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HIST30062 1 75937980 HIST30062 Document Analysis Extract from Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Johnathon Mayne, (London, 1995), p.12. “And so away he goes, hurrying, searching. But searching for what? Be very sure that this man, such as I have depicted him this solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert has an aim loftier than that of a mere flâneur, an aim more general, something other than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call ‘modernity’; for I know of no better word to express the idea I have in mind. He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal from the transitory. Casting an eye over our exhibitions of modern pictures, we are struck by a general tendency among artists to dress all their subjects in the garments of the past. Almost all of them make use of the costumes and furnishings of Rome. There is however this difference, that David, by choosing subjects which were specifically Greek or Roman, had no alternative but to dress them in antique garb, whereas the painters of today, though choosing subjects of a general nature applicable to all ages, nevertheless persist in rigging them out in the costumes of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance or the Orient. This is clearly symptomatic of a great degree of laziness; for it is much easier to decide outright that everything about the garb of an age is absolutely ugly than to devote oneself to the task of distilling form it the mysterious element of beauty that it may contain, however slight or minimal that element may be. By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”

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  • HIST30062 1 75937980

    HIST30062 Document Analysis

    Extract from Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays,

    trans. Johnathon Mayne, (London, 1995), p.12.

    And so away he goes, hurrying, searching. But searching for what? Be very

    sure that this man, such as I have depicted him this solitary, gifted with an

    active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert has

    an aim loftier than that of a mere flneur, an aim more general, something other

    than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which

    you must allow me to call modernity; for I know of no better word to express

    the idea I have in mind. He makes it his business to extract from fashion

    whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal

    from the transitory. Casting an eye over our exhibitions of modern pictures, we

    are struck by a general tendency among artists to dress all their subjects in the

    garments of the past. Almost all of them make use of the costumes and

    furnishings of Rome. There is however this difference, that David, by choosing

    subjects which were specifically Greek or Roman, had no alternative but to

    dress them in antique garb, whereas the painters of today, though choosing

    subjects of a general nature applicable to all ages, nevertheless persist in rigging

    them out in the costumes of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance or the Orient.

    This is clearly symptomatic of a great degree of laziness; for it is much easier to

    decide outright that everything about the garb of an age is absolutely ugly than

    to devote oneself to the task of distilling form it the mysterious element of

    beauty that it may contain, however slight or minimal that element may be. By

    modernity I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art

    whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.

  • HIST30062 2 75937980

    The Painter of Modern Life is an essay written by the poet of mid-nineteenth century

    Paris, Charles Baudelaire, and was published in instalments in the periodical Le Figaro in the

    winter of 1863.1 In this extract Baudelaire delineates the notion that the transient, anonymous,

    encounters of everyday life in the urban metropolis constitute a world of impressions worthy

    of representation in modern art. He promotes a style and ideology of social observation that

    permeated nineteenth century writing, much of which was produced for the feuilleton section

    of the new mass newspapers, such as Le Figaro, and were likely to have received a wide

    readership. Influential critics such as Walter Benjamin have studied Baudelaires ideology of

    the modern artist in this document and have argued that it is emblematic of the tortured

    intellectual in the wake of industrial capitalism.2 However, the significance of Baudelaires

    literary approach in conveying the experience of the transition to modernity is undercut by, as

    Wolff outlines, the exclusion of women.3 The ideal artist that Baudelaire sanctifies is male,

    and through his imaginative distilling of the eternal aspects of traditional aesthetics from

    the transitory in public space, the specific women he depicts are only constructed through

    his gaze. This study will therefore evaluate how Baudelaires progressive ideology of modern

    artistry would have simultaneously reverberated with, and have been repudiated by,

    contemporary and current readers of French literature and culture.

    In this document Baudelaire draws on existing themes in the literature of modernity

    that would have resonated with contemporary audiences in the Second Empire. The noun

    flneur, for example, meaning stroller or lounger, emerged as key term in French literature

    describing the experience of the individual in the changing city and society. Ceaselessly

    journeying across the great human desert, the flneur, propelled by curiosity, provided the

    1 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Johnathon Mayne, (London, 1995),

    p.301. 2 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, (London, 1999), p.962. 3 Janet Wolff, The Invisible Flneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 2, No. 37, (November, 1985), p.37.

  • HIST30062 3 75937980

    writer with a method and persona in the cultivation of urban knowledge.4 The literary figure

    first appeared in nineteenth century Paris and is often initially associated with Honore de

    Balzacs novel Physiologie du manage of 1826.5 However, the appropriation of the authority

    of the flneur within literary guide books to Paris indicates that Balzac was working with an

    already well-established urban patronage and practice. The flneurs constitutive

    disengagement from the city, as indicated in the text by the adjective solitary, is utilized as a

    model for the travel guide Le Flneur in 1825; the author ambles through Paris, without

    plan, without order, without method.6 Thus, Baudelaires incorporation of a principal figure

    within the existing literature of modernity would have reverberated with contemporary

    readers in 1863. However, while Baudelaires elusive flneur is consonant with traditional

    illustrations he also diverges from previous narratives through his insistence that he is not the

    mere idler previously known to the audience. Instead, Baudelaires flneur acquires a more

    superior art through his exploration of public space where by his intellectual quality could

    be sought. The document therefore conveys how Baudelaire builds on a central tenet of

    French urban writing and radicalizes flneurie to promote his artistic style of social

    observation.

    Baudelaire defines the artist-flneurs field of predilection as the public space made

    available by the increased modernisation of cities in the mid-nineteenth century. For example,

    Ferguson situates the genesis of the flneur within French literature as being part of a

    symbiotic relationship between the artist and the urban environment.7 Baudelaires painter of

    modern life thus derives his originality from investigating the continual metamorphoses of

    the mid- century city facilitated by the transition from production to consumerism. In Paris,

    for instance, the accelerated urbanisation under the aegis of prefect Haussmann broke down

    4 Priscilla Pankurst Ferguson, Paris As Revolution: Writing the 19th Century City, (Oxford, 1997), p.82. 5 Honore de Balzac, Physiologie due manage, (Paris, 1826), Cited in, Ferguson, Paris, p.81. 6 Ferguson, Paris, p.85. 7 Ferguson, Paris, p.81.

  • HIST30062 4 75937980

    social and geographical divisions between classes, thereby intensifying the flneurs

    proclivity for observation.8 Consequently, the document states that the aim of artists should

    now be to understand the modern as comprising of two interrelated halves: the eternal and

    immutable subject matter and evaluative criteria of traditional art alongside the ephemeral

    characteristics of metropolitan life. The expansion of the notion of modernity in this piece

    can be viewed as a response to the transition to capitalism that instigated an imperative need

    within the artist-flneur to make sense of the changing contours of public space.

    Furthermore, while Ferguson highlights how Paris became a spectacle for the flneur

    within the capitalist origins of modernity, the significance of the role of imagination in the

    text dislocates Baudelaires conception from his contemporaries. The artist that Baudelaire

    views as demonstrative of the heroic stroller is Monsieur C. G or Constantin Guys.9 As a

    popular sketch artist of Paris life, Guys, goes out into the crowd in order to extract from

    fashion its element of beauty. An isolated reading of the source suggests that the fashion

    Guys endeavours to uncover from his idle perusals is sartorial and unlike the antique garb

    of traditional art. However, elsewhere in the essay Baudelaire itemises fashion as a

    characteristic that can be understood as physical ugliness, but also, a sort of professional

    beauty.10 Guys painting, Three Women By a Bar (See Appendix), illustrates the sufficient

    imagination acquired of the artist-flneur to distil from a group of chaste and poor

    prostitutes their eternal poetry. Baudelaire claims that he does not want to scandalize the

    reader with these images but rather to purify the thoughts to which they give rise.11

    Unlike

    the contemporaneous realism movement, for instance, the creativity of Baudelaires artist

    relies on not imitating reality but ultimately the ability of his mind to infiltrate beyond the

    8 Wolff, The Invisible, p.40. 9 Baudelaire, The Painter, p.5. 10 Baudelaire, The Painter, p.37. 11 Baudelaire, The Painter, p.38.

  • HIST30062 5 75937980

    banality of appearances.12

    Nevertheless, this ideology is still likely to have repudiated readers

    in 1863, considering that six poems incorporating this aesthetic logic from Baudelaires

    collection, Les Fleurs du mal, were charged with an obscene libel in 1857.13

    Thus, while the

    text can be understood as an attempt to substantiate Baudelaires notion of beauty to the

    reader, it also establishes the disquieting relationship of the artist to his modern urban canvas.

    The significance of the document can be ascertained from the ways in which

    Baudelaires ideology becomes emblematic of his own intermittent creativity in denoting the

    experience of the capitalist origins of modernity. For Benjamin, Baudelaire emerged as the

    prodigious idler of the modern age and became an example of the tortured intellectual in the

    advent of a capitalist regime of work.14

    Benjamins Marxist approach to history rejects a

    hermeneutical understanding of the past as it actually was and instead his method lies in the

    shock of removing historical objects from their original context in order to awaken

    revolutionary consciousness in the present. Benjamin summarizes the relationship between

    the writer and consumerist culture as Erfahrung is the outcome of work; Erlebnis is the

    phantasmagoria of the idler.15 Benjamins distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis (two

    forms of experience) parallels that between production, the active creation of ones reality,

    and a reactive, consumerist response to it. However, in the case of Baudelaire,

    phantasmagoria (meaning a sequence of dreams) is experienced by his observations

    alongside a paradoxical shock experience; the result of his alienated labour.16

    Thus, when

    Baudelaire states in his essay that Guys has distilled the phantasmagoria from nature he

    has presented the urban idler with the possibility of a new kind of work; he uses his

    imagination to penetrate the banality of the reified disposition of relationships he witnesses

    12 Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity: Avant Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, (London, 1977), p.54. 13 Richard Sieburth, Poetry and Obscenity: Baudelaire and Swinburne, Comparative Literature, Vol. 36, No.4, (1984), pp.343-353, p.344. 14 Peter Buse et al, Benjamins Arcades: An unGuided Tour, (Manchester, 2005), p.152. 15 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p.962, Cited in, Buse, Benjamins, p.152. 16 Buse, Benjamins, p. 153.

  • HIST30062 6 75937980

    within the consumerist city to sell to the feuilleton sections of mass newspapers.17

    Thus,

    Baudelaire is utilized by Benjamin as a critical insight into the source of the problem of the

    modern artist under capitalism, which he views as only redeemable through an awakening of

    revolutionary consciousness in the present.18

    The impact of the ideology of the valiant flneur

    comes to represent Baudelaires literature itself and is indicative of the afflictions of

    intellectuals under the imposition of capitalism.

    However, Baudelaires ideology is constructed through a gendered conception of

    artistry that undercuts the credibility of elucidating the experience of the transition to

    modernity. While Benjamins approach is useful for revealing Baudelaires broader impact

    within the literature of modernity, both writers have rendered the experience of women

    invisible by, as Wolff claims, equating the modern with the public.19

    For example, elsewhere

    in the essay Baudelaire extolls the female sex as a non-person. Although he writes that a

    woman is far more than just the female of Man he defines her as being a kind of idol,

    stupid perhaps, but dazzling and bewitching.20 Wolff highlights the misogynist duality

    Baudelaire presents of women as idealised-but-vapid/real-and-sensual-but-detested and

    outlines that the women described within the literature of modernity are of a particular

    parade due to the centrality of public space.21 As a result of the sexual division of labour the

    document, and others like it, fail to include the experience of women through its admission of

    the private sphere. Ultimately, the impact of The Painter of Modern Life within the literature

    of modernity is limited by the invisibility of the flneuse.

    Word Count: 1518

    17 Baudelaire, The Painter, p.11. 18 Susan Buck-Morss, The Flneur, the Sandwhich Man and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering, New German Critique, No.39 Special Issue on Walter Benjamin, (Autumn, 1986), pp.99-140, p.122. 19 Wolff, The Invisible, p.37. 20 Baudelaire, The Painter, p.30. 21 Wolff, The Invisible, p.43.

  • HIST30062 7 75937980

    Bibliography

    Primary

    Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du mal: The Complete Text of The Flowers of Evil, ed. and

    trans. by Richard Howard, (Brighton, 1982).

    Baudelaire, Charles. Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans P.E. Charvet, (London, 1981).

    Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. by

    Johnathon Mayne, (London, 1995).

    Secondary

    Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, (London,

    1997).

    Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and

    Kevin McLaughlin, (London, 1999).

    Buck-Morss, Susan. The Flneur, the Sandwhich Man and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering, New German Critique, No.39 Special Issue on Walter Benjamin, (Autumn, 1986), pp.99-140.

    Buse, Peter, Ken Hirschkop, Scott McCracken and Bertrand Taithe. Benjamins Arcades: An unGuided Tour, (Manchester, 2005).

    Calinescu, Matei. Faces of Modernity: Avant Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, (London, 1977).

    Ferguson, Priscilla Pankhurst. Paris As Revolution: Writing the 19th

    Century City, (Oxford,

    1997).

    Harvey, David. Paris, Capital of Modernity, (London, 2003).

    Sieburth, Richard. Poetry and Obscenity: Baudelaire and Swinburne, Comparative Literature, Vol. 36, No.4, (1984), pp.343-353.

    Wolff, Janet. The Invisible Flneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 2, No. 37, (November, 1985), pp. 37-46.

  • HIST30062 8 75937980

    Appendix

    Figure 1. Guys, Constantin. Three Women By a Bar, drawing, 1860. Cited in, Baudelaire, The

    Painter of Modern Life, plate 20, p.280.

  • HIST30062 9 75937980