Charles
Baudelaire believes the folly of going to the Louvre, walking past secondary
works of art, stopping abruptly in front of a Titian or Raphael, and then
confidently stating, “I know my museum,”[1]
is identical to deeming art portraying only a city’s picturesque tableaus as a thorough representation of
the modern urban space. Baudelaire feels beauty consists of two distinct factors:
one resembling a Kantian a priori element
of eternal invariability while the other is a relative, flexible piece susceptible
to contemporary influences such as fashion and emotions. These two unique
constructs create a sense beauty defined by Baudelaire as the “promise of
happiness”[2].
Furthermore, his concept of beauty uniquely intertwines flavors of what some
readers refer to as the vulgar and provocative. Regardless of moral judgment
levied by external agencies, Baudelaire feels that “the obscene” is such a
prevalent theme within the modern urban space that omitting its portrayal is to
deny the second component of his model of beauty. In other words, Baudelaire
calls upon the reader to search for a beautiful sense of vulgarity to fully comprehend
the modern aesthetic.
To
further his argument, Baudelaire constructs a dichotomy between a “man of the
world” and an artist to contrast the unadulterated portrayal of an environment
to that of one obfuscated by subjective moral censorship. Baudelaire defines a
man of the world as one who “understands the world and the mysterious and
lawful reasons for all its uses” while artists are nothing but “highly skilled
animals, pure artisans, village intellectuals, [and] cottage brains”[3].
What segregates the two is the notion that a man of world is not afraid to
embrace the unfamiliar and uncomfortable while artists avoid leaving familiar
neighborhoods. By exposing
ourselves to the foreign, we become vulnerable to a “violent nervous shock that
has its repercussion in the very core of the brain”[4]
which in turn couple with the aforementioned a priori component of beauty. The result is art with an unequivocal
presence of both purity and clarity.
To
validate his theory, Baudelaire exhumes the beauty prevalent in a common
prostitute. To him, the motifs of lust, excess, and degeneration blend together
in a “background of hellish light…or if you prefer an aurora borealis” that enables a prostitute to arise as a “Protean
image of wanton beauty”[5].
While a puritanical reaction quickly relegates this Jezebel to realm of sin and
damnation, Baudelaire gleans a unique thread of beauty composing the modern aesthetic.
This liminal figure treading on the fringes of society possess a sense of
beauty “which comes to her from Evil always devoid of spirituality, but
sometimes tinged with a weariness which imitates true melancholy”[6].
Furthermore, her willingness to become a public spectacle, or a “creature of
show, an object of public pleasure”[7]
only compounds her appeal. Paradoxically, her propensity to defile herself
makes her unique, and to Baudelaire, very beautiful.
Transitioning
to his essay “Some French Caricaturists”, Baudelaire buttresses “The Painter of
Modern Life” by introducing an additional artistic theme: caricature. When
artists draw caricatures, they gain the freedom to exaggerate natural defects
and thus gain access to higher level of lucidity while portraying a “great city
[which] contains living monstrosities, in all their fantastic and thrilling
reality”[8].
Artists such as Charlet, Daumier, and Goya use caricatures to deconstruct a
divinity superimposed by either political agendas or an evanescent contemporary
aesthetic and address the banality, if not absurdity, of the modern world. Goya’s
ugly portrayal of monks creates an “art that purifies like fire”[9]
while Daumier’s art boldly showcases the “ridiculous troubles of home, every
little stupidity, every little pride, every enthusiasm, every despair of the
bourgeois”[10].
Their accurate and honest exposé of modern life introduces a sense of malaise
and despair that Baudelaire considers “a very amusing bit of blasphemy”[11]
that allows us to pierce the artificial grandeur dictated to us by external
agents and regain the faith in our own ability to define reality.
“The
Painter of Modern Life” and “Some French Caricaturists” introduce an aesthetic
derived from combining the decay and degradation of the modern city with our a priori notion of the beautiful. This synthesis
deconstructs the classical notion of beauty and forces us to find splendor in
the perverse and vulgar. Revisiting the notion of sprinting through the Louvre
to behold Raphael’s work, Baudelaire challenges us to pause and embrace the
beauty of our decrepit surroundings. While some of us are averse to sorting
through refuse in a search for beautiful, Baudelaire argues that in the modern
world, we do not have an alternative. As he previously stated, beauty is one of
the few promises of happiness granted to us by the modern world.
[1] Charles
Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” in The
Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York:
Phaidon Press), 1.
[2] Ibid, 3.
[3] Ibid, 7.
[4] Ibid, 8.
[5] Ibid, 36.
[6] Ibid, 36.
[7] Ibid, 36.
[8] Charles
Baudelaire, “Some French Caricaturists” in The
Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York:
Phaidon Press), 177.
[9] Ibid, 169.
[10] Ibid, 177.
[11] Ibid, 179.
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