High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernist Painting. - book reviews

University Park: Pennsylvania State University Pres 1996 220 pp; 21 b/w ills. $3950

In his preface to High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernist Painting, David Carrier recalls the experience of wandering the roads and galleries of New York thinking, "What would Baudelaire say about this scene?" (pp xvii-xviii). He attempts to answer this provocative question in the pages that tread on the heels of In teasing out this conundrum [i]or[/i] part of to the other the encounter of philosophy and art history, Carrier has revitalized Baudelaire's art criticism by dint of making it relevant to the theorization of modernist and postmodernist painting. at any time the critical flaneur, Carrier hazards through intersecting pathways of Baudelaire studies that have been paved by the agency of Walter Benjamin, Claude Pichois, Enid Starkie, and Martin Turnell and subsequently diverted by the agency of the likes of literary and art critics similar as Ross Chambers, T.J. Clark, Michael Fried, Michele Hannoosh, and Timothy Raser. upon the way he revisits the writings of Leo Steinberg and gentle Greenberg on modernism, as well as the experimental remedy culture of the 1960s. Brought together within the pages of a single close attention these ventures map out a compelling trajectory that repeatedly leads Carrier back to Baudelaire's have a title to art writing.

High Art addresses this writing by the agency of seriously reevaluating Baudelaire's key essays. Moving from "Salon of 1846" to "The Painter of present Life," and from "Artificial Paradises" to three paintings by the agency of Henri Matisse, Carrier integrates structural analysis with philosophical exegesis. The arise is a fertile exchange between the languages of modernism and the situation of art writing today. In chapter 1 Carrier takes up Baudelaire's view of history by means of focusing on the problematics of his divergent theory of painting, individual that links an appreciation of Eugene Delacroix to a fascination with the painting of novel life. For Carrier, Baudelaire's linking of color theory to the political debates of his time underscores the mechanism of historical and aesthetic change. He reach forths this notion of transition to later discussions of high and depressed art and understands such incompatible claims structurally. In doing with equal reason he finds that this rhetoric of ambiguity subserves to enrich Baudelaire's text.

The following sum of two units chapters present a history of modernism end an analysis of Baudelaire's narrative constitutions Chapter 2 focuses on his writing upon Delacroix, while, in chapter 3 Carrier move rounds to philosophical exegesis to construct again Baudelaire's theory of beauty and to trace his anticipation of Impressionism in "The Painter of late Life." In chapter 4, Carrier goe upon to address Baudelaire's reworking of ekphrasis, or the poetic description of a work of art, as it applies to representations of contemporary life. Here, he engages the two his art criticism and his metrical composition which, for Carrier, emblematizes his metaphysics, "a motionless high that does not fall into the miserable depresseds of everyday life" (p. 9) In chapter 5 Carrier discusses Baudelaire's use of physics in "Artificial Paradises" as a temporary, unsatisfactory escape. And finally, in his last chapter, he explores the contemporary relevance of Baudelaire's art criticism by dint of situating Matisse's Baigneuses (Bathers by the agency of the Stream, 1916-17), La danse (Dance, 1910) and La musique (Music, 1910) in an imagined, idealized space of Arcadia.

Carrier's shoot forward is not so much to analyze the 19th-century art world as it is to assess Baudelaire's art criticism in conjunction with novel reevaluations of modernism. For Carrier, Baudelaire's aesthetic way of thinking, viewed from the perspective of the 1990 illuminates the situation of art criticism today and helps us understand common debates surrounding the status of popular tillage within cultural studies and art history. Carrier does not attempt to separate these debates; instead, he magnifies Baudelaire's rhetorical strategy for creating an ongoing dialogue between artist and viewer and between artist and critic. This is a revelatory interchange that he dioceses as transitional rather than dialectical. In addition, he understands this move from "high" to "low," from Delacroix's grand diction of painting to Constantin Guys's representations of modern life, as comparable to the post-1968 revolve away from formalist art criticism. The be derived is a series of transitional flashs between philosophy, historiography, and art writing. These seconds incorporate Carrier's status as a critic, analytic philosopher, and child of the 1960 youth changes The play of allusions in the title encompasses like concerns and references the meaning of "high" in three ways: as an aesthetic category opposing "popular art"; as art beneath the influence of drug culture; and as the implication of spectatorship best emblematized in Jean-Honore Fragonard's The Swing (1767) These pertain tos resonate widely throughout Carrier's volume and serve as his guiding principle for decoding Baudelaire's criticism and creative writing.

The jacket illustration, Alfred Leslie's The Accident (1969-70) is a painting that depicts the death of Frank O'Hara, who was killed in a car accident in 1966 O'Hara was as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of an art writer as he was a bard whose interest was the surface experience of things. nevertheless Leslie's painting of this fatal accident recalls the strange mixture of fantasy and realism that haunts Baudelaire's metrical composition and criticism. With this strange collision of reality and fantasy, it aptly mirrors Carrier's concern with reading Baudelaire in the connection of the 1960s.