Il Salon del 1846

by Charles Baudelaire

In his introduction to Charles Baudelaire’s Salon of 1846, the renowned art historian Michael Fried presents a new take on the French poet and critic’s ideas on art, criticism, romanticism, and the paintings of Delacroix.

Charles Baudelaire, considered a father of modern poetry, wrote some of the most daring and influential prose of the nineteenth century. Prior to publishing the international bestseller Les Fleurs du mal (1857), he was already notable as a forthright and witty critic of art and literature. Captivated by the Salons in Paris, Baudelaire took to writing to express his theories on modern art and art philosophy. 
 
The Salon of 1846 expands upon the tenets of romanticism as Baudelaire methodically takes his reader through paintings by Delacroix and Ingres, illuminating his belief that the pursuit of the ideal must be paramount in artistic expression. Here we also see Baudelaire caught in a fundamental struggle with the urban commodity of capitalism developing in Paris at that time. Baudelaire’s text proves to be a useful lens for understanding art criticism in mid-nineteenth-century France, as well as the changing opinions regarding the essential nature of romanticism and the artist as creative genius. 
 
Acclaimed art historian and art critic Michael Fried’s introduction offers a new reading of Baudelaire’s seminal text and highlights the importance of his writing and its relevance to today’s audience.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Criticism, Art History, Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

Published February 24, 2022

About the author

Public condemned Les fleurs du mal (1857), obscene only volume of French writer, translator, and critic Charles Pierre Baudelaire; expanded in 1861, it exerted an enormous influence over later symbolist and modernist poets.

Reputation of Charles Pierre Baudelaire rests primarily on perhaps the most important literary art collection, published in Europe in the 19th century. Similarly, his early experiment Petits poèmes en prose (1868) ( Little Prose Poems ) most succeeded and innovated of the time.

From financial disaster to prosecution for blasphemy, drama and strife filled life of known Baudelaire with highly controversial and often dark tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Long after his death, his name represents depravity and vice. He seemingly speaks directly to the 20th century civilization.

Reviews

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating book on so many levels. Charles Baudelaire, one of my favorite poets on the contemporary art of his time in Paris, 1849. Critical, but he had knowledge of the works he writes about, and it's a remarkable snapshot of the creative life in Paris. There is an interesting link between poets who wrote art criticism then and even now.

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 3 out of 5]

About a decade before the works we would most associate with his name, a young Baudelaire made his name by writing several wide ranging and rather extraordinary reviews of the annual Paris Salon (of which this is the second). It shows a depth of knowledge, thought and insight one could hardly gather from his poetic works. It also shares something I feel about his more famous works: that they are looking both forward and back. Here he elaborates and defends a position firmly rooted in romanticism and extols the virtues of slightly older painters (such as Delacroix) while putting forth ideas and thoughts on art which one could almost see paving the way for Impressionism. Like his poetry, this is both a bold laying out of a future direction for art, but also (strangely) somehow very reserved (one could even say Catholic, to tie it even more to his poetry and to other, later decadents such as Huysmans).

[Molsa Roja(s) · Rating 5 out of 5]

An early oeuvre of Baudelaire, one finds him quite different from the tortured poet he seems to represent in what's the best-known of his work; here, even if he certainly is devilish, still he fits in the category of criticism. And so, this is a collection of criticism pieces on the state of Modern art, praising painters such as Delacroix and demoting the very rest of them; commenting on line and color; on the Beauty of Modernity. A pleasant read overall, it felt so tremendously distant from what it's written, or thought, nowadays I almost couldn't bear reading more than 3 or 4 pages every time.

"All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory-of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction skimmed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the [passions]: and just as we have our own particular [passions], so we have our own beauty."

"I sincerely believe that the best criticism is that which is both amusing and poetic: not a cold, mathematical criticism which, on the pretext of explaining everything, has neither love nor hate, and voluntarily strips itself of every shred of temperament. But, seeing that a fine picture is nature reflected by an artist, the criticism which I approve will be that picture reflected by an intelligent and sensitive mind. Thus the best account of a picture may well be a sonnet or an elegy."

"The pageant of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences-criminals and kept women-which drift about in the underworld of a great city; the Gazette des Tribunaux and the Moniteur all prove to us that we have only to open our eyes to recognize our heroism."

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘You can live three days without bread - without poetry, never; and those of you who can say the contrary are mistaken; they are out of their minds’.
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Charles Baudelaire was a very complex man - on one hand he was a dandy, spending his money left and right and concerning himself mostly with his appearance and having a chaotic life, but on the other hand he had this great mind, the father of modernity, an amazing art critic and poet. The best proof there is that humans can be the embodiment of opposites, right?
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‘The Salon of 1846’ is the first published book by Baudelaire - it amazes me that this work came before The Flowers of Evil and is by no means inferior to it. Throughout the book, Baudelaire touches a number of subjects related to art, but also life and society. My favourite chapter is the one dedicated to Eugene Delacroix, with whom unfortunately Baudelaire had a one sided bromance - he was one of the main campaigners of Delacroix’s art, but the guy was not very impresses and often said Baudelaire gets on his nerves lol. You can’t have them all.
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Baudelaire says in his writings that Delacroix is one of his most sympathetic subjects and goes on to explain - ‘(what) makes him the true painter of the nineteenth century is the unique and persistent melancholy which all his works are imbued, and which is revealed in his choice of subject, in the expression of his faces, in gesture and in style of colour. Delacroix has a fondness for Dante (Dante and Virgil in Hell - slide 2) and Shakespeare (The Farewell of Romeo and Juliet - slide 3), two other great painters of human anguish: he knows them through and through, and is able to translate them freely.’

[David Stoker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this up because I enjoyed the joie de vivre shown in snippets of Baudelaire's writing cited in "The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love" by Andy Merrifield (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...). And as a former university debater, I like the idea of the Salon as an intellectual ferment of creative dissent.

The book, like many historical influential books, functions at two levels - the level of understanding the era, and the level of enjoyment to a contemporary reader. I am pleased to say that this short book succeeds on both: the introduction is enlightening and adroit at outlining the influence of this work, and the essays, on average, have verve and momentum.

This book is primarily
1) An interesting theory of aesthetics, that promotes naivety and sincerity.
2) An enjoyably opinionated view of the painters of the time.
(Most of these painters readers won't have heard of - though may inspire a visit to the Louvre! - and can be skim-read unless you're a dedicated scholar of painting.)

Would shelve well alongside John Ruskin's Modern Painters (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...)

I will look up his poems next, with interest.

[Uriah Marc Todoroff]

The book series is called "ekphrasis," but there is really not a lot of literal description of art in this review. Nonetheless, I learned a few things about writing about art. I liked the structure of moving from discussing something abstract, to more concrete reviews of particular works and artists seen at the salon. He doesn't flinch from talking shit about the people he doesn't like, although on the whole he is a lot more positive than negative. Some of the arguments he makes feel intuitive---about how a draughtsman is the artist of reason, and the colourist the artist of temperament, for example. Other of his positions are much less obvious and are clearly the conclusions of research. To me, that sort of thing is especially valuable because it represents a perspective that we no longer have access to. It is something from another world, and yet there is, of course, famously, an enduring connection to this world. We see that in the concluding chapter "on the heroism of modern life." This chapter needs to be studied today, in our age so well remarked upon as one wherein artists cannot confront representing the contemporary. It clarifies my own ambition to do so.

[casanovasbooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

adorato e amato.
Baudelaire è sempre una goduria da leggere ma lo è soprattutto qui dove si lascia andare a commenti, senza troppi veli o giri di parole, su ogni aspetto della nuova arte che si sta sviluppando nella metà del 1800.
non avrà parole lievi nemmeno per alcuni critici, per gli eclettici, per coloro che definirà "le scimmie del sentimento" o per la scultura.
edizione consigliatissima!

[Nat]

I love this cute little ekphrasis series of criticism and theory:

https://www.davidzwirner.com/collect/...

It's best to approach this with a search engine to look at the dozens and dozens of forgotten works from the Salon that Baudelaire criticizes. My favorite chapter title is: "XVI. Why Sculpture is Tiresome"

[Maarten Buser · Rating 3 out of 5]

De beeldhouwkunst is verdorie niet saai.

[Aeven · Rating 5 out of 5]

important to me

[Archie Hamerton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another year in Cambridge, another year having to write on Baudelaire’s chromatic theory