Antonio Madrid

Allison Ramay
Literary Theory I
23 June 2015
Prcis on Charles Baudelaires The Painter of Modern Life
On his essay The Painter of Modern Life, which was published on 1964, Charles
Baudelaire tries to establish an idea of beauty which defies the academicist or the elitist pure,
unique beauty. He aims to express and explain a beauty which can be perceived relative to a
culture, relative to an age and customs. He also explains how this relative beauty is that
belonging to a modernity, and exemplifies the beauty of his modernity through the works of
Monsieur G..
Initially Baudelaire makes a distinction between general beauty,that expressed by
classical artists, and particular beauty, the one subject to circumstances and the sketch of
manners; Even though for him the sketch of manners is the depiction of bourgeois life and
the pageant of fashion, a contemporary equivalent would be fashion and customs. He explains
how this particular beauty has a historic value that collectors attribute to it for pieces of the past,
and voices a concern for the importance of the painting of manners of the present, whose value is
being that, the present. This would carry the moral and aesthetic feeling of their time, and it is
his interest for this to be painted. It is after this that he proposes a contrasting theory of beauty,
one rational and historical, to contrast the unique and absolute beauty of academic theory. He
argues that beauty makes a single impression, but is always composed of two difficult to discern
parts; these are an eternal invariable element, whose quantity it is excessively difficult to
determine and a relative, circumstantial element, . . . the age, its fashion, its morals, its

emotions. By this he means that the invariable element is too difficult to define, and pointless to
try to, while the circumstantial is much more accessible.
Baudelaire also explains his idea of a genius artist, a "man of the world", one with
childlike wonder that makes him curious of everything, everything as new, but with the will to
evoke this curiosity as desired, and an understanding of the world. Monsieur G is such a man to
him, and his depictions of the life around him and in the world carry in them what Baudelaire
seeks to call "modernity", that which is variable in beauty and representative of their own period.
In this sense Baudelaire is concerned with the beauty derived from human condition, the one that
comes from aesthetics and values of a society. He then describes how Monsieur G. paints the
modernity of their era in a variety of aspects; war, aristocracy, women, carriages, etc..
An essential point explained, implicitly, by Baudelaire, is the importance of modernity in
a bare a true sense, how beauty is according to the values and expectations, especially when he
talks about women. In his ruthlessness and strong character, he lays bare a truth of the beauty of
women in his modernity, his society. Women exist according to the values of such modernity
when they only serve aesthetic purpose, he stripes a hypocrite romanticism that dominates the
era, and exposes the real intentions of their morals, revealing the ideal woman, the one whose
duty is to "[devote] herself to appearing magical and supernatural; she has to astonish and charm
us." For all the modernity cares women could "have not a single thought in their heads", their
exterior is all the matters, and this is a truth hidden by the idealization of their beauty. It is this
same tenor that may be hidden underneath our own society's pretenses of women aesthetics, and
is hidden by the same adulatory odes as the ones they did back then; this is a heritage of
modernity.