Charles Baudelaire: on painting

Gustave Courbet, Portrait of Charles Baudelaire, Oil on canvas, 54 x 65 cm, 1848 (Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France)

The Musée Fabre in Montpellier was built upon a collection of 19th century academic paintings donated by François-Xavier Fabre, himself a member of this group of artists that had so much success with the art collectors of the 19th century, with their historical paintings and other work, painted with so much self-congratulatory finesse and finish.  It is a strange irony to find a fine collection of paintings of Gustave Courbet's work within the walls of the museum.  The Courbet paintings were donated to the museum by his close friend and patron, Alfred Bruyas, a native son of the city.  Amongst this group of Courbets, there is the portrait of Charles Baudelaire, the 27 year old dandy, reading at his desk.

The portrait of Baudelaire, painted in 1848, would have been painted just two years after his initial début as an art critic--he had been forced by monetary needs to write a review of the 1846 Salon.  I have been reading a collection of Baudelaire's art criticism as of late and would like to translate a few passages from his critique of the Salon of 1859:

"The whole question, if you want me to accord the title of artist or lover of fine art, is therefore to know by which process you would like to create or feel surprise.  If that which is beautiful is always surprising, it would be absurd to suppose that that which is surprising is always beautiful.  On the contrary, our public, who is singularly incapable of feeling the joy of reverie or admiration (sign of a smallness of the soul), want to be surprised by the means that are outside of art, and the artists who serve them obey and conform to this taste; they want to strike hard, surprise, stupefy by unworthy strategies, because they know that the public is incapable to find rapture before the natural tactics of true art."

Baudelaire wrote this in a chapter he entitled "The Modern Public and Photography" and he is speaking of painters who wish to surprise the viewing public by the finesse of their technique which resembles so much what is the exterior of things, without any consideration of all the other elements that make up art.

In our days, when words like "soul" or "truth" sound so dim-witted and strangely ridiculous, one wonders what exactly Baudelaire is getting at when he criticizes the all out pursuit of a fine technique and a brilliant perfect finish (the quintessential essence of photography).  Later on in the chapter, he writes:

"From day to day, art loses self-respect, and bows down before external reality, and painters become more and more inclined to paint no longer what is in their dreams, but that which they see.  Yet, it is a joy to dream, and it was a glorious thing to express what one dreamt . . . "

The final paragraph of this chapter, which will be followed by one entitled "The Queen of the Faculties" asks a simple question:

 "Is it possible to suppose that a people whose eyes are so accustomed to judge by criteria of the material sciences the work of an artist, will in the long run be incapable of judging and feeling that which is ethereal and also immaterial?"

Baudelaire, a poet, prized above all the power of the imagination.  He acknowledged that an artist like Ingres had a lot of material power in the fineness of his technique, but he prized the paintings of Delacroix much more, for its power of imagination, the beauty not in execution but in the ineffable thing one would call "soul" or "gestalt" or nowadays "intangible".

The need to leave dumb-founded by means of spectacular technique and polish continue.  We would like to think that with all the successive "revolutions" of the avant-garde that we have evolved passed the "vulgar" of the 19th century bourgeois.  But in reality, any art fair, any "salon" of any sort, will reveal that the underlying taste for the surprising continues.  In fact, if Baudelaire was doubtful that that which is surprising is always beautiful, in our days, perhaps because we no longer have a norm in that which is beautiful, the only criteria for "beauty" per se is that it be surprising.  An old art school professor of mine would say, when evaluating the success of a gallery show, "it's got to have a thing, a schtick."