Picturing modernity, then and now: an international exhibition aruges that, from the 19th century to the present, "modernity" has been most richly expressed not by abstraction but by portrayals of human experiences that are quintessentially urban

"Faces in the Crowd," a lively and ambitious exhibition that debuted at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, suggests an imaginative, open alternative to the neatly arranged, tightly pigeon-holed categorization of modern art offered by New York's glamorously revamped Museum of Modern Art. Instead of a decorous step-by-step journey from Cezanne to Picasso to later abstraction, organizers Iwona Blazwick and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev offered the messy, irregular, often confrontational juxtaposition of a range of mediums and periods. Instead of the insistence on formal innovation and stylistic evolution as the organizing principles of modernism, the emphasis at Whitechapel was on the human figure in all its variety. The show plays the dynamism of the anonymous urban crowd against the alienation of the isolated individual to suggest an alternate visual paradigm of modernity itself, from the 19th to the 21st century.

Although at first the experience of such a plethora of unrelated visual stimuli--Impressionist paintings rubbing shoulders with early Soviet posters, film screens abutting canvases, sculpture bumping into photography--may seem chaotic to the viewer accustomed to a more academic approach to modernity, especially in the rather close quarters offered by the Whitechapel exhibition space, I, for one, felt from the start a renewed sense of vitality, of freedom to construct my own relationships among objects and movements, to confront visual history freshly without the weight of movements and stylistic categories impinging on my consciousness. Little by little, it became apparent that life imitated art in the gallery context at Whitechapel. When the rooms were full, packed with moving and stationary bodies, it seemed that the viewers themselves were re-enacting the theme of the show, playing both the role of the crowd and the faces within it. Never had I paid such close attention to my fellow art-lovers as I bumped or pushed into them, leaning in to catch a telling detail of a painting or backing up to see the entirety of an adjacent film screen. That very separation--both psychic and physical--between the world of the audience and that of the art object, which is taken for granted and indeed emphasized in more conventional modes of modern art display, was shown for the artifice it is, in this crowded space, where art and audience were woven into a web of merging and emergent figuration, the crowd and its faces both literally and figuratively present and represented.

Yet I was aware, from the start of the journey, of the impulse that holds it all together: the contradictory condition of human beings in urban society, in which the crowd and the individual, though so often in opposition, nevertheless must be seen as a single interdependent social entity. Indeed, two of the early poetic theorists of modernity, Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe, insist on the primacy of both the crowd and the crowd-watcher, that solitary figure, the flaneur, who is part of the ever-moving urban horde yet stands apart from it to meditate and, at times, to pick out a single entity as an object of contemplation or desire. Baudelaire articulates the artist-observer's key role as both part of and recorder of that quintessentially modern spectacle in The Painter of Modern Life: "The crowd," he declares, "is his domain.... His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer, it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite." And he continues: "To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere, to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world and yet to be unseen by the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of these independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions." "The observer," he concludes, "is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes." (1)

If representations of the crowd and the individual are two hallmarks of modern imagery, then the choice of opening works, Edouard Manet's Masked Ball at the Opera (1873) and Edvard Munch's The Day After (1894-95), established the direction of the show perfectly with a kind of implicit narrative of modern urban pleasure and its dismaying aftermath. I say "implicit" because, in Barthean terms, this is a "writerly" narrative. "Faces in the Crowd" requires the viewer to work for him-or herself at making sense out of the material on view rather than being told what it is all about by the "one-who-knows" in the form of wall labels or an Acoustiguide. (2) Here, the viewer must become an active participant in the construction of meaning, or rather meanings, for there can be and should be no single, clear-cut story imposing unity on this heterogeneous viewing experience.