How is Charles Bauledaire’s ideas of the modern is similar to an Impressionist painter’s paintings like Manet?
As well as being in important poet Baudelaire was an influential art critic.
In his essay Le Peintre de la vie moderne, he exhorts the modern painter to utilize the following concepts in creating his/her works of art:
The painter of modern life extracts, from his observation of modern fashion and events, whatever elements they may contain of poetry within history. In other words, the artist distills the eternal from the transitory.
The artist should be a flaneur, i.e., a passionate spectator of modern life. The flaneur is at his best in an urban crowd. The modern artist finds inspiration amid the ebb and flow of people moving within the city attending to their daily tasks, in the midst of both the fugitive and the infinite.
The artist flaneur is able to draw shock and intoxication through association with the crowd. Baudelaire seems to place this shock experience at the very center of his artistic work. The flaneur is jostled, pushed and shoved by the seething urban crowd and is bombarded by a plethora of stimuli that cannot be completely assimilated. Accordingly, the flaneur must remain alert, vigilant and constantly on guard lest he experience psychological disintegration and loss of coherence.
The artist flaneur is both an idler and a passionate observer. The perfect idler and passionate observer finds immense enjoyment from dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite.
The hero of modern life is someone who practices the tenants of modern capitalism, but is simultaneously engaged in an inevitably doomed struggle against them. For Baudelaire, this hero is one who experiences the paradoxes and illusions of modern life, but who also participates and give form to these fragmented, fleeting experiences of the modern. Examples of modern heroes are: the poet, the flaneur, the dandy, the collector, the gambler, the worker, the rag-picker and the prostitute.
The city may be considered as a duality. The modern city is both bestial and beautiful, but it has become the essential source of inspiration for the modern artist and poet.
These ideas were inluential on the Impressionists, particularly Manet, who was encouraged by Baudelaire to base his art on the modern, urban world.
From;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire
“Manet and Baudelaire became constant companions from around 1855. In the early 1860s, Baudelaire accompanied Manet on daily sketching trips and often met him socially. He also lent Baudelaire money and looked after his affairs, particularly when Baudelaire went to Belgium. Baudelaire encouraged Manet to strike his own path and not succumb to criticism. “Manet has great talent, a talent which will stand the test of time. But he has a weak character. He seems to me crushed and stunned by shock”. In his painting Music in the Tuileries, Manet includes portraits of his friends Théophile Gautier, Jacques Offenbach, and Baudelaire. While it’s difficult to differentiate who influenced whom, both Manet and Baudelaire discussed and expressed some common themes through their respective arts. Baudelaire praised the modernity of Manet’s subject matter: “almost all our originality comes from the stamp that ‘time’ imprints upon our feelings”. When Manet’s famous Olympia (1865), a portrait of a nude prostitute, provoked a scandal for its blatant realism mixed with an imitation of Renaissance motifs, Baudelaire worked privately to support his friend, though he offered no public defense (he was, however, ill at the time). When Baudelaire returned from Belgium after his stroke, Manet and his wife were frequent visitors at the nursing home and she would play passages from Wagner for Baudelaire on the piano.”
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