CHAPTER 1
Introduction
How could Baudelaire have been so wrong? The question is a silly one, even a stupid one, but it comes back persistently in different forms for readers of his art criticism. If Baudelaireâs art criticism is read today, it is above all for his late essay, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, published in 1863. There he elaborates a concept of modernity that has elicited discussion for a century and a half, and it has even been said that Baudelaireâs essay defines modernity. Baudelaire chose however to refer in his essay to the works of a âM. G.â, an initial that in earlier versions of the essay as well as within the published essay points to Constantin Guys, a draughtsman for the Illustrated London News. The reference has caused consternation ever since the essay was published: why did Baudelaire choose an unknown artist working for an English publication, whose works were visible mainly as engravings in the paper; why did he choose Guys as his âpainter of modern life?â The question arises in many forms. It comes up when Timothy Clark entitles his study of the Impressionists The Painting of Modern Life; it occurs when Paul de Man reads Baudelaireâs essay as an allegory of writing, and again when the editors of a collection of Walter Benjaminâs essays use the title The Writer of Modern Life. All of these responses push Constantin Guys into the background. Other writers simply replace Guys with other, âbetterâ artists, and here Ădouard Manet is the favorite: Anne Coffin Hanson applies Baudelaireâs definition of modernity to Manetâs works, while Pierre-Georges Castex goes as far as to correct the poetâs mistake:
Le peintre complet de la vie moderne ne saurait sâidentifier Ă un interprète de mode, mĂŞme heureusement inspirĂŠ. Sans doute Baudelaire aurait-il pu trouver une matière plus riche, sinon pour une analyse de la modernitĂŠ au sens oĂš il entendait cette notion, du moins pour une analyse du gĂŠnie moderne en peinture, dans les Ĺuvres dâĂdouard Manet.1
[The complete painter of modern life cannot be identified with a fashion-artist, even an inspired one. Certainly Baudelaire could have found richer material, if not for an analysis of modernity in the meaning which he grants to this notion, at least for an analysis of the modern genius in painting, in the works of Ădouard Manet.]
So Baudelaire erred by naming Guys âle peintre de la vie moderneâ, as well as by failing to recognize Manet as a more worthy bearer of that title. Is that all? As it happens, Baudelaire also missed the development of photography, which was going to fill Guysâs job in the decades after his death. But not simply did Baudelaire fail to see that photography was going to do what Guys was doing â recording modern life as it happened â he condemned the medium in terms that make his very few comments on it anthology-pieces found in histories of photography as evidence of the hostile reaction that the new process encountered in the first decades of its existence. The overlap between his praise of Guys and his condemnation of photography shows up occasionally, when acute readers of Baudelaire place the latter in the former essay, or vice versa. This is the case, for example, of Gisèle Freund, a friend of Walter Benjaminâs who cites Baudelaireâs Le Peintre de la vie moderne but refers her citation to the Salon de 1859 as if that were the source.2 Likewise, Antoine Compagnon in his Baudelaire lâirrĂŠductible speaks of âle chapitre sur la photographie du Peintre de la vie moderneâ [the chapter on photography from Le Peintre de la vie moderne].3
More generally, there now exists an overlap between photography and flânerie, the former abhorred by Baudelaire, the latter adored. In On Photography, for instance, Susan Sontag cites the Baudelairian figure of the flâneur as a model for the photographer: âThe flâneur is not attracted to the cityâs official realities but to its dark seamy corners, its neglected populations â an unofficial reality behind the façade of bourgeois life that the photographer âapprehendsâ, as a detective apprehends a criminalâ.4 The flâneur is indeed a prototypical figure for the poet, but when he appears at length, discovering the seamy side of the Second Empireâs bourgeois dream, it is in Le Peintre de la vie moderne,5 and this conflation of him with photographers overlooks Baudelaireâs explicit link of flânerie with engraving: âDelâtre me prie de faire un texte pour lâalbum [of Meryonâs etchings]. Bon! voilĂ une occasion dâĂŠcrire [...] les rĂŞveries philosophiques dâun flâneur parisienâ6 [Delâtre is asking me to do a text for an album (of Meryonâs etchings). Great! Hereâs an occasion to write...the philosophical reveries of a Parisian flâneur]. More recently still, and still further from Baudelaire, Edmund White takes Eugène Atget as the very model of the flâneur, even if he âcarried his tripod, view camera and glass plates everywhere with himâ,7 a load that makes flânerie a rather strenuous activity.
This study is a response to these two âerrorsâ: Baudelaireâs designation of Constantin Guys as the painter of modern life, and his condemnation of photography. Both are from 1859, the year James R. Lawler has designated as the poetâs âmiracle yearâ.8 The condemnation of photography is to be found in his Salon de 1859, and Le Peintre de la vie moderne, although only published in 1863, was first conceived in 1859 and its composition could have occurred at any point between those two dates.
What does it mean to say that Baudelaire erred? First and foremost, it means that his judgements are central to his art criticism, and that theories and descriptions are secondary. So to say that Baudelaire got it wrong is to say that someone else â Baudelaireâs critic, presumably â got it right, and that despite the fact that, as Kant so nicely put it, a judgement in matters of aesthetics âhas often enough to put up with a rude dismissal of its claims to universal validityâ.9 To fault Baudelaire is thus to take his aesthetic judgements seriously, too seriously, perhaps, and likewise to take our own without the grain of salt that opposing opinions provide. At the very least, the argument about the true subject of Le Peintre de la vie moderne should warn of the perils of aesthetic judgement.
Baudelaire however did take such judgements seriously and his readers cannot ignore them. What one can do, given the opposition his endorsements and exclusions have created, is ask why he chose to write art criticism, and what he wanted to accomplish by writing it. From the very first of his art-critical essays, Baudelaire sought to do something that bears little resemblance to the assertions of oneâs taste over someone elseâs: discover an artist â a painter â around whom he could elaborate a theory not of beauty, but of modernity. From his first essays on, Baudelaire is interested in painters who seize the moment, whose work is more like discovery than representation, who show something unknown and perhaps unknowable.
It is hardly novel to say that Baudelaireâs writings exhibit a tension between two poles: his art criticism nonetheless, which began as a search for beauty, finishes as an articulation of modernity, over a trajectory where the poetâs concern with beauty declines as his interest in modernity grows. It is clear though that something happened in 1859 that caused him to rethink his search for beauty: this is the year during which he sees Charles Meryonâs engravings; the year when he sends three magnificent poems to Victor Hugo, dedicating them to him, but also sends him a page of his art criticism, the one describing Meryonâs etchings. Later in that year, he talks of meeting Constantin Guys.
It must not be forgotten that both Guysâs and Meryonâs works used mechanical means of reproduction, and in that are opposed to the one-of-a-kind pieces that commanded large sums at the yearly Salon. Perhaps he has become convinced that cheaper, printed images are the way of the future; perhaps he sees for images what happened to words with the invention of the printing press: durability ensured by multiplicity, not solidity. Whatever the case, though, his Salon de 1859 is where he advances his theory of the imagination, and it is also where he condemns photography. Very broadly, the value he finds in imagination is projective, forward-moving and anticipatory, while the defect of photography is that it is static and repetitive.
His characterization of photography will touch discussions for more than a hundred years: well into the second half of the twentieth century, arguments have surrounded photographs asserting, very broadly again, either that photographs are like paintings â single works, one-offs â or that they are like printed words â indefinitely repeatable, having no special relation with what they designate. Baudelaire clings to the second of these views, and further, sees it as a failing.
Beyond Baudelaireâs âerrorâ in assessing the value of photography, what calls out for comment is the ferocity of his denunciation of the process: he reverts to a religious discourse, and pronounces it anathema, like a pontiff excluding a sinner from the fold of the faithful. The binary structure of his condemnation invites comparison to other extreme reactions, and it appears here that Baudelaireâs reaction is hostile because photography does exactly what his new poetics would have him do: create âTableaux parisiensâ.
Why hasnât this subject been studied? In fact, it has, but unlike other topics to which Baudelaire put his hand, the very few pages that he wrote on photography have been read as though their meaning were clear and simple.10 There are several reasons for this. In the years following the publication of his Salon de 1859, his comments were similar in their content and their tone to many other writers on the subject, for whom photography was a way of producing bad images, but more seriously, a way of meddling in Godâs monopoly on exact likenesses. As photography came to be recognized as an art, it became expedient to dismiss Baudelaireâs thoughts on it as an embarrassing faux pas. Here the motivation is twofold: if the passages consist above all in a judgement, and if that judgement is wrong, it is best to ignore them, for to say that Baudelaire could be wrong in his judgements would also imply that we could be wrong in ours, and that would not do. To say that he was right, on the other hand, or that he was prescient, would be to deny the fact of photographyâs success, and that would not do either. Better then to ignore what Baudelaire said, especially if, as it is the case, the Salon de 1859 offers something that can be glossed at length, namely his theory of imagination.
The list of readers who saw in Baudelaireâs comments only condemnation of photography is an illustrious one: Walter Benjamin opposes Baudelaire to the forgotten Antoine Wiertz, who for his part predicted that photography would change the world.11 At the same time as Benjaminâs Short History of Photography, Eni...