Nadar, Baudelaire, 1855-58.
Baudelaire on photography: “I know very well that some people will retort, “The disease which you have just been diagnosing is a disease of imbeciles. What man worthy of the name of artist, and what true connoisseur, has ever confused art with industry?” I know it; and yet I will ask them in my turn if they believe in the contagion of good and evil, in the action of the mass on individuals, and in the involuntary, forced obedience of the individual to the mass. It is an incontestable, an irresistible law that the artist should act upon the public, and that the public should react upon the artist; and besides, those terrible witnesses, the facts, are easy to study; the disaster is verifiable. Each day art further diminishes its self-respect by bowing down before external reality; each day the painter becomes more and more given to painting not what he dreams but what he sees. Nevertheless it is a happiness to dream, and it used to be a glory to express what one dreamt. But I ask you! does the painter still know this happiness?
Could you find an honest observer to declare that the invasion of photography and the great industrial madness of our times have no part at all in this deplorable result? Are we to suppose that a people whose eyes are growing used to considering the results of a material science as though they were the products of the beautiful, will not in the course of time have singularly diminished its faculties of judging and of feeling what are among the most ethereal and immaterial aspects of creation?”
– Salon, 1859
Baudelaire sat for world-famous portrait photographer Nadar several times in the mid-1850s. Is this the “invasion of photography,” the “industrial madness” that Baudelaire decries? Or, does it show “judging and feeling,” those qualities that belonged to a true art, the “ethereal and immaterial aspects of creation?”
Nadar, Baudelaire, 1856.
What do you think? Is he a dandy as he describes it in “The Painter of Modern Life”?
Etienne Carjat, Baudelaire, c. 1863. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
– Prof. Steer
