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BAUDELAIRE, CHARLES (1821–1867)
French poet and art critic
Baudelaire wrote one of the most famous essays on
photography in the nineteenth century. Known as “The
Salon of 1859,” it is a review of a Parisian art exhibition,
the fi rst Salon show to include photographs. Although
his literary importance rests with his verse and prose
poems, Baudelaire began his writing career as an art
critic. To understand better the context of Baudelaire’s
statements about photography in “The Salon of 1859,”
it is useful to trace his aesthetic development through
his art reviews.
Baudelaire’s fi rst published work was a review of
the Salon of 1845. Informing his career as art critic
was a tradition in French letters that began with La
Font de Saint-Yenne in 1747 and Diderot in 1759.
The painter Eugène Delacroix and Stendhal’s writings
on art complete the major infl uences on Baudelaire’s
thoughts on the subject of painting and the visual arts
in general. Many key phases and concepts that recur in
Baudelaire’s art criticism appear fi rst in “The Salon of
1845.” They include “originality,” “reality” or “the real,”
“the new,” “naivete,” and “the heroism of modern life.”
It is noteworthy that in 1845 Baudelaire is impressed
with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, “who is so much
in love with detail” (Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1845,”
Art in Paris: 1845–1862, Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1981, 5).
In announcing his view of criticism in “The Salon
of 1846,” Baudelaire contends that it “should be par-
tial, passionate and political (Baudelaire, “The Salon
of 1846,” Art in Paris: 1845–1862, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1981, 44). Contemporary art, on the
other hand, should “contain an element of the eternal
and an element of the transitory—of the absolute and
of the particular” (Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1846,” Art
in Paris: 1845–1862, Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1981, 117). With this doctrine he seeks to root the artist’s
subject in his or her own time and experience. Yet one of
the greatest faults that an artist may possess, according
to Baudelaire, is to believe that beauty resides in the
exact rendering of nature in all her detail. Baudelaire
expounds a theory of art derived in part from Delacroix’s
own theories: nature is a vast dictionary to be consulted
yet ultimately transformed by the memory of the artist.
“Exact imitation spoils a memory” (Baudelaire, “The
Salon of 1846,” Art in Paris: 1845–1862, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1981, 80).
In 1846 Baudelaire has yet to reject photography—
specifi cally daguerreotypy—as a negative, mechanistic
medium, but by 1855 in his review of the Exposition
Universelle, he solidifi es his views concerning the
visual arts. Ingres is pilloried by Baudelaire, who on
entering a room devoted to the artist’s works experi-
ences nothing but boredom commingled with fear. For
Baudelaire Ingres’s work is now devoid of imagina-
tion; he considers it a product of a conscious aesthetic
of the “real” devoid of senti ment or the supernatural.
This lack of sentiment and the supernatural has already
been linked by Baudelaire to the insufferable fashion
for “progress,” “this gloomy beacon, invention of pres-
ent-day philosophizing, licensed without guarantee of
Nature or of God—this modern lantern throws a stream
of darkness upon all objects of knowledge; liberty melts
away, discipline vanishes” (Baudelaire, “The Exposition
Universelle, 1855,” Art in Paris: 1845–1862, Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1981, 125–126).
In “The Exposition Universelle, 1855” Baudelaire
unequivocally separates his aesthetics from the “realist”
school of painting and “realist” art in general. His con-
cept of the correspondence between the spiritual and the
natural and of the underlying unity of all art keeps him at
odds philosophically with the perception or representa-
tion of nature as an end unto itself. A work that merely
describes is not art, according to Baudelaire, because a
work of art must transport ideas from the natural world
to the supernatural and/or spiritual realm.
Baudelaire’s derision of daguerreotypy as expressed
in “The Salon of 1859” is what is generally understood
to be his absolute and exclusive opinion on the medium.
Sociological and cultural factors, as well as the devel-
opment of Baudelaire’s unique artistic vision, seem to
support the fi nality of expression offered in the Salon
review. By 1859 Baudelaire has separated “Truth,” at
least as he believes the public to understand it, from
“Beauty.” He contends that nature is the only thing in
which the public believes and, therefore, the public
believes that only the exact reproduction of nature is
what art should be. Former graphic artists dominated
the photographic “industry” of mid-nineteenth-century
France: Daguerre epitomized this world. Baudelaire’s
diatribe against photography in “The Salon of 1859”
is a political tract that appears to attack Daguerre as
“Messiah” of this new industry but remains more
completely a denunciation of the public. Although da-
guerreotypists are co-conspirators with the public, it is
the public’s unques tioning belief in nature that offends
Baudelaire. He rails against the failure of the public to
doubt, to think, and to challenge the world in which it
lives and links this failure with the ascendancy of the
belief in progress that specifi cally partakes of science
and mechanistic inventions and discoveries.
Baudelaire may not have even attended the Salon of- In one letter to his friend Nadar, he claims fi rst
that he is currently writing on the Salon show without
having seen it and then retrenches somewhat in a second
letter by stating that he had lied a little and had made
one—and only one—visit. Baudelaire professes to rely
on a “livret” describing the exhibition for his analysis.