EDOUARD MANET, PART TWO
The painter of Parisian modernité, Édouard Manet, abandoned his early strategy of commenting on past masterpieces but continued his quest to update and modernize traditional genres in Salon painting. A transitional painter, Manet pointed to way to the final break from Academic art with his work during the last two decades of his life.
ÉDOUARD MANET AND “THE (FEMALE) NUDE”
“The leading characteristic of our century is its historical sense.
This is why we have to confine ourselves to relating the facts.”
Gustave Flaubert, 1854
“The wind blows in the direction of science.
Despite ourselves, we are pushed toward the exact study of facts and things.”
Emile Zola, Salon of 1866
“Il faut être de son temps.”
Honoré Daumier
Unlike his predecessor, Gustave Courbet who carefully directed the critical discourse around his art, Édouard Manet was far more taciturn. When he spoke, it was in fragments, causal remarks, rarely buttressed by explanations about his paintings. Against this silence, art historians constructed many frameworks for understanding. First there is Manet the Formalist, as put forward by Clement Greenberg, as the progenitor of Modernism. Next, there was the Manet of the Marxists, put forward by writers such as T. J. Clark, followed by Manet of the feminists, such as Griselda Pollock, and then there was the Manet examined by the sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. There is validity to all of these approaches, each illuminating the complex artist who ushered the modernité of his friend, Charles Baudelaire, into the world of avant-garde art. How Manet created a final rupture between the modern realists and the traditional Academy is less interesting than why. What were his strategies of attack, what were his tactics of provocation?
Manet, who was a child of privilege, born to a comfortable, even wealthy, haute bourgeois family, was typical of the rebellious son of a professional—-supported in his rebellion and cushioned in his insurrection by his father’s fortune. Manet was never a successful artist, in the sense of sales, during his lifetime. His financial independence would be crucial to his artistic independence. He could afford, quite literally, to take risks and to continue without reward. Part of the dominant class, Manet had no particular reason to destroy the bourgeois source of his position, and he never stopped vying for recognition in the Salon, always needing the rewards doled out by the State. The artist was less of a rebel than a careerist, seeking a way to get noticed among a crowded field of aspirants. The career of Gustave Courbet provided an excellent model: find your crowd of supporters among art critics and writers of the literary world, create a recognizable persona, and attract attention to your art through shock and awe. Like the career of Courbet, the paintings of Édouard Manet cannot be understood without acknowledging the power of the press and the importance of publicity and the new avenues that mass media opened up to the artist.
The Second Empire was a peaceful period, marked by intellectual cynicism and resignation, following a failed revolution. Open rebellions would fail, rebels caught in the crossfire would get crushed, so the smart move was to retreat to the safety of intellectual dissent. Literary and artistic language evolved into a subtle network of overt condemnation of the hated middle class and its self-satisfied complacency. The direct confrontation of a Courbet gave way to the visual ambiguities of a Manet. Courbet’s paintings were battering rams on the barred gates of the Academy, intended to break in and to reform the wrong-headed taste for the classical. Manet, with impeccable credentials, direct from his long tutelage under the fine academic artist, Thomas Couture, was already an insider. His task was not to storm the barricades but the find a way out of the fortress of the Academy. Manet inherited a group of literary supporters from the avant-garde, such as Emile Zola, and the ready-made role of “the Dandy,” popularized by Baudelaire. Handsome, elegant, well-dressed, and cynical man about town, Manet succeeded Courbet as the leader of the insurrectionists. But Manet was a very different kind of “Realist.”
It could be asked if Manet’s work was the Naturalism of his literary counterparts, Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola. According to the critic Jules Castagnary, “…its (Naturalism) only object is to reproduce nature and lead it to its greatest power and integrity…the Naturalist school reestablishes the severed relationship between man and nature…” Far more than any other artist of his time, Manet was a link between the tradition of historical painting and the need to paint new objects in a new fashion. Less of a history painter and more than a painter of the history of painting, Manet’s representational mode was not that of copying nature but of observing human nature with a shrewd and jaundiced eye. His highly stylized subjects were presented to the viewer, and this audience—assumed to be white, male and heterosexual and urbane and wealthy—was taken into account and the male viewer was drawn visually and metaphorically into his works. Like his predecessor, Courbet, and his teacher, Thomas Couture, Manet’s work is pastiche-like in its collage approach to putting together many elements, which may or may not fit together.
This pictoral collaging of flattened units, so evident with Courbet, becomes almost a conceit with Manet. Echoing Courbet’s mockery of the rhetoric of academic poses, seen in The Bathers (1853), Manet exploited the customary practice of putting academic poses and postures together into huge history paintings, as was seen in Courture’s Romans of the Decadence (1847). Manet extended the convention of academic visual discourse to its logical extreme, by exposing its inherent artificiality. In the face of Naturalism and Realism, Manet’s works of art were about other earlier works of art, high and low, serious and commonplace, historical and current. The result was a series of anti-academic paintings that pushed the Romantic dictum of “art-for-art’s sake” to its logical conclusion, making the artistic statement that art is an artificial product, a cultural artifact that is about reality but that does not mirror reality. If art is severed from its traditional task of reflecting the world and/or being in the service of society, then art has no purpose other than an existential one: art existed for its own sake alone.
In The Rules of Art (1992), the sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, made a distinction between the successive avant-gardes in Paris: the first avant-garde in of the 1830s, the original la bohème, and the second avant-garde, which engendered the collaboration between the artists and the writers, such as the partnership between Courbet and Champfleury. The last avant-garde, according to Bourdieu was the art-for-art’s-sake position, held by Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert and carried on by Édouard Manet. The difference between Courbet’s socially active art and Manet’s socially apolitical art can be summed up in the difference between Courbet the Country Bumpkin and Manet the Dandy. The Country Bumpkin was a construct in contrast to the sophisticated Parisian, while the Dandy was uninvolved, aloof, alone and apart. It is this disinterested detachment that allows the new avant-garde artist to separate himself from the “rules of art” and to forge a separate path. The contrast also explains Baudelaire’s antipathy to Courbet’s politically engaged painting, which kept art in the service of society. Baudelaire selected Constantin Guys as his “painter of modern life” for a reason—Guys was an outsider who was uninterested in the art world, without a stake in the Academic game. The poet was saying very clearly that the “painter of modern life” had to be a disinterested observer of society and could not be a participant in that society, thus privileging the alienation of the artist.
For many art historians, Manet was Baudelaire’s “Painter of Modern Life;” but the poet, who died in 1867, did not live to see his friend become successful or at least renowned. Nevertheless, it was Manet who began to capture the essence of modernité, a quality the critic called “the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present day life…” La vie moderne was based in the city, the heart of darkness of the century, a place of anomie and indifference. Wiped clean of anecdote and symbolism and of meaning, Manet’s art becomes a synedoche, a slice of life but a very particular kind of life. Like his friend, Edgar Degas, Manet was a man about town who knew well the pleasures of the boulevards and brothels and cafés and cabarets and bars. Life in Paris had a duality and a hypocrisy: a bourgeoisie respectability on one hand and an underground, Baudelaire’s “floating existences,” of marginalized people living on the fringes of respectability or far beyond social redemption. In Manet’s art, as in Courbet’s later works, women were the main commodities of the era. Forced into prostitution by economic conditions beyond their control, women were bought and sold, everywhere available to the highest male bidder. Women, or to be more precise, the “fallen woman,” became the visual images upon which the Second Empire depicted itself as the all-consuming bourgeois male in power.
Did Manet reiterate the conditions of this male-dominated society to simply record, or to comment, or to critique, or to scandalize the male viewer? From viewing his works, it seems that the hero of modern life in the Second Empire was a man with money to spend on women, a member of the haute bourgeoisie who pursues the dubious pleasures of the demi-mondaine. The artist occupied the protected position of an observer who could slum and escape, retreating to the sanctity of the studio where his adventures could be captured. But the presence of a suffering urban proletariat in the works of Edouard Manet cannot be considered a critique. Their misery is presented as a simple accepted fact, which is ironically manipulated through the lenses of art history. The Old Musician (1862) is a pendant to Music in the Tuileries (1862), as an implied contrast between the lower and upper classes. The Old Musician borrowed from Spanish painting and from the works of the Le Nain Brothers, while Music in the Tuileries was an artist’s attempt to paint the crowd—albeit an upper class one—in the modern city. Both paintings are group portraits of urban types, but Manet’s lower class people–the ragpicker and the destitute children and the old people–were overwhelmed with allegory and appropriation, used for the artist to mock the tradition for history painting. The presence of the lower classes, displaced by Haussmann’s destruction of the Old Paris, was entirely new subject matter in the Salon. But any social comment was absorbed into elitist allusions to the history of art, appealing to the well-educated male connoisseur as a series of insider commentary.
But the pair of paintings took their place only as preludes for the seminal works of 1863, two paintings of the “modern nude,” who could only be the prostitute. The urban poor, inherently unattractive, quickly disappeared from Manet’s work, and attractive women of ill-repute emerged as his major preoccupation by the mid 1860s. These women, who could be owned by males, were presented with a specifically masculine way of looking: a proprietorial gaze, which implies unmediated and unquestioned power. As John Berger remarked, men look and women are constructed to be looked at. The only clue to Manet’s intentions as to why he painted (Le Dejeunner sur l’herbe) Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia, both of 1863, is that the “nude,” by now always female, was the path to fame and fortune in the Salon. Manet is said to have signed and accepted the inevitable—-to become noticed, he had to stoop to hackneyed subjects. “It seems I must paint a nude. Very well,” he said, “I shall paint one.” The question was how to update the female nude? Manet was clear that he meant to include “…people like you see down there,” meaning that he was familiar with the people who bathed in the Seine. These would have been the urban poor who had no other recourse for cleanliness or recreation than the city’s river. Manet was also familiar with Giorgione’s Fête champêtre (1508), a country or rustic scene with a theme of humans living in harmony with nature. Apparently, Manet combined the ideal rustic scene with the actual and current way in which ordinary people used nature.
“The public will rip me to shreds but they can say what they like…” Manet said bravely. We know that after he was “ripped,” he felt considerable pain but received no sympathy from Baudelaire who was dying in Belgium and blooded by the Empire’s censors. Manet began a painting named Le Bain, which could be thought of as the beginning of his mature career. His father had died the year before (of syphilis) in 1862, freeing the son to be his own man. Updating the nude meant not only making the nude a contemporary one but also to free the nude from symbolism and metaphor and allegory. The woman most likely to have a kind of “public” nudity would be the prostitute. The strategy had to be to mask the inherent vulgarity of the prostitute and to avoid the impropriety of presenting the respectable woman by using canonical art historical examples from past times. In the painting, later renamed Le Dejeunner sur l’herbe, Manet appropriated Giorgione and Titian and Goya and Raphael and mined their art for poses, precedents and legitimacy. By filtering the nakedness of the modern woman through art history, Manet escaped the trap of Naturalism, that of passively recording reality. These paintings were artificial and arbitrary and willful in their irony and sarcasm. While Manet’s work seems satirical, the paintings were also a gamble, as if he bet everything on one throw of the dice. His goal was probably to be noticed among a sea of earnest and pornographic female nudes, disguised as goddesses.
Courbet’s success owed a great deal to the open Salon of 1848 which allowed him to summarize and end the first stage of his career and to the Salon of 1849, juried by artists, which allowed his Dinner at Ornans to be shown and awarded a second-class medal. Manet’s success would equally hinge on politics, this time on art politics. Manet had hoped to soften up the jury by preempting their judgment with a show of is new works at the Louis Martinet gallery. As would often happen, Manet’s hopes for public acceptance were dashed and the Salon jury was no better disposed towards his work. The jury for the Salon of 1863 was unusually harsh, an outcome during the censorious Second Empire, which meant that the level of rejection was nothing short of extreme. Deprived of the right to be seen and, thus of the right to earn a living, the rejected artists protested so much that the Emperor intervened and ordered a second salon, the famous Salon des Refusés of 1863. Many artists simply slunk away, not wanting to exhibit with the losers, but the more opportunistic painters, such as Manet and his friend, James Whistler, participated. The Salon des Refusés overshadowed the Salon of the Accepted Ones, and the two artists were the most scandalous painters presenting. To paraphrase Flaubert, now that Manet was attacked, he now existed in the minds of the art public, which was primed and ready to be horrified at his next offering, Olympia, another modern nude, at the Salon of 1865. “I render as simply as possible the things I see. What could be more naïve than Olympia?” Manet protested, perhaps a bit disingenuously.
By layering Le Dejeunner sur l’herbe with references to two paintings by Raphael, to Giorgione’s Fête Competre, to Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, and Olympia with quotations from Titian and Goya, Manet seemed to ask why couldn’t he be allowed to do the same kind of art as his predecessors? But his art was not the same. Manet did more than Michel Foucault claimed when he remarked that the artist was the first to paint a “museum painting,” that is a painting that would be comprehensible only to the art educated public. The paintings Manet borrowed from were all set in poetic spaces, not in real time or in real places. Only Titian’s Venus of Urbino, the model for Olympia, was contemporary, a private commission, about as high-minded as Courbet’s The Sleepers. But Titian’s “Venus” was demurely distanced from the kind of provocative modernité demonstrated by Manet. Titian’s painting was a private offering to a princely patron; Manet’s paintings were public assaults, exposing the sexual pastimes of the well-heeled male, indiscretions to which the law turned a blind eye. That willed blindness was pierced by the strident gaze of Manet’s model, the high-priced courtesan watchfully regarding the male interloper, who had apparently interrupted a sexual tryst. The tactic of breaking through the “fourth wall” of the picture plane predicted the theatrical practices of Berthold Brecht—-the direct address of the actor to the audience, the refusal to accept the rules of virtual reality. By forcing the Second Empire audience to become part of its own sordid hidden lives, Manet achieved his intention to “do the nude” and to become noticed. Scandal equaled success and established Manet’s reputation as the leader of the new avant-garde, and freed him from conventional subject matter. But Modernité would not be the conflation of art history and art present, but the capture of all that was contingent and fleeting, the ephemeral drifting fragments of Paris: the next stage of Manet’s career.
If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.
ÉDOUARD MANET, PART ONE
It is with Édouard Manet that the concept of Modernism as a new form of urban culture is manifested in painting. This podcast traces Manet’s ironic and satiric play with art historical predecessors in his efforts to both succeed in the Salons and to capture the fleeting world of modernité.
Art-for-Art’s-Sake in Context
In the Salon of 1846, the poet and art critic, Charles Baudelaire argued that average people (in modern clothes) were as heroic as any Roman heroes of ancient times. In the waning days of the July Monarchy, the Greco-Roman legends and myths represented in French Academic art were no longer relevant to a society which was rapidly modernizing. Art, Baudelaire insisted, should be about “us” and “our” heroism and “our” time. Within the world of Academic art, his idea of conceiving of the contemporary period as being special or even worthy of depiction was controversial and heretical. The emotional investment that the Academy and its artists had in the classical tradition has to be understood, not as a stubborn preference for a particular style, but a reaction to the rapid and unstoppable social and economic changes.
These alterations to the cultural fabric were unstoppable, beyond anyone’s control. Even worse, the consequences of the constant upheavals could not be predicted. It is also important to realized the stress the French people had been under since the French Revolution, as the political scene veered wildly from King to Emperor to revolution to war and rebellions. Periodically the nation would be caught up in a never-ending civil war which was a struggle between the lower and middle classes for political power. Only one class could rule, according to the bourgeois mindset, and the upstart class must be crushed. When seen in the context of the desperate rear guard struggle against cultural change, the intensity of the artistic quarrels of the Nineteenth century is easier to comprehend.
Classical art and traditional Academic teachings, whether philosophical or technical, were a bulwark of reassurance, as if the “timeless” would protect the nation from all that was “modern.” The “modern” and “modernité” were, quite simply, dangerous to the status quo and to the stability that was so hard to come by and so hard to maintain. The Second Empire devoted enormous amounts of time and energy to controlling thought. Previous freedoms were revoked. The press was strangled and killed and the publications that were left were heavily censored. Art was strictly controlled by the government.
Those who dedicated themselves to economic pursuits were celebrated and ennobled by the state, but those who rejected the bourgeois lifestyle were suspect. It is out of these suspect people, poets, writers, visual artists, déclasse members of la bohème, that the new concept of art-for-art’s-sake developed. This new approach to art and how and why art should be made differed from the Romantic justification for art in that, with the Naturalist artists, their stance was impersonal rather than personal, and objective rather than subjective. A reflection of the demand for individualism, the Romantic artist based everything on personal vision and personal expression. But the Naturalist perspective comes, not from selfhood, but from science.
The Naturalist artist had a new role, that of an observer who was disinterested and detached. In some ways, this role sounds similar to that of the Realist artist—to depict life as it really was. However, there is an important difference both in intent and in effect: the Realist artist was “interested.” In the art of Gustave Courbet, for example, the purpose of recording ordinary life was to make a political point, giving the artist a social purpose and the art a social role. Courbet and his art were intended to work within the stystem, reforming it from the inside. This new social utility of art and the resulting political engagement was a necessary wedge between the old Romantic “art-for-art’s-sake” and the new concept of “art-for-art’s-sake.”
Science and technology became the basis for knowledge, and Baudelaire’s ideas were in tune with an intensified historical self-consciousness and self-examination that can be found in other disciplines of the time, especially history, which was beginning to take its modern form. After Courbet, it became necessary to free art from its role as political commentator and social savior. Art making had to be a detached exercise, and, after Courbet, content should not count, subject matter could not be significant. At this stage, the object of artistic contemplation could not be totally neutralized but it could be downplayed. The artists and writers who needed to distance themselves from the old-fashioned Realists deliberately selected subject which were both modern and commonplace.
By commonplace, they meant ordinary as opposed to ancient heroics, but another point needs to be made. These members of la bohéme were bound to the middle class, depending, like Courbet and Manet, upon private family wealth to fund their artistic rebellion against the establishment. Men like that were snobs with a profound distaste for the middle classes who were conformist and ordinary, and it is important to understand the importance of their hostility towards that which they examined. While taking a disinterested stance, the artists exposed the banality of modern life in all its excrutiating detail. Mere depiction condemned, simple description challenged, hence the crushing reaction of the forces of law and order leveled against these vulgarians. The approach of depicting modern life without trying to exoticize it, symbolize it, moralize it, or idealize it was the basis of the current Naturalist literature of Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert. Flaubert insisted that it would be a mistake to conflate Realism with Naturalism.
Everyone thinks I am in love with reality, whereas i actually detest it. It was in hatred of realism that I undertood this book (Madame Bovary). But I equally despise the false brand of idealism which is such a hollow mockery in the present age…I wrote Madame Bovary to annoy Champfleury, I wanted to show that bourgeois dreariness and mediocre sentiments could sustain beautiful language.
What is important about Flaubert’s statement is, first, his “hatred” for “reality,” i. e. bourgeois life; and second, is his stress on language. Flaubert looked at the sordid word of the unsalvagable middle class and turns that world into a linguistic exercise. The writer pointed out that is is important to “write the mediocre well,” that is, the content is irrelevant and the form becomes paramount. The trick is to transcend reality with the transformative power of language. But this language had to be a neutralized speech: rhetoric had to be stripped away, poetry had to be eliminated. This new way of writing was one of observation composed of detailed description for no particular purpose other than the sheer act of writing. Writing was for the sake of writing. From the perspective of Naturalism, Flaubert’s visual counterpart was Edouard Manet.
Manet may or may not have been Baudelaire’s “painter of modern life,” but he was engaged in the same enterprise as the writer—that of using the language of the discipline against the discipline in order to change, not literature or art, but to change its language. If the new task of the artist, inherited from the older Realists, was to avoid the “poncif,” then the next step would be to use the scenes of modern life as a vehicle for a modern language. It would be incorrect to argue that Manet’s content was totally neutral, nor were the scenes of modern life he selected arbitrary. True, his paintings were charged with social meaning but, in their own time, the truly sensational aspect of his work was not his content but the way he painted: his language.
In The Judgment of Paris (2006), Ross King pointed out that the public cared little for the nudity or prostitution or Manet’s Dejeunner sur l’herbe or Olympia and that the critics were more concerned with his sins against painting techniques. Emile Zola was one of the writers who urged the public to look away from Manet’s content to his style of painting but we should not read his defense anachronistically as a justification for formalism or a formal reading of a painting. The importance of Manet, in his own time, is how he took the language of art and renewed it, freeing, painting itself from it traditional role in representation. As Pierre Bourdieu in The Rule of Art (1992) expressed it,
This is the complexity of the artistic revolution: under pain of excluding oneself from the game, one cannot revolutionize a field without mobilizing or invoking the experiences of the history of the field and the great heretics—baudelaire, Flaubert, and Manet—inscribe themselves explicitly in this history of the field, mastering its specific capital much more completely than their contemporaries, so that revolutions take the form of return to sources, to purity of origins.
“Art-for-art’s-sake” under naturalism was an attempt to remake literature so that writing would be simply writing: word-making; and to remake art so that painting would be simply painting: mark making. Simple, but profoundly disruptive to a society constantly on the brink of disintegration. During the Second Empire, art should be mobilized to the purposes of the State and anyone who was suspected of not doing the proper patriotic duty would suffer the fate of an outsider. Like it or not, art-for-art’s-sake was political stance and a social position.
If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.
THE PAINTER OF MODERN LIFE
Like many writers before and after him, Baudelaire wrote without specific commission, on “spec” as it were. This essay on Constantin Guys, an illustrator for the Illustrated London News, was actually written in 1860 and would not be published until 1863 in installment form in Figaro. The publication of the article coincided with the infamous Salon des Réfusés and the debut of Édouard Manet as an artist of scandal. Suddenly, what had been a nebulous concern, about content and technique in art making, became urgent and topical. Manet had presented a courtesan as a modern “Venus,” a prostitute as a modern “Nude,” and had quoted Renaissance artists, Raphael and Titian to do so. In addition, the painter had eschewed “good” drawing and approved “finish” for a causal and notational manner of transcribing. The Painter of Modern Life made sense of what Manet had done to art—made painting “modern.”
There is a real question as to whether or not the “painter” of whom Baudelaire wrote was less important than the essay itself. While it is certainly true that any writer uses others as vehicles for his or her views, the selection of Constantin Guys was crucial to the main point of the essay. Guys, who, according to Baudelaire, refused to be named in the essay, was an old soldier who had served in that most romantic of conflicts, the freedom of Greece. As widely traveled as the poet was provincial, Guys had spent years as a reporter and an war correspondence for the Illustrated London News during the Crimean War. The artist informed the English audience of the details of an unpopular war at a time where his pen was much quicker than the camera. Born in 1802, Guys was far older than Baudelaire when he returned to live in Paris, and he lived much longer than the poet who suffered from syphilis and drug addiction. Guys died in a tragic traffic accident in 1892.
Baudelaire saw Guys as a bohemian hero, an outsider, the “observer, philosopher, flâneur” and as “the painter of the passing moment and of all the suggestions of eternity it contains.” Like Baudelaire, he, a “man of the crowd,” was a journalist who was trained to watch and look carefully, especially at the details, or what the poet described as, “particular beauty, the beauty of circumstances and the sketch of manners.” But Baudelaire drew a distinction between the dandy—Guys “has a horror of blasé people…” (like the dandy)—and the flâneur , or the “passionate spectator.” Baudelaire made the point, over and over, that the flâneur was someone who is traveling “incognito” or, in other words, the flâneur fades into the crowd, unnoticed. “…the crowd is his element,” Baudelaire said, “…the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electric energy.” “Monsieur Guys,” due to the necessary haste to record what he saw “drew like a barbarian, or a child,” producing “primitive scribbles,” was declared by Baudelaire to be “not precisely an artist, but rather a man of the world.” “…the mainspring of his genius is curiosity.” The working methods of the artist were traditional in that he looked, he saw, he scribbled and then, using his memory, completed his thought later in a sketch-like record.
Baudelaire stressed the “rights and privileges offered by circumstances…for almost all our originality comes from the seal which Time imprints on our sensations.” Reaching back to Friedrich Schiller, perhaps, Baudelaire compares the artistic condition of Guys to be that of childhood, suggesting that the illustrator was an instinctive artist, from whom images simply flow, without hierarchy and without restraint. Under the direction of no one, Guys simply sketched what he saw. “But genius is nothing more not less than childhood recovered at will..,” Baudelaire stated. So, it is implied, that only the “childlike artist,” who was Schiller’s “naïve artist,” is equipped to see and record the new world. Baudelaire stated,
By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and 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 time the first woman before the fall of man.”
This is the founding definition of modernity, coined by a poet and evidenced by an illustrator of the “crowd.”
The salient quality of The Painter of Modern Life is what and whom Guys, the grown man, found interesting. “Modern Life,” for Baudelaire, appeared to be located among la bohème, which, in itself, was a creation of the modern world. First, there is the dandy. The dandy is one of Baudelaire’s heroes and makes many appearances in the urban scenes captured by Guys. “Dandyism,” the poet said, “borders upon the spiritual and stoical…Dandyism is the last spark of heroism amid decadence…Dandyism is a sunset; like the 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…” This man has “an air of coldness…a latent fire…(which) chooses not to burst into flames,” he concluded, alluding to the resigned cynicism of an endangered species in the face of unstoppable changes.
The female, in contrast to the male, is described, not in terms of character or psychology, but as a spectacle: “She is a kind of idol, stupid perhaps, but dazzling and bewitching.” But far from dismissing the female, Baudelaire continues for pages, focusing on cosmetics and fashion. For Modernism, fashion is the leading indicator or the “ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent,” for nothing is more changeable than fashion. Fashion stands for the new consumerism, showcased in the arcades, where commodities were protected in passages of iron and glass. Positioned between the major avenues, the arcades were the domain of the flâneur, both male and female, and the precursors to the department stores. Consumer capitalism needs to create desire to tempt the buyer to purchase, which meant the creation of products that, by their very nature, needed to be renewed. Not food or another necessity, but an artificial desire for a non-necessity drove the economy. The woman becomes the carrier of artificiality.
Baudelaire, a city dweller, is no nature lover: “I ask you to review an scrutinize whatever is natural—all the actions and desires of the purely natural man: you will find nothing but frightfulness. Everything beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.” And cosmetics. “Fashion should thus be considered as a symptom of the taste for the ideal which floats on the surface of all the crude, terrestrial and loathsome bric-à-brac that the natural life accumulates in the human brain: as a sublime subordination of Nature, or rather a permanent and repeated attempt at her redemption.” There is a slippage in Baudelaire’s writings from “women” to “prostitutes,” as if, for the poet there is no divide. It is known that his only relationship was with a prostitute, but that kind of connection was not uncommon, in an age where marriage was often a financial alliance. Baudelaire seemed to have no interest in the so-called respectable woman, who reflected her husband’s position and the values of the bourgeois society. The prostitute is a free and liberated woman, from the poet’s perspective and thus wears modernity as cosmetics and fashion, proclaiming the artificial. Indeed, the poet compares the application of make up to the creation of a work of art: “Maquillage has no need to hide itself or to shrink from being suspected. On the contrary, let it display itself, at least if it does so with frankness and honesty.”
Gradually, as the essay draws to a conclusion, Guys, the “painter of modern life,” has become less important that the social conditions he observed and recorded. Modern life, fueled by commodities and their artificial manufacture of artificial desires, is defined by a new and bewildering urban environment, populated by new kinds of people, the demimonde. Nothing is real and everything changes and, above all, nothing is natural. Baudelaire understands that art is not a copy of nature. Art is inherently and definitionally artificial, as artificial as fashion, as ephemeral as a fad. The role of the artist is not to re-imagine the “eternal” or the antique but to seize upon the passing fancy, that salient detail that captures the mood of the moment.
The Painter of Modern Life predicts the paintings of Manet, such as The Street Singer of the same year—-a grisette (low level prostitute), or street entertainer, strides past the flâneur. She is eating cherries and glances briefly at the spectator and is caught in a brief instant of time, and quickly moves on, her wide skirts embellished in the latest fashionable embellishments. The idea of the passive observer who merely records, the demand that that watcher react quickly to what the photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, would call “the decisive moment,” looks forward to the Impressionist artists who were much less cynical and sophisticated than the art writer. Baudelaire did not live long enough to see a group of painters embrace the sketch-like approach of “the painter of modern life,” but his essay became foundational in its description of modernity: all that is “transitory” and “fugitive.” It has been a hundred and fifty years since The Painter of Modern Life was published and with the benefit of hindsight one can only marvel at how much our world resembles that of the poet.
See also “Baudelaire as Art Critic” and Baudelaire and Modernity”
If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.
BAUDELAIRE AND MODERNITY
Every age needs its observer and every era requires an interpreter. That individual has to be an odd cross between a poet and a reporter, to elevate the culture above mere description. Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 1867) was a renegade poet, a syphilitic art critic, and above all a disaffected and alienated student of a society under the pressure of a transition. That Baudelaire was a marginal character who lived on the fringes of a cynical consumer society was crucial to his ability to describe and define the new phenomenon, “modernité.” Although the poet wrote extensively on a variety of topics, he is especially significant for essays, prose poems, poetry and art criticism that articulated a new way of life. In 1947, Jean-Paul Sartre accused Baudelaire of “bad faith” due to the many contradictions in his life and work. However, a self-destructive poet and drug addicts, who lived in debt on the run from creditors, while, at the same time, taking part in the intellectual and artistic life of Paris, can hardly be expected to be consistent. The very times of Baudelaire were paradoxical.
The art critic straddled the divide between waning Romanticism and emerging Realism, watching Eugène Delacroix after his creative peak and not living long enough to see Èdouard Manet reach his full artistic potential. While there may never have been an artist who coincided with the poet’s desire to describe modernité, Baudelaire addressed the unfolding of a new way of life in a dense urban environment of the “crowd” and the impact of technology upon society and art. By the 1840s, not only was Romanticism over but the art produced by the salon system was also becoming increasingly irrelevant. The excuse for academic art was that it portrayed the “heroic” life of the ancient world, but, for Baudelaire, it was necessary for artists to be of their own time. But what that “their time” mean?
The industrial revolution came slow and late to France, not in small part because many of the technological changes had been developed in the homeland of their hated enemy, England. While England was already adjusting to industry, France, by mid-century, was just beginning to cope with the transition from an agricultural society to an urban and industrial one. It is possible to see the process of artistic adjustment to these changes in the paintings of Jean-François Millet and Gustave Courbet. Millet presented the countryside as frozen in time while Courbet showed the class tensions even in small villages. Meanwhile, the mainstream salon artists chose to ignore the present in favor of the historical past. Few artists had to ability to see their age in all its uniqueness. To be fair, the cultural changes caused by the Industrial Revolution were so extensive and far-reaching that it was easier to look away. The problems for the artists during this transition period were, first, content of art—contemporary or traditional? and what new artistic techniques would be appropriate for the new age?
More than anyone, Baudelaire articulated both the new content and the new way of expressing the new content. In doing so, he impacted many of his contemporaries and influenced later generations of writers and poets. As an art critic who had to work the salon beat, it was his job to discern a trend or a concern with each annual exhibition. One of his most important salon statements was penned in 1846. In an essay published as a section of “The Salon of 1846″: “On the Heroism of Modern Life,” Baudelaire argued that modern life was as heroic as ancient life and that men in frock coats were as brave in their own time as the Roman gladiators were in the arena:
It is true that this great tradition has been lost, and that the new one is not yet established. But what was this great tradition, if not a habitual everyday idealization of ancient life—a robust and material form of life, a state of readiness on the part of each individual…? Before trying to distinguish the epic side of modern life, and before bringing examples to prove that our age is no less fertile in sublime themes than past ages, we may assert that since all centuries and all peoples have had their own form of beauty, so inevitably we have ours. That is the order of things…But to return to our principle and essential problem, which is to discover whether we possess a specific beauty, intrinsic to our new emotions…The pageant of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences—-criminals and kept women—which drift about in the underworld of the great city; the Gazette des Tribunaux and the Moniteur all prove to us that we have only to open our eyes to recognize our heroism. For the heroes of the Iliad are but pigmies compared to you—-who dared not publically declaim your sorrows in the funeral and tortured frock coat which we all wear today!—you the most heroic, the most extraordinary, the most romantic and the most poetic of all the characters that you have produced from your womb!
The “hero” is male but not just any male. The poet’s hero is not the contented businessman who as prospered under the Citizen King, Louis Philippe, but the hero of la bohème, a cultivated and well-educated man who was also an outsider: the dandy. “…a dandy can never be a vulgar man,” Baudelaire said. The dandy wears the new uniform, the habit noir, the black suit with distinction, proclaiming middle class status. And yet the dandy keeps himself apart from the bourgeoisie by moving with the “crowd,” without ever being part of the crowd. Being a dandy, standing aside and watching, is a strategy of self-defense. But a dandy, par excellence, is also a man who is able to walk the city, freely. Baudelaire is the new man, the flâneur, the person who strolls the side streets, peruses the new arcades and watches the carriages pass down the wide boulevards. At the same time the arcades were ushering in a new form of looking, the spectacle of window-shopping, a new nocturnal Paris sprang into being with the introduction of gaslight in the 1820s. Here, in the darkness, is where we find the poet’s world of marginal people who live a “floating existence,” and it is here were we find the female counterpart to the dandy, the prostitute, the only kind of woman allowed to go abroad at night. Modernism and its heroes is not for the respectable nor the faint-hearted.
Baudelaire, like many inhabitants of the changing city, felt the stresses of the transition. The city he had been born in was vanishing before his very eyes. According to one of Baudelaire’s greatest biographers, the German writer, Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire was part of Bohemia, la bohème. A Marxist writer, Benjamin linked Baudelaire to the territory of the dispossessed by quoting Marx on the precarious position of this social class:
…Their uncertain existence, which in specific cases depended more upon chance than on their activities, their irregular life whose only fixed stations were the taverns of the wine dealers—the gathering places of the conspirators—and their inevitable acquaintanceship with all sorts of dubious people place them in that sphere of life which in Paris is called la bohème….the whole indeterminate, disintegrated, fluctuating mass which the French call la bohème….
By the time of the Second Empire, the chasm between rich and poor had stranded a number of middle class people on the wrong side of prosperity. “It is bourgeois society that Baudelaire holds guilty of the suffering of the post-aristocratic period, and not the least that art has gone to rack and ruin, that poets and artists like himself now belong to the déclassés,” John E. Jackson remarked in 2005. Thus Baudelaire wrote as an outsider, not an insider, taking advantage of an unprecedented expansion of the press. Over the past two decades, new opportunities had emerged for writers such as Baudelaire who was able to find his unique voice and to carve out a position as an observer and witness. The poet was a character composed of unabashed contractions who had no problem in proclaiming, “Any newspaper, from the first to the last is nothing but a web of horrors….” As a writer (who wrote for newspapers) he tried to defend traditional art making against the onslaught of technology, mainly photography, while, at the same time, rushing out to be photographed many times. In “The Salon of 1859,” there was a section, ”The Modern Public and Photography,” where Baudelaire complained about the clash between art and photography:
Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place. If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude, which is its natural ally.
These two essays, written over ten years apart, are indicative of the contradictions and confusions over the role of modern life in art. On one hand, Baudelaire was convinced that the “heroism of modern life” was worth of depiction but on the other hand, that depiction had to be hand made, done in the old fashioned “art” way. A machine can never replace art. But more should be said of the difficulty of writing in a moment of social becoming, for Baudelaire, like Denis Diderot, was looking for the artist who could capture modernité or the pulse of his (or her) own time. Courbet painted contemporary life, but this life was rural and, hence, not the “urban modern” condition that was the daily life of Baudelaire. The poet was clearly looking for someone who expressed modern life in Paris, the city that Walter Benjamin called “the Capital of the Nineteenth Century.”
Baudelaire found his candidate, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in a fellow member of the fringes of society, an obscure illustrator named Constantin Guys. The result of the relationship between the poet and the illustrator, both inhabitants of la bohème, was a long essay, almost book length, which described the condition that Baudelaire called modernité. That essay was the famous The Painter of Modern Life. The poet states, “By ‘modernity,’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable…” Guys, an illustrator and a quick sketch artist, was the outsider, who, because of his position on the fringes, was able to produce hundreds of quick studies of all that was fast-moving and fleeting in modern life. Modernism, for both Baudelaire and for Guys, becomes defined by the concept of constant change, or what the art critic, Harold Rosenberg, would term, a hundred years later, “the tradition of the new.”
See also: “Baudelaire as Art Critic” and “Baudelaire and The Painter of Modern Life”
If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.
BAUDELAIRE AS ART CRITIC
“We are going to be impartial. We have no friends—that is a great thing—and no enemies.” Thus Charles Baudelaire began his career as an art critic with the Salon of 1845. With a tone we suspect to be sardonic, the young writer addressed himself to the bourgeoisie, “a very respectable personage; for one must please those at whose expanse one means to live.” The poet completed his introduction, which is his manifesto of art writing, by saying, “We shall speak about anything that attracts the eye of the crowd and of the artists; our professional conscience obliges us to do so. Everything that pleases has a reason for pleasing, and to scorn the throngs of those that have gone astray is no way to bring them back to where they ought to be.” In the Salon of 1846, the writer again targets the middle class art audience, stating that, “…any book which is not addressed to the majority—in number and intelligence—is a stupid book.” In other words, Baudelaire, a member of la bohème, would not be writing to the artistic reader but to those who were woefully in need of education, the middle classes.
Baudelaire followed the traditional format of the art critic, a walk through a huge salon exhibition, pausing here and there, giving some artists an entire page and others a mere sentence. Interspersed were pages of commentary on the state of the arts, which, combined over time, created a description of the culture of two decades in Paris. The art writer was a product of the Romantic period. Reading his reviews of the Salons, it is plain that he was imbued with the tenants of Romantic thought, but by the time his career began, Romanticism was on the wane and new ways of thinking about art were being developed. Although Eugène Delacroix was making official art for the establishment, Baudelaire worshiped him and despised his great rival, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres. “M. Delacroix is decidedly the most original painter of ancient or of modern times…M. Delacroix is not yet a member of the Academy, but morally he belongs to it.” Baudelaire refers to the painter as “a genius who is ceaselessly in search of the new.”
In The Salon of 1846, Baudelaire wrote some of the most definitive words on Romanticism. “…if, by romanticism, you are prepared to understand the most recent, most modern expression of beauty—then…the great artist will be he who will combine with the condition required above—that of the quality of naïveté—the greatest possible amount of romanticism.” As will pointed out in the text, “Baudelaire and Modernité” (Art History Unstuffed), the writer was obviously familiar with Friedrich Schiller’s “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” in which the poet compared two artistic types. Schiller’s “naïve” poet (artist) who was “childlike,” and allowed nature to flow through spontaneously creating art through an individual sensibility was the precursor to artistic individualists like Delacroix. “Romanticism,” Baudelaire echoed, “is precisely situated neither in choice of subjects nor in exact truth, but in a mode of feeling. They looked for it outside themselves, but it was only to be found within. For me, Romanticism is the most recent, the latest expression of the beautiful.”
And yet, in the same Salon, Baudelaire acknowledges the pressing conditions of the urban present. For him, and for many artists, Romanticism was the very expression of all that was modern: artistic freedom and the expression of individuality. But in the writer’s section “Of the Heroism of Modern Life,” there are passages that prefigure The Painter of Modern Life. In order to understand the importance of Baudelaire’s writing at this point, it is necessary to remember that the Romantic artists, especially during the time of this Salon, were often involved in historical subjects. Unknowingly working against waning Romanticism and predicting Realism, Baudelaire made a case for modern subject matter.
Before trying to distinguish the epic side of modern life, and before bringing examples to prove that our age is no less fertile in sublime themes than past ages, we may assert that since all centuries and all people have had their own form of beauty, so inevitably we have ours…
All forms of beauty,” the writer continued, “…contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory—of the absolute and the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction skimmed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions; and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.
The notion of “beauty” is already an old fashioned one, inherited from the Ancients, would will soon be replaced by a bracing does of realism and the introduction of “ugliness.” Here we see the appearance of Baudelaire’s fascination with fashion that would emerge in The Painter of Modern Life. In contrast to the colorful attire of the past, contemporary fashion for men had become democratized by the uniform of the black suit, which, according to Baudelaire, “…not only posses their political beauty, which is an expression of universal equality.” After reassuring the reader that artists were capable of capturing shades of blacks and grays, something Èdouard Manet would excel at, he continued, “…our principal and essential problem, which is to discover whether we possess a specific beauty, intrinsic to our new emotions…” and urges the artists to look away from “public and official subjects” to “private subjects which are very much more heroic than these.”
Indeed, Baudelaire moved directly to the world he knew best, the world inhabited by the disenfranchised, including artists and writers, “the pageant of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences—criminals and kept women—which drift about in the underworld of a great city….all prove to us that we have only to open our eyes to recognize our heroism.” It is in this underworld where modern life existed. Indeed, as Baudelaire pointed out, the comfortable bourgeoisie cannot be a hero; that status is reserved for those who deserve it—those of “floating existences,” the men and women struggling to keep alive in a hostile city. The need for this new kind of heroism intensified, for the gaps that appear in his art writing coincide with the Revolution of 1848 and the establishment of the Second Empire, events that brought about the very “modern life” he predicted. For years, Baudelaire the art writer went dark, while he translated the American poet Edgar Allan Poe and wrote his ill-fated book of poetry Les Fleurs du Mal (1857).
Baudelaire’s silence and withdrawal are interesting. On one hand, one could speculate that the writer was confounded by the death of Romanticism, but, on the other hand, he had been on the cutting edge by predicting the coming of an art that demanded contemporary subjects. But the kind of realism that developed after the Revolution of 1848 was based upon observation of the base and the banal, the ordinary world according to Gustave Courbet. The natural world of the petit bourgeoisie did not appeal to Baudelaire, who, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, “hated and regretted” “naturalness.” “Baudelaire’s profound singularity,” Sartre wrote, “lay in the fact that he was the man without ‘immediacy.’” The art critic is silent during the first decade of the Second Empire until the occasion of the Exposition Universelle in 1855. Picking up his earlier thoughts, Baudelaire returns to the subject of beauty. “The Beautiful is always strange,” he said in one of his most famous statements. “…it always contains a touch of strangeness, of simple, unpremeditated and unconscious strangeness, and it is that touch of strangeness that gives it its particular quality as Beauty.”
Oddly Baudelaire devotes his review of the Exposition to the dialectic of the display of Ingres and Delacroix as the official artists representing France, ignoring the outsider Courbet, his Realist Manifesto, his innovative Pavilion of Realism, and the two decades of works it contained. Halfway into the Second Empire, Baudelaire wrote of “The Modern Artist” and “The Modern Public and Photography” in The Salon of 1859. In writing of photography, Baudelaire also expresses his horror of the new tendencies towards objectivity and of scientific observation. “Each day art further diminishes its self-respect by bowing down before external reality; each day the painter becomes more and more given to painting not what he dreams but what he sees.” “…it is happiness to dream,” the poet protested and, in the next section, wrote on Imagination, “The Queen of the Faculties.” Once again, Baudelaire uses the opportunity to repudiate Realism.
In recent years we have heard it said in a thousand and different ways, “Copy nature; just copy nature. There is no greater delight, no finer triumph than an excellent copy of nature.” And this doctrine (the enemy of art) was alleged to apply not only to painting but to all the arts, even to the novel and to poetry. To these doctrinaires, who were so completely satisfied by Nature, a man of imagination would certainly have the right to reply: “I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fantasy to what is positively trivial.
Baudelaire dismissed the realists, “…let us simply believe that they mean to say, ‘We have no imagination, and we decree that no one else is to have any.’ He continued, “How mysterious is Imagination, that Queen of the Faculties! It touches all the others’ it rouses them and sends them into combat.” “…Without imagination, all the faculties, however sound or sharpened they may be, are as though they did not exist…” Speaking of Delacroix (without naming him), Baudelaire elaborated upon the painter’s dictate, “Nature is but a dictionary,” in order to compare the artist to the realists. Earlier the art critic had written of Delacroix that, for the painter, “The entire universe is only a dictionary of images and signs.” “Painters who are obedient to the imagination seek in their dictionary for which the whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform…”
The concept that nature was a dictionary, seen by the artist as a symbolic, not literal, source for ideas was echoed in his poem, “Correspondences” in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857):
La Nature est un temple oû de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L’homme y passé à travers des forêts de symbols
Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.
Writing in 1990, the critic, Jonathan Culler, translates Baudelaire’s “forest of signs” as a doctrine of Correspondences in which the poet “seems to disrupt the one-to-one correspondence between natural sign and spiritual meaning that the others promote.” In other words, Baudelaire caused a rupture between the word and the thing, between the act of transcribing and the object recorded. The so-called “correspondences” are arbitrary, making the signs into symbolic substitutes that do not name but suggest. By continuing to insist upon the primacy of the imagination, Baudelaire founded a modern poetry of nuance.
Baudelaire ends his work as an art critic by paying homage to his friend Courbet, “we must do Courbet this justice—that he contributed not a little to the re-establishment of a taste for simplicity and honesty, and of a disinterested, absolute love of painting.” And Baudelaire included a nod to Manet who had yet to become the artist he would be. And so, with the Salon of 1859, Baudelaire moves on to other forms of writing. Somewhere along the way, Baudelaire seemed to find a balance between poetry and prose with his “prose poems” in Paris Spleen in 1869. Waiting almost a decade after his last Salon, Baudelaire seemed to come to terms with Realism, but not in terms of “simplicity and honesty,” but in terms of the artificiality that Sartre insisted Baudelaire preferred. The poet realized that the next life for art would be not in the country scenes of the painters of the lower classes but in the interpretation of “the heroism of modern life” he discussed in The Painter of Modern Life.
See also “Baudelaire and Modernity” and “Baudelaire and The Painter of Modern Life”
If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.
