Baudelaire by Nadar
 

    The poet and sometime art critic Charles Baudelaire enjoyed an intense relationship with the avant-garde art movement.  He began his life as a writer after being expelled from the Parisian Lycee in 1839.  Baudelaire's withdrawal from the classical system of education mirrored his artist counterpart's rejection from the Ecole de Beaux Arts.   In the 1840's Baudelaire lived in a luxurious apartment in hotel Pimodan.  It was during this time that he cultivated his bohemian aesthetic and theories on dandyism that would later be compiled in th essay The  Painter of Modern Life. In 1845 Baudelaire's father, disgusted at his son's decadent lifestyle which consisted of a fair amount of drugs (opium, absinthe) and sex,  cut off his inheritance.  Without a steady stream of income to support his leisure lifestyle, the young poet started to devote his time to  serious writing.  his famous "Spleen" poem series grew out of this period.  In these poems Baudelaire blames the hyperstimulation of modern society  for making literary productivity impossible. The Flowers ofEvil,  acollection of poems that defined Baudelaire as the quetessential philosopher-poet of modern life and decay, was published in 1861.  Baudelaire had to endure the humiliation of an obscenity trial that charged his poetry collection as pornographic and blasphemous. He was forced to take out several scandalous poems and agree to "admit" that his writing was not to be taken seriously.
    Baudelaire was met with far less censorship and public outcry when he analyzed the artist as a modern figure.  The Painter of Modern Life champions the idea of the artist as both "child" and sophisticated "man of the world."  A profound curiosity is needed for the artist to interpret the external world.  Baudelaire's analysis of the ideal artist is timeless, yet deeply rooted in the society of the rebel artist that he was associated with.  The model artist that Baudelaire's based his essay on was the illustrator and watercolorist Constintin Guys.  Of course the respective characters of Courbet and Manet also fit the essay's description.

Baudelaire in an armchair by Nadar, 1855.  Single print on salted paper from a destroyed negative.
 

    Between 1855 and 1858 Nadar photographed his friend Baudelaire in three sittings.  The above reproduction is the only remaining image from the first sitting in 1855.  The poet is depicted as a romantic dreamer with one hand to his face.  Baudelaire is wearing a close-cropped hair style that he adopted after 1845.  Although wary of modern innovations in science impinging on the creative spirit of the artist, Baudelaire approved the new medium of photography.1 Nadar and Baudelaire remained close until the end of the poet's life in 1867.  Baudelaire posed for the last time in 1862.  The image was subsequently made into an engraving by Manet,  one of Baudelaire's admirers.  One year after his death, Nadar recounted his relationhsip with Baudelaire in the post-humously published Charles Baudelaire Intime: Le Poete Vierge.  (The Intimate Charles Baudelaire: The Virign Poet).
 
 
 
 

A sampling of Baudelaire's unique and powerful writing style can be found in "Cats."

                                               Cats

                                                Fevered lovers and austere thinkers
                                                Love equally, in their ripe season
                                                Cats powerful and gentle, pride of the house
                                                Like them they feel the cold, like them are sedentary

                                                Friends of science and sensuality
                                                They seek the silence and the horror of the shadows
                                                Erebus had taken them for its funeral coursers
                                                Could they to servitude incline their pride.

                                                Dreaming, they take on noble postures
                                                Great sphinxes stretched out in the depths of emptiness
                                                Seeming to fall asleep into an endless dream.

                                                Their fertile loins are full of magic sparks
                                                And nuggets of gold like fine sand
                                                Vaguely bestar their mystic pupils.
 
 
 

If you would like to know more about Baudelaire and his time please visit here.
 

1  Baudelaire: Modernism in the Streetsby Marshall Berman  p.145