“Half Art”: Baudelaire’s Le Peintre de la vie moderne Rachel Bowlby In this piece, I look at an essay that I have probably read too often not to ½nd in it the key to all matters aesthetic, historical, philosophical, and more. The essay is Charles Baudelaire’s Le Peintre de la vie mod- erne (The Painter of Modern Life), ½rst published in 1863 and written, most probably, around 1859 to 1860. Baudelaire’s exhilarating innovation is to down- play the signi½cance of eternal value in art, in favor of what he designates as its other half, the fleeting presentness that is modernity. My essay is unapolo- getically an appreciation–for the most part–of a text that, in focusing on another artist, itself appears to be just that.1 For Baudelaire develops his arguments through a mock-anonymous celebration of the artist Constantin Guys, referred to as M. G. (Monsieur G.). Guys’s proli½c sketches, done at speed, for rapid journal publication, chart the smallest of day-by- day changes and typical scenes in contemporary life. Guys’s pictures–the art of modernity–give to the day a second life, and “translate” into a different RACHEL BOWLBY is Professor of medium–from sight to (mental) impression to its Comparative Literature at Prince- “rebirth” as a sketch–that which would otherwise ton University; previously she was be lost with its passing. the Lord Northcliffe Professor of At one level, then, The Painter of Modern Life is a Modern English Literature at Uni- celebration of the work (and the lifestyle) of Guys, versity College London. Her books whose subjects ranged from fashion to war, and include A Child of One’s Own: Pa- whose images were reproduced in widely circulated rental Stories (2013), Freudian Myth- 2 ologies: Greek Tragedy and Modern magazines such as the Illustrated London News. Identities (2007), and Carried Away: Guys is not named directly by Baudelaire; there is a The Invention of Modern Shopping coy pretense of secrecy, on the grounds that this is (2001). what the mysterious M. G. himself would prefer, © 2014 by Rachel Bowlby doi:10.1162/DAED_a_00252 46 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00252 by guest on 30 September 2021 but he is readily and intentionally iden- Modernity is the transitory, the fleeting [le Rachel ti½able. The “½ction,” as Baudelaire calls fugitif], the contingent, half of art [la moitié Bowlby it, of his subject’s “incognito” is essential de l’art], the other half of which is the eter- to the elevation of a form of art that, in nal and the unchangeable. (IV, 553; empha- conventional terms, is not proper art at all. sis added) This “painter of modern life” is pointedly At a stroke, or a couple of strokes, Baude- not a singular, named genius whose work laire transforms, or claims to, both the conforms to classical conventions and is likely subject matter and the evaluative con½ned for tasteful inspection within criteria for art. The whole ½eld of con- the precincts of a museum. Artists, in the temporary life and manners is opened up usual sense, are debunked as “village minds as worth representing, worth making into [des intelligences de village],” or, just to make art–as having its own beauty. But Baude- the point quite plain, as “hamlet heads laire is not simply making a claim for a [des cervelles de hameau]”3; whereas M. G. new art that will do justice to the beauties is “cosmopolitan,” a “man of the world,” of the present–the mid-nineteenth-cen- someone who spends his time in “the cap- tury present in particular. He is also ital cities of the modern world” (VIII, 558). af½rming that all art, always, has “con- Guys makes his appearance in the essay tain[ed] these two elements”; and that not exactly in his own right, but in the there is a pleasure in the art of the present role of illustration or elaboration of a man- as such. The art of past times can be seen, ifesto. Starting on aesthetic and art-histor- in this light, to have been representing its ical, as opposed to urban or modern own present; one polemical thrust of the grounds, Baudelaire rejects art’s con½ne- essay is Baudelaire’s contempt for artists ment to established, and would-be perma- who insist on draping their subjects in nent, media and modes of display: “historical” costumes, rather than showing This is a perfect opportunity, in truth, to them in the fashions of their own moment: establish a rational and historical theory of “The pleasure we take from the represen- the beautiful, in opposition to the theory of tation of the present derives not only from a unique and absolute beautiful; to show the beauty that may clothe it, but also that the beautiful is always, necessarily of a from its essential quality of presentness double composition, even though the im- [sa qualité essentielle de présent]” (I, 547).4 pression it produces is uni½ed. The beau- “The pleasure we take” draws everyone tiful is made of an eternal, invariable element, into an appreciation of a world out there whose quantity is excessively dif½cult to now that is already and always half art, determine, and of a relative, circumstantial awaiting its completion or visibility in the element that will be, if we want, in turn or form of the artist’s representation. It is also all together, the period, fashion, morality, perpetually changing, with the observer passion. I challenge anyone to discover or artist enjoying and noting what Baude- some sample of beauty that does not con- laire calls, in a lovely phrase, la metamor- tain these two elements. (I, 549–550) phose journalière des choses extérieures, “the daily metamorphosis of external things” Later on, this grand theory is stated from (II, 550)–a formulation that seems to be the other direction, starting from the his- poised halfway, mythically and historically, torical rather than from the eternal, in what between Ovidian transformations and the may well be the most famous sentence of tiny but perpetual changes of The Origin Baudelaire’s essay: of Species, which is exactly contemporary.5 143 (1) Winter 2014 47 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00252 by guest on 30 September 2021 On The scene is set far from the natural var- offers is pretty early: primitive religious Baudelaire’s iations of seasons, landscapes, or living art–there is and was a circumstantial, “Le Peintre de la vie things; nature is neither an image of sta- cultural present, discernible in retrospect moderne” bility against the confusions of social as distinctive and often now as ancient. change, nor in itself a model of constant Some past presents, though, are evidently growth and change. Unlike either of these, more worthwhile than others. Baudelaire though, Baudelaire’s changing world has little time for what he sees as the is proudly urban and man-made–and falsely historicizing or pseudo-simple self- woman-made: his paradigm of daily representations of the eighteenth century change and proto-art is fashion. Woman –just as early-twentieth-century modern- may be the ½rst spectacle, inseparable, ists would routinely debunk the benighted says Baudelaire, from her costume, her aesthetics and values of the nineteenth toilette; she is also, by implication, the pri- century. But it might also seem that the mary artist, who knows that nature stands idea Baudelaire is promoting about both in need of embellishment. the signi½cance and the perpetual change The chapter entitled “Eloge du maquil- of the present could only have come up in lage” (“In Praise of Makeup”) draws Bau- the modern period in which he was writ- delaire’s most scathing remarks against ing: in other words, in a world conscious the idealization of nature in both an aes- in a new way of change, rapid change, as thetic and a moral sense. This leads him the normal condition of life. This does not to yoke together two seemingly quite dis- invalidate the theory; but it might suggest parate halves. Fashion and makeup, em- that only in the modern period, the period blematized by the woman, are joined to in which both the constancy and the rapid- the civilizing necessity of collective moral- ity of visible change are taken for granted, ity that has to be added on. Just as nature could artistic images come to be viewed is to be improved, or beauti½ed, by makeup in this way: as the remains of moderni- and dress, so morality is founded not on ties past. following but in departing from a nature In this connection, we might also won- which, if left to itself, would be violent: der about the almost arithmetical division “Crime is originally natural; the human of art into two halves–with nothing ap- animal drank in the taste for it in its parently in between these mutually de½n- mother’s womb. Virtue, in contrast, is arti- ing, separate-but-united extremes of his- ½cial, supernatural, because in all times torical time, the eternal and the momen- and for all nations there have had to be tary. It makes for a neat dialectic and for a gods and prophets to teach it to animal- perhaps too easy complementarity of form ized humanity and because on his own, and content: “Without this second ele- man would have been powerless to dis- ment”–that is, the second element of the cover it” (XI, 562; emphasis in original). present age–“which is like the amusing, This is how Baudelaire slips an ethical half titillating, apéritif envelope of the divine in alongside his theory of art: morality is gateau, the ½rst element would be indi- like art, in that both of them seek to im- gestible, unappreciable, unadapted and not prove on a nature that is originally flawed.