Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book still in great condition. Cover and corners has some wear but pages are free from notes and in great condition. See images. 1965 copy. A great book.

About the book >.>.> Is a companion-volume The Painter of Modern Life I have traced the main lines of Baudelaire’s critical thought and method and their development through his working life. In the present Introduction I want rather to show how some of these ideas originated for him and to indicate something of the breadth of influence and interest that helped to form his critical mind. Inevitably there will be some overlapping and repetition; but the emphasis will be somewhat shifted. In making his d?but in 1845 with a Salon-review Baudelaire was following a literary tradition that was within two years of being a century old. The first critical account of a Salon entitled R?flexions sur quelques causes de l’?tat pr?sent de la peinture en France by La Font de Saint-Yenne had appeared in 1747. The real father of the genre however was Diderot whose first Salon appeared in 1759- exactly a hundred years before Baudelaire’s last. Appropriately enough it is Diderot’s influence that has been most often remarked in Baudelaire’s earlier art-criticism. After his death in 1784 Diderot’s reputation sured a partial eclipse but by the time that Baudelaire came to write a number of his Salons had been reprinted the short Salon de 1759 having reappeared as recently as March 1844 in the magazine l’Artiste. It is a fair assumption that Baudelaire had read this and its easy conversational tone is sharply reflected by him in his own first Salon. This was already noticed by contemporary critics. Champfleury review- ing Baudelaire’s Salon de 1843 observed: ‘M. Baudelaire-Dufays (the name under which his earlier writings were published) est hardi comme Diderot moins le paradoxe.’ And he went on to note certain resemblances with Stendhal also- another important carly influence whom we shall shortly discuss. Diderot described by Sainte-Beuve as le cr?ateur de la critique ?mue empress?e et ?loquente’ is certainly one of the great-grandfathers of that criticism which Baudelaire in his Salon de 1846 applauded as ‘partiale passionn?e politique’. His manner particularly in dismissing pictures which he did not like is strik- ingly adopted by Baudelaire. Where Diderot writes: ‘Si vous ?tes curieux de visages de pl?tre vous verrez… les portraits de Drouais’ we find Baudelaire parallelling him with: ‘Les t?tes de M. P?rignon sont dures et lisses comme des objets inanim?s. Un vrai mus?e de Curtius.’ And the mocking conclusion to Baudelaire’s 1845 and Diderot’s 1759 Salons are remarkably close to one another. According to his early biographer and friend Charles Asselineau Baudelaire was constantly saying ‘Pas de grande peinture sans de grandes pens?es. Can this essentially eighteenth-century notion have been derived from Diderot’s