Citation and narrative In Baudelaire's art criticism

Abstract

Abstract It is generally conceded that if one wants to study French painting of the fifth and sixth decades of the nineteenth century, one should, at some point, consult the art-critical essays of the poet Charles Baudelaire, and, among those essays, the first one to consult is the last one he wrote, an essay on Constantin Guys, Le Peintre de la vie moderne. This gesture has been practiced with insistence, insight and with entirely admirable results by such eminent art historians, among others, as Anne Coffin Hanson, in her Manet and the Modern Tradition, and Timothy Clark in his Painting of Modern Life. I While results speak for themselves, and Clark's and Hanson's are not at all to be slighted, there is something unusual about this use of the essay: it is about a very minor artist, one who, it is safe to say, owes his posthumous reputation almost entirely to Baudelaire's essay. Of course, Baudelaire deliberately chose a minor artist as subject of his essay, for he wanted to make a point about the presen...