BAUDELAIRE, PATER, AND THE ORIGINS OF MODERNISM

BAUDELAIRE, PATER, AND THE ORIGINS OF MODERNISMAuthor(s): David CarrierSource: Source: Notes in the History of Art, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Fall 1994), pp. 39-43Published by: Ars Brevis Foundation, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23205581 .

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BAUDELAIRE, PATER, AND THE ORIGINS OF MODERNISM

David Carrier

Any one who has ever gone over the same ground as Pater . . . will be amazed to find how conscientiously and

diligently the material has been em

ployed . . . condensing an abundance of scattered points into a simple illuminat

ing hint, a poignant image, an apt illus tration.

—A. C. Benson, Walter Pater

It has long been suspected that the canoni cal modernist texts, Baudelaire's Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne and Pater's The Renais

sance, are connected. "Pater's remarks about fashion," Clark observed, "are very similar to those of Baudelaire."2 Pater's desire "to define beauty, not in the most

abstract, but in the most concrete terms

possible, to find, not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most ade

quately this or that special manifestation of it" (p. xix), seems an obvious echo of Baudelaire's phrase "le beau est fait d'un element eternel, invariable . . . et d'un element relatif' (II, p. 685).3 When, in The

Renaissance, Pater says, "He who experi ences these impressions strongly . . . has no need to trouble himself with the abstract

question what beauty is in itself" (p. xx), we recall Baudelaire's claim that he will avoid "la pensee abstraite" (II, p. 686). But Pater does not explicitly refer to Baude laire's theorizing. We know that he read

Baudelaire, but until recently no one was sure what to make of this connection.

In 1985, Clements published her discov

ery that Pater quotes Baudelaire in Chapter

3, "Modernity," of the unfinished imaginary portrait Gaston de Latour. Pierre de Ron sard's poetry, which "boldly assumed the

dress, the words, the habits, the very trick, of contemporary life, and turned them into

gold" (p. 214), does what Baudelaire says that modernist art ought to do4 Baude

laire's title Les Fleurs du Mai appears; Pater speaks of " 'flowers of evil,' among the rest" (p. 232). Baudelaire's phrase "la

modernite, c'est le transitoire, le fugitif, le

contingent" (II, p. 695) is quoted: "It was the power of 'modernity' . . . that the true 'classic' must be of the present . . .

[Ronsard was] . . . asserting the latent po etic rights of the transitory, the fugitive, the

contingent" (p. 217). Slight changes in

wording would have made Pater's allusions to Baudelaire unlocatable; explicit refer ences appearing earlier in Pater's famous

The Renaissance would more easily have been found.5 Pater hid unmistakable refer ences in an out-of-the-way place, where a smart commentator would find them.

How should we understand Clements's

discovery? She argues that identifying "the substitution fractures the fictional surface of this unfinished romance and disturbs its

placid relation to the allegorical depths" (p. 89). "Modernity" both literally tells the

story of an imaginary sixteenth-century poet and allegorically alludes to Baudelaire. "The characteristics of Ronsard's poetry as Gaston sees them and Pater describes them are those of Guys's painting as Baudelaire had described that" (p. 90).

This way of understanding the evidence



40

is natural in the context of a study of the

literary influence of Baudelaire. Clements is interested in how Algernon Charles Swin

burne, Oscar Wilde, Edith Sitwell, T. S.

Eliot, and other writers were influenced by Baudelaire. Interested in Baudelaire the art

critic, I read her evidence differently. Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne aims to explain the value of modernist visual art.6 Pater was not an art critic. What use, then, could

"Modernity" make of Baudelaire's theory of modernism?

Guys, Baudelaire s modernist hero, loved

immersing himself in crowds; drew with "toute l'ardeur d'un homme epris d'espace, de perspective, de lumiere faisant nappe ou

explosion" (II, p. 705); and is fascinated by "les femmes et les filles" (II, p. 718). These are not Ronsard's concerns. All that sur vives the transfer of this ideal to an earlier

period and another art is the conception of an art showing the transitive, fugitive, and

contingent qualities of contemporary life. Clements calls Ronsard "a direct descen

dant of that idealized Guys" (p. 90). Can a

sixteenth-century poet be a descendant of a

nineteenth-century artist?7

Here, two small details deserve analysis.

Borrowing Baudelaire's account of how

"une figure bien dessinee [can give pleas

ure] tout a fait etranger au sujet"—Baude laire cites "les membres d'un martyr qu'on ecorche, le corps d'une nymphe pamee" (II,

p. 713)—Pater mentions rather "the ara

besque . . . colouring ... of Titian's Lace

girF (p. 104). Avoiding Baudelaire's con

troversial examples, he makes a misattribu

tion.8 Maybe he desires to avoid contro

versy and shows his indifference to con

noisseurship. But perhaps he chose this

would-be Titian because "early in the eigh teenth century one of Pater's forebears, who was engaged in the lace trade, mi

grated from a Dutch enclave." Baudelaire and Pater share an admiration of their ob scure contemporary Alphonse Legros. But Baudelaire praises Legros's L'Angelus, a

scene of modern everyday life; Pater, in his

essay on Giorgione, discusses an ahistorical

subject, a landscape.10 When he alludes to Baudelaire s text,

Pater thus signals that his own interests are

different. To understand how he uses Bau

delaire's theory of modernist beauty, con

sider two different readings of Baudelaire's

analysis. First, Baudelaire's goal is to present a

general theory of beauty. "Le beau est fait

d'un element eternal, invariable . . . et d'un

element relatif" (II, p. 685). The fixed ele

ment of beauty appears in museum master

pieces, the variable component in pictures of modern life. Showing "une courtisane du

temps present" inspired by "une courtisane

de Titien ou de Raphael" creates "une oeu

vre fausse, ambigue et obscure" (II, p. 686). Both the old masters and painters of

contemporary life make art possessing

beauty. Second, Baudelaire, concerned about

praising modernist art, does not seriously offer a general theory of beauty. He was

not much interested in art history.11 Beauty and modernite are indexical terms like now

and here.n "Pour que toute modernite soit

digne de devenir antiquite, il faut que la

beaute mysterieuse que la vie humaine met

involontairement en ait ete extraite" (II, p.

695). Raphael was modern in his day;

eventually, nineteenth-century art will be

long to "antiquity."13 Valuing pictures show

ing scenes from the past because they sat

isfy our wish to witness historical events as

if we were present at them, we naturally call such images beautiful. But why admire art showing present-day life, scenes that we



41

can view directly without looking at repre sentations? "Le plaisir que nous retirons de la representation du present tient non seulement a la beaute dont il peut etre

revetu, mais aussi a sa qualite essentielle de

present" (II, p. 684). Baudelaire values

Guys's modernist images because they achieve this presence.

Pater accepts neither of these readings of Baudelaire's account of modernism. He re

jects the first reading because, as a He

gelian relativist, he denies that all art con tains some fixed element of beauty. But neither does he want to defend contempo rary modernism. Rather, projecting Baude laire's indexical theory of modernity into the past, he fantasizes experiencing this

imaginary past as if it were the present. "Modernity" projects Baudelaire's theory into the past, transforming its crucial idea. What we see right now has beauty, Baude laire says, because it is present. What we would have seen had we lived earlier, Pater

replies, would then have been beautiful be cause it would have been present.

Like the uncanny violence in "Apollo in

Picardy" and "Denys L'Auxerrois," Pater's

borrowing from Baudelaire is aggressive. He doesn't just borrow Baudelaire's con

ception of beauty, but, in borrowing, trans forms what he has taken. Both writers are concerned with understanding the origin of a historical moment. Baudelaire's goal is to describe the origin of modernism. Pater identifies another "origin," the Renais sance.14 Baudelaire is trying to grasp the

significance of the new art of his day; "Modernity," looking backward, seeks to understand how the beginning of an earlier era appeared at that time. Anticipating Im

pressionism, Baudelaire was interested in art using modern subjects. A friend of Ma

net, he expressed ideas that were "in the

air." Pater, the prophet of Postimpression ism, did something more remarkable. De

scribing paintings in which the subject is

unimportant, he anticipates the modernist tradition from Matisse through Greenberg's 1960s color-field painters. "In its primary

aspect, a great picture has no more definite

message for us than an accidental play of

sunlight," Pater says, "caught as the col ours are in an Eastern carpet" (p. 104). This view really could only be understood

by artists of the future. "The radicalism in Pater's statement is the assertion that ab stract formal values, while coexisting with the representational or non-formal elements of a picture, constitute the primary strength of a great painting."15

How did Pater, who had little contact with painting of his day, come to develop his radically original concept of a decora tive artwork having "'a life of its own' . . .

possessing no detachable meanings . . .

containing within itself all that is relevant to itself"?16 Perhaps, as Greenberg suggests, "the ideas about music ... in The School of Giorgione reflect this transition from the musical to the abstract better than any sin

gle work of art."17 Or maybe Pater's essay anticipates Postimpressionism because Re naissance Venetian painting did.18 But un

derstanding how Pater uses Baudelaire's ideas suggests another, perhaps better, an swer to this question.

Applied to art of the present, Baude laire's theory defends Guys's modernism.

Applied to the poetry of Ronsard or the

painting of the school of Giorgione, this

theory suggested Pater's ideal of a self sufficient decorative painting. Modernism, Baudelaire says, involves using modern

subjects to show how what is immediately present to us can have beauty. What this

means, Pater asserts when he projects this



42

theory backward, is that the subjects of art can be unimportant. Baudelaire's theory about the value of novel subjects turns into a defense of art that, like the "Eastern car

pet," is beautiful because it is decorative. How odd that thus transposing an ac

count of modernism back into the Renais sance should yield good prophecy. There is not much evidence in Pater's writing of concern for the future of painting. To the extent that Pater took Hegel—whose views are summarized at length in The Renais sance's last essay, "Winckelmann"—seri

ously, he would have expected the history of art to have already ended. But perhaps

he uses and transforms Hegel s histoncism as violently as he treats Baudelaire's theory of beauty. As aesthete, Pater had an odd

way of handling his sources. His achieve ment seems paradoxical. Judged as art his

tory, "The School of Giorgione"—a beauti ful essay—today seems eccentric. But if a historian is someone who tries to recon struct the past, then Pater was not really a historian. His odder goal was to imagine that past for its own sake, aesthetically. Nor did he seek to be an art critic, although his "misreading" of Baudelaire brilliantly anticipates the concerns of the critics of the next century.

NOTES

This essay is for Richard ShifF. I thank Paul Barol

sky and two anonymous readers for helping me to

clarify the argument.

1. A. C. Benson, Walter Pater (London: 1906), p. 211.

2. Walter Pater, The Renaissance, Introduction by Kenneth Clark (London and Glasgow: 1961), p. 23, n. 3. See also the discussion in Pater (pp. 294-295), and Billie Andrew Inman, Walter Pater's Reading: A Bibliography of His Library Borrowings and Lit

erary References, 1858-1873 (New York and Lon

don: 1981). 3. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art

and Poetry, the 1983 Text, ed. D. L. Hill (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: 1980); Charles Baude

laire, (Euvres completes, ed. Claude Pichois, Bib

liotheque de la Pleide, 2 vols. (Paris: 1976); refer ences to these books are given parenthetically.

4. Patricia Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition (Princeton: 1985), ch. 2; references to this

book are given parenthetically. Gaston de Latour

appears in The Works of Walter Pater in Eight Vol

umes (London: 1901); reference to this book are

given parenthetically. See also Harold Bloom, Yeats

(New York: 1970), ch. 2, and Paul Barolsky, "The

Case of the Domesticated Aesthete," Critical Es

says on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ed. H. Orel (New York: 1992), pp. 92-102.

5. The first chapter, "Two Early French Stories," is also set in France.

6.1 reconstruct this theory in my "Baudelaire's

Philosophical Theory of Beauty," Nineteenth

Century French Studies (forthcoming). 7. Baudelaire borrowed this idea from Stendhal;

see Baudelaire (II, p. 1296) and Stendhal, Histoirie

de la Peinture en Italie, 2 vols. (Paris: 1924), n, sec. 6: "Du beau ideal moderne."

8. Questioned already by Thore, this painting now is given to Sofonisba Anguissola (Pater, Ren aissance, Hill, ed., p. 387).

9. Gerald Monsman, Walter Pater (Boston:

1977), p. 17. Elsewhere also Pater's errors in con

noisseurship deserve scrutiny. Attributing to Leo

nardo "the Medusa of the UJJizi" (p. 83), perhaps an

"embarrassing acceptance of. . . work . . . which

Leonardo did not execute," anticipates modern

identifications of Caravaggio's erotic interests. See

Clark, in Pater, Renaissance, p. 16, and Michael

Levey, The Case of Walter Pater (New York: 1978),

p. 130. On Caravaggio, see Howard Hibbard,

Caravaggio (New York: 1983), p. 69. On nine

teenth-century views of Caravaggio, see Richard

Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics

of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill and London:

1990), p. 136; Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, 2d

ed., trans. A. Davidson (Oxford: 1970), pp. 25-26; and Stendhal, p. 186.



43

10. On L 'Angelus, see Alison Fairlie, "Aspects of

Expression in Baudelaire's Art Criticism," in

French Nineteenth-Century Painting and Literature, ed. U. Finke (New York: 1972), pp. 54-55.

11. Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler, Baudelaire

(Paris: 1987), pp. 200-204, note that Baudelaire

nowhere writes a detailed account of any pre

nineteenth-century artwork.

12. See Beerbohm's self-conscious play with a

Baudelairean fascination with makeup. "There is

charm in every period, and only fools and flutter

pates do not seek reverently for what is charming in

their own day." Max Beerbohm, "The Pervasion of

Rouge," in The Incomparable Max (New York:

1962), p. 42. 13. Hegel, in "Die Wahrnemmung oder das Ding

und di Tauschung," in Phanomenologie des Geistes,

explains: "Dies abstrakte allgemeine Medium, das

die Dingheit iiberhaupt oder das reine Wesen

genannt werden kann, is nichts anderes als das Hier

und Jetzt." G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig

Banden, HI (Frankfurt am Main: 1970), p. 95. Pater

read Hegel; see Germain D'Hangest, Walter Pater:

L'Homme et L'Oeuvre, 2 vols. (Paris: 1961), I, pp.

147-149, and Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism (Ith aca: 1989), p. 15.

14. Our concept of the Renaissance may be a

nineteenth-century creation, but Vasari, Panofsky

noticed, praises "having regard to place, time, and

other similar circumstances," notes Masaccio's

"modern manner," and identifies Leonardo as creat

ing a modern style. Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the

Visual Arts (Garden City, N.Y.: 1955), p. 212, and id., Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art

(New York: 1969), p. 35. See also D'Hangest, I, p. 111. Vasari has a very Baudelairean interest in a

"Cimabue" portrait of a figure wearing "un cap

puccio secondo l'uso di quei tempi"; see Le opere di

Giorgio Vasari, con nuove annotazioni e commenti

di Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence: 1973), I, p. 258.

15. Joseph Masheck, "The Carpet Paradigm: Critical Prolegomena to a Theory of Flatness," Arts

Magazine 51, no. 1 (1976):86, 82. 16. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London:

1971), p. 107. 17. Clement Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Lao

coon" (1940), reprinted in his The Collected Essays and Criticism, I: Perceptions and Judgments: 1939

1944, ed. J. O'Brian (Chicago and London: 1992), p. 32, n. 2.

18. Jack Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art

1869-1918 (Ithaca and London: 1986), p. 118.



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BAUDELAIRE, PATER, AND THE ORIGINS OF MODERNISM