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"The Painterof Modern Life"Charles audelaire

The Ar t i s t , Man of the Wor ld , Man of the Crowd.and Chi ld

Today I want to discourse o the public about a strange man, a man of sopowerful and so decidedan originality that it is sufficient unto itself anddoes not even seek approval.Not a single one of his drawings is signed, fby signatureyou mean that string of easily orgeablecharacterswhich spell

a name and which so many other artists affix ostentatiouslyat the foot oftheir least mportant trifles. Yet all his works are signed with his dazzlingsoul; and art-lovers who have seen and appreciated them will readilyrecognize hem from the description hat I am about to give.

A passionate over of crowds and incognitos, Monsieur C. G.i carriesoriginality to the point of shyness.Mr Thackeray, who, as is well known,is deeply interested in matters of art, and who himself executes theillustrations to his novels, spoke one day of Monsieur G. in the columns of

CharlesBaudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life," trans. Jonathan Mayne, in The PainterolMoilern Life and,Other Essays London:Phaidon, 1964), sec. 3-4, pp. 5-15,

' Constantin Guys (1802-92), Parisian painter and journalist.

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a London review. The latter was furious, as though at an ouhage to his

virtue. Recently again, when he learnt that I had it in mind to write an

appreciationof his mind and his talent, be beggedme - very imperiously,

I must admit-

to suppresshis name, and if I must speak of his works, tospeak of them as if they were those of an anonymous artist. I will humbly

comply with this singular request.The reader and I will preserve he fiction

that Monsieur G. does not exist, and we shall concern ourselveswith his

drawings and his watercolours (for which he professes partician scorn)

as though we were scholarswho had to pronounceupon precioushistorical

documents, thrown up by chance, whose author must remain eternally

unknown. And finally, to give completereassurance o my conscience, t

must be supposed that all that I have to say of his strangely and

mysteriouslybrilliant nature is more or less ustly suggestedby the worksin question - pure poetic hypothesis,conjecture,a labour of the imagina-

tion.

Monsieur G. is an old man. Jean-lacquesiis said to have reached he age

of forty-two before he started writing. It was perhaps at about the same age

that Monsieur G., obsessed y the throng of pictures which teemed n his

brain, was lirst emboldened o throw ink and colours on to a white sheet

of paper.Truth to tell, he drew like a barbarian, or a child, impatient at the

clumsinessof his fingersand the disobedience f his pen. I have seena large

number of these primitive scribbles,and I must own that the majority ofthosewho are, or claim to be, connoisseursn this matter, might well have

been pardoned or failing to discern the latent geniuswhich abode n such

murky daubs. Today, after discoveringby himself all the little tricks of his

trade and accomplishing,without advice,his own education,Monsieur G.

has becomea powerful master in his own way, and of his early artlessness

he has retained no more than what was neededto add an unexpected

seasoning o his rich gifts. When he comesacrossone of those early efforts

of his, he tears it up or burns it with a most comical show of bashfulness

and indignation.For ten yearsI had wanted to get to know Monsieur G., who is by nature

a great traveller and cosmopolitan. knew that for some ime he had been

on the staff of an English illustrated journal, and that engravings after his

travel-sketches,made in Spain,Turkey and the Crimea,had beenpublished

there. Since then I have seen a considerablequantity of those drawings,

hastily sketchedon the spot,and thus I have been able to read., o to speak,

a detailed account of the Crimean campaign which is much preferable o

any other that I know. The samepaperhad alsopublished,always without

signature, a great number of his illustrations of new ballets and operas.When at last I ran him to earth, I saw at once that it was not preciselyan

" Rousseau.

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Char les aude la i re

artist, but rather a man of the world with whom I had to do. I ask you tounderstandthe word artist in a very restrictedsense,and,man of the worldin a very broad one. By the second mean a man of the whole world, a

man who understands he world and the mysteriousand lawful reasons orall its uses;by the {irst, a specialist,a man weddedto his palette like theserf to the soil. Monsieur G. doesnot like to be called an artist. Is he notperhaps a little right? His interest is the whole world; he wants to know,understand and appreciateeverything that happenson the surfaceof ourglobe.The artist lives very little, if at all, in the world of morals and politics.If he lives in the Br6da district, he will be unaware of what is going on inthe Faubourg Saint-Germain.Apart from one or two exceptionswhom Ineed not name, it must be admitted that the majority of artistsare no more

than highly skilledanimals,pure artisans,village intellects,cottagebrains.Their conversation,which is necessarily imited to the narrowest of circles,becomesvery quickly unbearableto the man of the world, to the spiritualcitizen of the universe.

And so, as a lirst steptowards an understandingof Monsieur G., I wouldask you to note at once that the mainspring of his genius is curiosity.

Do you remember a picture (i t really is a picture!), painted - or ratherwritten - by the most powerful pen of our age,and entitled TheMan of thecrowd?iii n the window of a coffee-house here sits a convalescent,pleasur-

ably absorbed n gazing at the crowd, and mingling, through the mediumof thought, in the turmoil of thought that surrounds him. But latelyreturned from the valley of the shadow of death, he is rapturouslybreathing in all the odoursand essences f life; as he has been on the brinkof total oblivion, he remembers,and fervently desires o remember,every-thing. Finally he hurls himself headlong into the midst of the throng, inpursuit of an unknown, half-glimpsedcountenance hat has, on an instant,bewitchedhim. Curiosity has becomea fatal, irresistiblepassion!

Imagine an artist who was always, spiritually, in the condition of that

convalescent,and you will have the key to the nature of Monsieur G.Now convalescences like a return towards childhood.The convalescent,

like the child, is possessedn the highest degreeof the faculty of keenlyinterestinghimself in things, be they apparently of the most trivial. Let usgo back, f we can, by a retrospectiveeffort of the imagination, towardsourmost youthful, our earliest, mpressions,and we will recognize hat theyhad a strange kinship with those brightly coloured impressionswhich wewere later to receive n the aftermath of a physical illness,alwaysprovidedthat that illness had left our spiritual capacitiespure and unharmed. The

child seeseverything in a state of newness;he is always drunk. Nothingmore resembleswhat we call inspiration than the delight with which a

ii i By Edgar Allan Poe, n his ?ales 1845), translated nto French bv Baudelaire.

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child absorbs orm and colour. I am prepared o go even further and assert

that inspiration has something in common with a convulsion, and that

every sublime thought is accompaniedby a more or less violent nervous

shock which has its repercussion n the very core of the brain. The man ofgenius has sound nerves, while those of the child are weak. With the one,

Reasonhas taken up a considerableposition; with the other, Sensibility s

almost the whole being.But genius s nothing more nor less han childhood,

recovered t will - a childhood now equipped for self-expressionwith

manhood's capacitiesand a power of analysiswhich enables t to order the

mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated. t is by this

deep and joyful curiosity that we may explain the fixed and animally

ecstatic gazeof a child confronted with something new, whatever it be,

whether a face or a landscape,gilding, colours, shimmering stuffs, or themagic of physicalbeauty assisted y the cosmeticart. A friend of mine once

told me that when he was quite a small child, he used to be presentwhen

his father dressed n the mornings, and that it was with a mixture of

amazementand delight that he used to study the musclesof his arms, the

gradual transitions of pink and yellow in his skin, and the bluish network

of his veins. The picture of external life was already filling him with awe

and taking hold of his brain. He was already being obsessed nd possessed

by form. Predestination was already showing the tip of its nose. His

sentencewas sealed. Need I add that today that child is a well-knownpainter?

I asked you a moment ago to think of Monsieur G. as an eternal

convalescent.To completeyour idea, considerhim also as a man-child, as

a man who is never for a moment without the genius of childhood - a

genius for which no aspectof life has becomestale.

I have told you that I was reluctant to describehim as an artist pure and

simple,and indeedthat he declined his title with a modesty ouched with

aristocratic reserve. might perhapscall him a dandy, and I should have

severalgood reasons or that; for the word'dandy'

implies a quintessenceof character and a subtle understandingof the entire moral mechanism of

this world; with another part of his nature, however, the dandy aspires o

insensitivity, and it is in this that Monsieur G., dominated as he is by an

insatiablepassion for seeingand feeling- parts company decisivelywith

dandyism.Amabamamare,'saidSt Augustine.'I am passionatelyn love

with passion,'MonsieurG. might well echo.The dandy s blas6,or pretends

to be so, for reasonsof policy and caste.Monsieur G. has a horror of blas6

people.He is a master of that only too diflicult art - sensitivespirits will

understand me-

of being sincerewithout being absurd. I would bestowupon him the title of philosopher, o which he has more than one right, if

his excessiveove of visible, angible things, condensedo their plasticstate,

did not arouse in him a certain repugnance for the things that form the

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impalpable kingdom of the metaphysician.Let us be content therefore toconsiderhim as a pure pictorial moralist, like La Bruydre.i"

The crowd is his element,as the air is that of birds and water of fishes.

His passionand his professionare to becomeone flesh with the crowd. Forthe perfectfldneur, for the passionatespectator, t is an immense oy to setup house n the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement,in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yetto feel oneselfeverywhereat home; to see he world, to be at the centre ofthe world, and yet to remain hidden from the world - such are a few of theslightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natureswhich the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator s a prince whoeverywhere rejoices n his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole

world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his familyfrom all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are - or arenot - to be found; or the lover of pictureswho lives in a magical societyofdreamspainted on canvas.Thus the lover of universal life enters nto thecrowd as though it were an immensereservoirof electricalenergy. or wemight liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself;or to a kaleidoscopegifted with consciousness, esponding to each one of its movements andreproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all theelementsof life. He is an

'I 'with an insatiable appetitefor the

'non-I',at

every instant rendering and explaining it in picturesmore living than lifeitself, which is always unstable and fugitive. 'Any

man,' he said one day,in the course of one of those conversations which he illumines withburning glanceand evocativegesture, any

man who is not crushedby oneof thosegriefswhose nature is too real not to monopolizeal l his capacities,and who can yet be bored n the heart of the multitude, s a blockhead! ablockhead!and I despise im!'

when Monsieur G. wakesup and openshis eyes o see he boisteroussunbeating a tattoo upon his window-pane,he reproacheshimself remorsefully

and regretfully:'what

a peremptory order! what a bugle-blast of life!Already severalhours of light - everywhere- lost by my sreep!How manyilluminated hings might I have seen and have missedseeing!'so out hegoes and watches the river of life flow past him in all its splendour andmajesty.He marvels at the eternal beauty and the amazingharmony of lifein the capital cities, a harmony so providentially maintained amid theturmoil of human freedom.He gazesupon the landscapes f the great city -

landscapes f stone,caressed y the mist or buffetedby the sun. He delightsin fine carriagesand proud horses,the dazzlingsmartnessof the grooms,

the expertnessof the footmen, the sinuous gait of the women, the beautyof the children, happy to be alive and nicely dressed in a word, he derights

iuJeanLa Bruyere (1645-96), French moralist.

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in universal life. If a fashion or the cut of a garment has been slightly

modified, if bows and curls have been supplantedby cockades, f bavolets

have beenenlarged and chignons ave droppeda fraction towards the nape

of the neck, if waists have been raised and skirts have becomefuller, bevery sure that his eagleeyewill alreadyhave spotted t from however great

a distance.A regiment passes, n its way, as it may be, to the ends of the

earth, tossing nto the air of the boulevards ts trumpet-callsas winged and

stirring as hope; and in an instant Monsieur G. will already have seen,

examined and analysed he bearing and external aspectof that company.

Glittering equipment,music, bold determinedglances,heavy, solemnmous-

taches - he absorbs t al l pell-mell; and in a few moments the resulting'poem'

will be virtually composed.Seehow his soul lives with the soul of

that regiment, marching like a single animal, a proud image of joy inobedience!

But now it is evening. It is that strange, equivocal hour when the

curtains of heaven are drawn and cities light up. The gas-light makes a

stain upon the crimson of the sunset.Honest men and rogues, sane men

and mad, are all saying to themselves,The

end of another day!' The

thoughts of all, whether good men or knaves, turn to pleasure,and each

one hastens o the placeof his choice o drink the cup of oblivion' Monsieur

G. will be the last to linger wherever there can be a glow of light, an echo

of poetry, a quiver of life or a chord of music; wherever a passioncan posebefore him, wherever natural man and conventional man display them-

selves n a strangebeauty, wherever the sun lights up the swift joys of the

depraved nimall'A

fine way to fill one's day, to be Sure,' emarks a certain

reader whom we all know so well.'Which

one of us has not every bit

enough geniusto fill it in the sameway?' But no! Few men are giftedwith

the capacity of seeing; there are fewer still who possess he power of

expression.So now, at a time when others are asleep,Monsieur G. is

bending over his table, darting on to a sheetof paper the sameglancethat

a moment ago he was directing towards external things, skirmishing withhis pencil, his pen, his brush, splashinghis glassof water up to the ceiling,

wiping his pen on his shirt, in a ferment of violent activity, as hough afraid

that the image might escapehim, cantankerous though alone, elbowing

himself on. And the external world is reborn upon his paper,natural and

more than natural, beautiful and more than beautiful, strange and en-

dowedwith an impulsive ife like the soul of its creator. The phantasmago-

ria has been distilled from nature. All the raw materials with which the

memory has loaded itself are put in order, ranged and harmonized, and

undergo that forced idealizationwhich is the result of a childlike percep-

u Rousseau's hrase:"The man who meditates s a depravedanimal." From his Discourse n

the Origin and Foundationsof Inequality Among Men, Part One.

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tiveness that is to say, a perceptiveness cute and magical by reason ofits innocence!

Modern i ty

And so away he goes,hurrying, searching.But searching or what? Be verysure that this man, such as I have depictedhim - this solitary, gifted withan active imagination, ceaselesslyourneying across the great humandesert has an aim loftier than that of a mere ldneur,an aim more general,something other than the fugitive pleasureof circumstance.He is lookingfor that quality which you must allow me to call

'modernity';for I know of

no better word to express he idea I have in mind. He makes t his businessto extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry withinhistory, to distil the eternal from the transitory. Casting an eye over ourexhibitionsof modern pictures,we are struck by a general endencyamongartists to dress all their subjects n the garments of the past. Almost all ofthem make use of the costumesand furnishings of the Renaissance,ust asDavid employed he costumesand furnishings of Rome.ui here is howeverthis difference, hat David, by choosing subjects which were specificallyGreek or Roman, had no alternative but to dress them in antique garb,

whereas he paintersof today, though choosingsubjectsof a generalnatureand applicable o all ages,neverthelesspersist n rigging them out in thecostumesof the Middle Ages, the Renaissance r the Orient. This is clearlysymptomatic of a great degreeof laziness; or it is much easier to decideoutright that everything about the garb of an age is absolutelyugly thanto devoteoneself o the task of distilling from it the mysterious elementofbeauty that it may contain, however slight or minimal that element maybe. By

'modernity'I mean the ephemeral, he fugitive, the contingent, the

half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable. Every old

master has had his own modernity; the great majority of fine portraits thathave come down to us from former generationsare clothed in the costumeof their own period. They are perfectly harmonious, becauseeverything -

from costume and coiffuredown to gesture,glance and smile (for each agehas a deportment, a glance and a smile of its own) - everything, I say,combines to form a completely viable whole. This transitory, fugitiveelement, whose metamorphosesare so rapid, must on no account bedespised r dispensedwith. By neglecting t, you cannot fail to tumble intothe abyss of an abstract and indeterminate beauty, like that of the first

woman beforethe fall of man. If for the necessaryand inevitable costumeof the age you substitute another, you will be guilty of a mistranslation

"' lacquesLouis David (1 748-1825), French neo-classical ainter.

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only to be excused n the case of a masqueradeprescribedby fashion'

(Thus, the goddesses, ymphs and sultanas of the eighteenth century are

still convincing portraits, morally speaking'

It is doubtlessan excellent hing to study the old masters n order to learnhow to paint; but it can be no more than a waste of labour if your aim is

to understand the specialnature of present-daybeauty. The draperiesof

Rubensor Veronesewill in no way teach you how to depict moire antique,

satind la reine or any other fabric of modern manufacture, which we see

supportedand hung over crinoline or starchedmuslin petticoat. In texture

and weave these are quite different from the fabrics of ancient Venice or

those worn at the court of Catherine.'iiFurthermore the cut of skirt and

bodice s by no means similar; the pleatsare arranged accordingto a new

system.Finally the gestureand the bearing of the woman of today give toher dressa life and a specialcharacter which are not those of the woman

of the past. In short, for any'modernity' to be worthy of one day taking its

placeas'antiquity" it is necessaryor the mysteriousbeauty which human

life accidentallyputs into it to be distilledfrom it. And it is to this task that

Monsieur G. particularly addresses imself.

I have remarked hat every age had its own gait, glanceand gesture.The

easiestway to verify this propositionwould be to betakeoneself o somevast

portrait-gallery, such as the one at versailles. But it has an even wider

application.Within that unity which we call a Nation, the various profes-sionsand classes nd the passingcenturiesal l introducevariety, not only in

manners and gesture,but even in the actual form of the face.Certain types

of nose, mouth and brow will be found to dominate the scene or a period

whoseextent I have no intention of attempting to determinehere, but which

could certainly be subjected o a form of calculation. Considerations f this

kind are not sulficientlyfamiliar to our portrait-painters; he great failing of

M. Ingres, n particular, is that he seeks o imposeupon every type of sitter

a more or less complete,by which I mean a more or less despotic, orm of

perfection,borrowed from the repertory of classical deas'In a matter of this kind it would be easy, and indeed egitimate,to argue

a priori. The perpetual correlation between what is called the'soul'

and

what is called the'body' explains quite clearly how everything that is

'material', or in other words an emanation of the'spiritual', mirrors, and

will always mirror, the spiritual reality from which it derives. f a painstak-

ing, scrupulous,but feebly imaginative artist has to paint a courtesan of

today and takes his'inspiration' (that is the accepted word) from a

courtesanby Titian or Raphael, t is only too likely that he will producea

work which is false, ambiguous and obscure.From the study of a master-pieceof that time and type he will learn nothing of the bearing, the glance,

ui i RussianEmpress,Catherine he Great (1684-1727\.

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the smile or the living'style'

of one of those creatureswhom the dictionaryof fashion has successively lassifiedunder the coarse or playful titles of'doxies', kept

women' lorettes,or biches.

The same criticism may be strictly applied to the study of the militaryman and the dandy, and even to that of animals, whether horses or dogs;in short, of everything that goesto make up the external life of this age.woe to him who studies he antique for anything else but pure art, logicand generalmethod! By steepinghimself too thoroughly in it, he will loseall memory of the present;he will renouncethe rights and privilegesofferedby circumstance for almost all our originality comes rom the seal whichTime imprints on our sensations. need hardly tell you that I could easilysupport my assertionswith reference o many objectsother than women.

what would you say, for example,of a marine-painter (I am deliberatelygoing to extremes)who, having to depict the soberand elegantbeauty ofa modern vessel,were to tire out his eyes by studying the overcharged,involved forms and the monumental poop of a galleon,or the complicatedrigging of the sixteenth century?Again, what would you think if you hadcommissionedan artist to paint the portrait of a thoroughbred, famed inthe annals of the turf, and he then proceeded o confine his researchesothe Museums and contented himself with a study of the horse in thegalleriesof the past, in Van Dyck, Borgognoneor Van der Meulen?'iii

under the direction of nature and the tyranny of circumstance,MonsieurG. has pursuedan altogetherdifferentpath. He beganby being an observerof life, and only later set himself the task of acquiring the means ofexpressing t. This has resulted in a thrilling originality in which anyremaining vestigesof barbarousnessor naivetdappearonly as new proofsof his faithfulness o the impression eceived,or as a flattering complimentpaid to truth. For most of us, and particularly for men of affairs, or whomnature has no existencesaveby reference o utility, the fantastic reality oflife has becomesingularly diluted. Monsieur G. never ceaseso drink it in:

his eyes and his memory are full of it.

uiiiseventeenth-centuryFlemish painters Anthony Van Dyck and Adam van der Meulen,and their French contemporary JacquesCourtois (known as

,.IlBorgognone").

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