ABSTRACT
At the heart of Baudelaire’s conception of great art, as expressed in ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’, is the ability to distil experience in gestures of synthesis and abbreviation, an ability he particularly attributes to the painter Camille Corot and to Constantin Guys, his ‘painter of modern life’. But to traffic in detail at all is, for Baudelaire, already to go too far, to espouse the wrong kind of aesthetic politics. Baudelaire’s searing indictment of photography in the Salon de 1859 is followed immediately by an apologia for the imagination. The simplifications of studio give way to the complexities and angularities of the street; as Varnedoe puts it: 'her gesture suggests, ambiguously and simultaneously, equal parts of auto-eroticism, somnolence and remorseful shame'. The undermining of the significance of memory and imagination, these safeguards of processes of introspection, was connected with the dream of unmediated vision. The instant of the painting is the moment of the coincidence of different durations.
