follows is that good must be the result of ‘an art’ because it takes effort in its artificiality. The focus of art is then “veiled and expressed by this duality of good/evil”[36]. Baudelaire’s manipulation of dualities is a form of inversion where evil is aligned with nature/being in a natural state, and virtue is artificial. Makeup, for example, is more “more virtuous when caked on obviously than when pretending to be natural”[37]. The double vision in Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergere looks back at traditional symbolism to create Baudelaire’s hero of modern life: his prostitute is the modern Venus. By augmenting herself to modes of perception, she is artificial. As a prostitute she is not so much the provider of love, but the illusion of it, for a price.

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Baudelaire’s works embody the conflicting worlds of past and present simultaneously, which, much like Manet’s reception of the urban environment, can be disorienting. The poet’s bifurcated vision, looking back to an idealized past and forward to an uncertain future are visually rendered by his agents of perception, who are able to understand and reflect their observations in time visually. An image is a sight, which can be recreated or reproduced – it is an appearance, which has been detached from its place in time of its first materialization, and is preserved. The detachment encompasses all images, including photographs – all involve a way of seeing by the person who has created them[38]. Benjamin recognized the course modernization would take as a result of technological advancements. He clearly saw it when he described the desolation of the arcades – how transient they became due to accelerated consumption demands. Andy Warhol was aware of the ephemeral nature of spaces and objects when he was taking publicity stills meant to advertise new movies, and re-contextualizing them to project his own way of seeing. A photograph efficiently and easily captured the ephemerality of the moment in time, and just as well be easily mass-produced. Warhol’s specific perceptivity to the world around him attunes him to the Baudelairean basis of flânerie. As the New York flâneur of the 20th Century, Warhol maintained the fascination with the city as well as the desire to reproduce its fleeting essence. He was the American metropolitan observer, born of a middle-class background; he too was able to peruse the lower and higher depths of the streets to capture and mass-produce his view of the modern urban sphere of the 20th Century.  

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After World War II, America experienced a period of economic growth; many middle-class Americans moved to the suburbs as a result of cheap, mass-produced homes[39]. Media sources began to dominate the public sphere – this was the information and consumer age; images of products and celebrities were repeated in magazines, newspapers and television[40]. Pop Art emerged during the 1960s, celebrating and critiquing mass culture as well as the influence of the fashion world – such as the glamour of Hollywood stars. The public experience of the 1960s was saturated with advertising, iconography and mass consumption: new aesthetics that represented merchandise and aspects of the buying or selling of goods and services, including product design, packaging and advertisement, was a significant presence during this time[41]. The movement, born of industry, chose iconography taken from television, comic books, magazines, and advertising, using the very techniques created by media from which the imagery itself was taken[42]. The goal of Pop Art was to nullify connoisseurship and hand skill – a phenomenon known as a “shotgun marriage of high and low”[43]. This marriage offered creations that were flat and often empty in their portrayal of the world. Using the new commodity aesthetic, Pop Artists altered the relationship between art and the audience. They would look for inspiration in their surrounding world, representing and making art directly from everyday items[44]. Pop Artists would adopt methods such as silk-screening or producing multiples of their works to emphasize the commercial aspect of the society they were speaking to. This tactic undermined the notion of originality of the works. Warhol had a keen interest in the public image of celebrities alongside manufactured consumables like Campbell’s soup. Pop Artists wanted to prompt new meaning behind mass-produced images and Warhol drew on mass media as a catalyst for dreams of glamour[45]. Warhol’s admitted that he had been interested in consumerism and the celebrity image since he was a child. His career as a commercial artist led him to reverse his methods. Instead of creating attractive ads and displays for consumer products, he would use these products/their images to create art.

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20th Century New York shares similarities to Benjamin’s Arcades; Benjamin’s research on the arcades – their advertisements and building structures – unveils the beginnings of a modern consumer culture[46]. Specifically, Benjamin focuses on the innovations of mass consumption; how forms of bargaining and window-shopping have changed, where displays were filled with “goods from distant regions, which transformed abundance into novelty and made novelty abundant”[47]. Benjamin’s The Arcades Project suggested that mass consumption thrived because it manipulated consumer’s desires to look a certain way, engrossing buyers into the wish image. In striking similarity, New York city’s department stores used glass and electric light to appeal to consumers as “strategies of enticement, […] by making standardized consumer goods visible to all, department stores democratized desire, while motivating men and women to buy”[48]. Warhol’s own studio was an old commercial building he named the ‘Factory’ (1963-68), where he conceived of his artworks. He also employed numbers of individuals to help create his pieces, who were involved with the ‘industrial’ execution of these works[49]. It is believed among scholars that Warhol was one of the most perceptive market researchers of all time. Arguably so given that few individuals recognized the impact of canned soup or cleaning pads on the American public. For such academics, Warhol had a firm understanding of the concept of brand equity, building a commodity not only out of himself, but of his creations. As a result, he created a lack “humanity in the individuals he co-opted into his work”[50].

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Pop Art is the anthesis to Benjamin’s concept of aura. Aura is the ‘halo of untouchability’ that surrounds the artwork. It is the essence of authenticity and uniqueness which the art object is seemingly saturated in. Artworks in museums are considered to possess an aura because they are the only known original piece to exist. When an image becomes replicable, and easily disseminated, its aura is then lost. When the image becomes reproducible, that allows for new meaning to be attributed to the work, altering the original intent for its reception by the public, as well as opening it up for more democratic interpretations. The reproduction of the image also means that its circulation breaks down specific narratives devised by the elite. The barrier of space is also abandoned when the mass-produced piece can be touched or owned by many, removing the object from elitist high-culture. In Pop Art, artists aim to diffuse the line between high and low art. Subsequently, their choice in the everyday commodity/image participates in this standardization of a reproducible image. Pop Art was iconoclastic in its rejections of the supremacy of high-art from the past as well as pretensions of other contemporary art. Subsequently, the movement gained traction as a cultural event due to its focused reflection of social situations[51]. Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe exemplifies the Pop Art ethos: “[the piece] reminds us that celebrity equals commodification and that, consequently, celebrity culture is an industry, in which stars are manufactured the way ordinary goods are”[52]. By realizing the reproducibility and accessibility of celebrity images, means that the untouchable aura that was believed to encode God-like elevations of celebrity status, becomes dissolved. Anyone with enough money and interest could own a Marilyn Monroe print made by Warhol. In multiple copies of these works, he destroyed the conceptual aura that could have surrounded the Gold Marilyn Monroe if it had been created as an only and original piece. By reprinting the likeness of his subject numerously, Warhol designed an endless amount of reproducible icons. The end result is that the subject’s image resembled a mass-produced product, likening stardom in capitalist society as equivalent to being a commodity. Celebrities are thus the wish image of Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. Warhol’s ability to blur commercial art and commerce in order to ‘commercialize on commercialization’ facilitated his social critique and perception of American culture through the reproducibility of the images he exploited.

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For Warhol, Marilyn Monroe was a glamorously packaged product mass distributed to the public: “One of the most significant commodities of the 20th Century targeted by Warhol are screen actresses and other particularly notable women”[53]. His multiplying of Monroe’s image suggested that she, like Campbell Soup (1962), were equal to a mass-produced commodity. Warhol’s oeuvre offers critical insight on Hollywood’s culture industry and how its production of icons drove the exploitation of the same individuals chained to, yet socially elevated by the limelight[54]. Warhol’s Marilyn is an icon of consumerism. She, like Manet’s barmaid is a product, advertised to the public in a desirable manner in order to prompt commerce. Monroe’s image as a celebrity was one of a sex-symbol, and Warhol’s embellishment of gold in the piece suggests that she was given her own relic of ‘saintness’. In Warhol’s piece, he used her iconography to make her commodification in culture apparent. By likening the selling and buying of her image to a commodity, Monroe became the Pop Art prostitute of the 20th Century. Warhol exploited the use of her image as sex-symbol to comment on advertising fed to the masses, where the reduction to her sexual appeal is used strikingly in his execution of composition: Warhol effectively flattened her centered likeness, where he scaled her bust to a percentage of the size of the large canvas. In doing so, the potential projection of a vibrant personality was deflated into a one-dimensional identity.

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Warhol’s choice of colour for the piece was also telling for the divine Madonna-sex product narrative he was portraying. In Classicism, the gold background and pale qualities of the Madonna are motifs that imply divinity and purity. In Warhol’s rendition, the blondness of Monroe’s hair “becomes more of a comment on the contemporary sexual signifier and less of a harkening to the purity normally associated with the Virgin Mary”[55]. The object of focus was not the Blessed Virgin but a slightly lewd seductress, whose face is saturated with “erotic magic”. The bright blonde colour of Monroe’s hair is marked as a departure from her true identity and as a submission to the celebrity/assumed persona. Wherein, the persona projected to the public was hardly true to the identity of her actual self. This blondeness not only offers an assumed persona in an attempt to integrate into the mainstream as a commodity-star, but imposes that she is a sexy ‘dumb blonde’[56]. Again, Baudelairean fashion stands for the new consumerism of modernity – one that was displayed in the arcades much like where commodities were held behind passages of iron and glass. Observers will recognize that Warhol’s starting point for the piece was not Monroe as a person, but her public image, one that is infinitely reproducible like a product:

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“In this sense Marilyn Monroe has a lot in common with Coca-Cola: both are carefully contrived commodities packaged for global consumption. And most of Warhol’s other subjects share something of this. In the universe of the image, there is no need to differentiate between humans and tin cans, heroes and villains, celebrities and carnage. They are all equivalent”[57].

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Awareness of mass-production is elevated by Warhol’s screen-printing technique which spawned serial repetition. The element of repetition dismisses beliefs of originality not only in the work, but subtly suggests that Monroe herself is not original, or true; her image in modern culture is fictive, created by media representatives to sell her in order to gain more business. In order to gain such popularity, she had been molded into what is expected of her, rendering her as a wish image, divorcing her of true substance and limiting certain freedoms of self-expression in order to continue the wish image narrative. Warhol’s technique allowed for a monochromatic image to be repeated across canvas at will. He was able to alter the quantity of ink on screen, which affected whether the image would come out darker or paler, even to “point of obliterating the image in either direction”[58].

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By masking off areas of the print, Warhol was able to lay on five colours to the face of Marilyn while producing small visual variations between each reproduction. While these minute variations of each Marilyn may constitute beliefs of uniqueness, this concept distracts from the mechanical implications of the piece. Which, is difficult to achieve given that the seemingly careless discrepancies of each print adds to the mass produced and impersonal effect of the image – especially when the form of the work uses hard colour uniformly across the face, mouth, eyes, and backdrop[59]. The aim of the perceptive artist, as expressed in Baudelaire’s writings, was to understand modernity as comprising of two complementary portions: the ‘eternal and immutable’ subject matter and the evaluation of traditional criteria that accompanies the ephemeral components of urban living. Warhol’s expression of modernity in Gold Marilyn Monroe responded to heightened industrious consumerism and its effect on individualism in terms of personal image. Monroe’s personality was reduced to a sex-icon image, and sold as such in mass volumes across multiple medias – television, magazines, film. Her reproducibility across these platforms were not illustrated in Warhol’s print, but the ways in which the print was created and mass produced. In likeness to Baudelaire’s flâneur, Warhol’s visual comment made sense of the changing contours of public space – and how this modern living, much like Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, affected individual lives in their urban environment.

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            In both works analyzed across the 19th and 20th Century’s highly regarded artists – Edouard Manet and Andy Warhol – a correlation of flâneuristic attitudes are evident by their perceptive representations of the world they inhabit. The realism of the flâneur is manifested in the theme, atmosphere, and subject matter they create. What is more, is their profound attenuation to the modern urban life in new ways of seeing. The Baudelairean flâneur did not artlessly stroll through the crowd, but forged new modes of aesthetic perception garnered by the artist’s experiences in that crowd. Manet and Warhol did not simply show scenes of modern living, through their execution of technical elements such as composition and consciousness of colour or art school style, they cut through superficial recognition to project the true ephemeral experiences – whether positively such as mass availability of goods, or negatively, such as the loss of one’s freedoms due to the demands of urban living – of modern life.

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