TERM
PAPER
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
From THE PAINTER OF LIFE
Submitted to
Submitted by
Dr. Shalini M Anjali
Vijayan
Assistant Professor
I MA ECL
Department of Comparative Literature LCL051501
Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821- 1867) was
a French poet, an essayist, art critic and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan
Poe. Baudelaire’s demand to include the right to contradict oneself among the
Rights of Man, made self-contradiction a typical modern form of poetics. His
work is Les Fleurs du mal ( The Flowers of Evil, 1857) is
considered as the magnum opus. It expresses the changing nature of beauty in
modern, industrializing Paris during the 19th century. It was
Baudelaire who coined the term “modernity” to denote the fleeting, transient
experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to
capture that experience. His highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a
whole generation of poets including Stephane Mallarme, Paul Verlaine and Arthur
Rimbaud.
Viewed by his contemporaries as
a decadent Romantic or as Parnassian
lover of art for art’s sake, Baudelaire
is often described as the founder of
what would later be known as symbolism, which can be seen in hi theory
of “universal analogy” and in his Correspondences. Theorists of
romanticism, symbolism, modernism and realism have all claimed him as a key
figure, though in different ways.
The essay Painter of Modern Life is on Constantin Guys, who is a Crimean war
correspondent, a water color painter and illustrator of British and French
newspapers. Baudelaire called him “ the painter of modern life” and wrote this
essay praising his works under the pseudonym Monsieur G. It was actually
written in 1860, but would not be published until 1863 in the newspaper Le Figaro. It sketches out an
unprecedented theory of modern aesthetics. Many later critics have felt that
the essay should have been about Edouard
Manet, who was a companion of Baudelaire
from around 1855, whom the critics take to be the true painter of modern life,
in preference to Constantin Guys. Baudelaire’s essay coincided with the
infamous Salon des Refuses and the
debut of Edouard Manet as an artist of scandal. Manet was a French painter and
one of the 19th artists to paint modern life. Manet had presented a
courtesan as a modern Venus, a prostitute as a modern Nude, and quoted the
renaissance artists Raphael and Titian to do so. The Painter of Modern Life
made sense of what Manet had done to art – made painting “modern”.
In his essay, Baudelaire makes a
plea for minor artists indicating that what he appreciated in Guys was his lack
of monumentality, the speed of his sketches, the almost photographic accuracy
of his reportage and even his ephemerality. Guys captured for Baudelaire the
aesthetics of the flaneur – an idler on the city streets, aimless, but filled
with curiosity, made possible by then growth of modern commodity culture and
display. Baudelaire describes two complementary models for the artists - the
flaneur and the dandy. The flaneur gives himself over to the crowd and is
contextualized by new practices of shopping, whereas the dandy holds himself
aloof and unmoved. It resists the promiscuity of buying and selling in general.
Baudelaire forged this essay out
of a clash between nostalgia for lost aristocratic values and fascination with
the contemporary street life of commodity culture.
From THE PAINTER OF MODERN LIFE
Charles Baudelaire begins the
essay with the descriptive character formation of a self-taught artist whom he
refers to as Monsieur G., drawing out features of the artist’s nature and
actions which includes originality, modesty, a lack of need for approval, a
desire to be anonymous, a lack of ulterior motives and an obsession with a
world of images. Monsieur G. doesn’t sign his pieces with his name. He always
preferred anonymity. The author says that though Guys remains anonymous, his
nature is clearly readable in his works as “all his works are signed with
his dazzling soul”. His knowledge and
capability of art making is considered as a gift.
This leads to Baudelaire’s distinction between artist and Man of the World
because he considers Monsieur G. not just as an artist, but as a man of the world.
Baudelaire defines artist as a
slave- “ a specialist..... skilled brutes, mere manual labourers, village pub-
talkers with the minds of country bumpkins”, whereas the man of the world is
higher, better and more than the artist – “a man who understands the world and
the mysterious and legitimate reasons behind all its customs”. He calls
Monsieur C. G. “spiritual citizen of the Universe”. Baudelaire describes his immense yearning for
knowledge and understanding. According to him, this initial attitude within an
individual creates a man of genius.
Then the author goes on to
describe vividly the mindset of a convalescent to highlight the nature of
curiosity inherent in Monsieur G. He says that the experience of curiosity,
interest and passion is related to being a child, as a child is the one who is
distracted by the wonder of every single
moment as it being new and exciting. Baudelaire is depicting the idea of artist
as super sensory sensitive. Monsieur G. doesn’t have the mentality of a child,
but a hybrid of childlike naivety with mature sensibility, which ultimately
makes him a ‘man of genius’. The
mainspring of his genius is curiosity. Baudelaire makes a distinction between
the dandy and the flaneur or the passionate spectator. He says that flaneur is
someone who is travelling “incognito” or in other words, the flaneur fades into
the crowd unnoticed. As in Baudelaire’s words, “ the crowd is his element...the
lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense
reservoir of electric energy.” Baudelaire states
By
‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the halfof art
whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.... This transitory, fugitive
element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid, must on no account be despised or
dispensed with. By neglecting it, you cannot fail to tumble into the abyss of
an abstract and indeterminate beauty, like that of the first woman before the
fall of man
The word ‘modernity’ was coined by Baudelaire. So this
founding definition for modernity is given by himself, and was evidenced by an
illustrator of the “crowd”.
The Dandy is one of Baudelaire’s
heroes, who makes appearances in the scenes captured by Guys. According to him,
“dandyism borders upon the spiritual and
stoical….dandyism is the last spark of heroism amid decadence…dandyism is a
sunset; like a declining daystar, it is glorious, without heat and full of
melancholy. But alas, the rising tide of democracy, which invades and levels
everything, is daily overwhelming these last representatives of human pride and
pouring floods of oblivion upon the footprints of these stupendous warriors…”
The female, in contrast to male
is described in terms of a spectacle: “she is a kind of idol, stupid, perhaps,
but dazzling and bewitching”. Baudelaire, then goes on to talk of cosmetics and
fashion. As For modernism, fashion is the leading indicator or in his words,
‘the fugitive, ephemeral, the contingent”, for nothing is more changeable than
fashion. Fashion stands for new consumerism. Consumerism capitalism needs to
create desire to tempt the buyer to purchase, which means that the creation of
products, by their very nature needs to be renewed. The Woman becomes the carrier of
artificiality.
Modern life, fuelled by
commodities and their artificial manufacture of artificial desires is defined
by new and urban environment which is populate by new kinds of people. Nothing
is real, nothing changes and nothing is natural. According to him, art is not a
copy of nature, but, it is as artificial as fashion and as ephemeral as fad.
The role of the artist is not to re- imagine the antique, but to seize upon the
passing fancy, the very detail that captures the mood of the moment.
Many art adaptations have been
done to the essay “The Painter of Modern Life”. But Baudelaire didn’t live long
enough to see these sketch- like
approaches to his essay, but his essay became fundamental in the description of
modernity- all that is “transitory” and “fugitive”.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Leitch, Vincent B (ed.)
.The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism edited by. US: Norton and
Company, Inc. 2001.
Henri Peyre's Baudelaire: A
Collection of Critical Essays (1962)
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