Baudelaire
Hideo Kobayashi
I often hear people say that they cannot understand modern paintings. I thought it was a potato, so I looked at the title below, and saw that it was a man's face. As for the ship, well, it depends on that, and it doesn't understand. The painting must depict something. And this something must be something we know even before we see the painting. This is a very obvious idea, and in fact, painters have been painting according to this idea for a long time. For example, Pascal said, "What an empty and boring profession it is to be a painter, who is condemned to paint the real thing as though it were the real thing, when the real thing is so mediocre that no one prizes it." Pascal's own thought is another matter, but it clearly shows how painting was generally conceived of at the time.
Pascal was a contemporary of Rembrandt in the seventeenth century. Rembrandt certainly painted the real thing as authentically as possible. His portraits were so true to life that they earned him fame, and he could live off them. Today, no one would write a poem about Picasso's portraits. It would be absurd to say that he could not complain about any face he painted. The real thing is something a painter cannot do without. It did not have to be an immediate object, it could be a historical fact or a religious story, so it would be better to call it the subject or object of the painter's work rather than the real thing. The common sense and culture of the time provided painters with the people and things they recognised as such, the ideas they accepted, and the symbolic and aesthetic forms of their religious beliefs, as their subjects. For example, even if Raphael had painted a beauty that no one had ever seen before, the beauty of the painting would have been based on the common knowledge that if such a beauty had existed, no one would have been able to resist her charm. It would have been based firmly on people's common sense. Conversely, if Fra Angelico had painted a Madonna of any beauty, the artist himself would have firmly believed that the beauty of the Madonna would not change the message of God, which even a deer believes in. In any case, the painting was judged in close relation to the subject it dealt with.
Rembrandt has a painting called 'The Night Watch.' It was in Amsterdam and is a famous painting, although I was less than impressed by it, perhaps because I had seen so many of his later, more horrific masterpieces. The painting was commissioned by a member of the Amsterdam firing squad. I do not know how much Rembrandt was paid, but it must have been a very good business job, because it is not every day you get a large testimonial of twenty or more portraits like that. Rembrandt had to be very commercial, but he made only two of the officers look like portraits, while the others were all pushed down into the wistful background, making it hard to tell who was who or what they were doing. The union was angry because they thought they had been robbed of a lot of money. Rembrandt's reputation suddenly took a turn for the worse, and the portrait annotations stopped. In this case, Rembrandt did not cut corners, as he clearly thought that it was enough to paint two men who looked like the real ones, and that the others should be burnt. For the unionists, the painting was just a way of showing the honourable firing squad defending Amsterdam.
The lieutenant was, of course, a far more important figure than a mere portrait painter. Rembrandt would not have been unaware of such common sense at the time, but the artist's main desire for composing beautiful pictures went beyond such common sense. From the artist's instincts, the firing squad in Amsterdam was only one year's means of reaching a beautiful painting. If the darkness of the background is an essential condition for the aesthetic harmony of the picture, the expressions of the people must be sacrificed for this purpose. As this instinct of the painter became stronger and more conscious, modern painting began to emerge. Rembrandt's paintings cannot be called modern paintings, but the adventures he attempts are of a modern nature. 'The Night Watch' is a very beautiful painting. The Amsterdam firing squad has no meaning to our eyes when we look at 'The Night Watch,' but the painting seems to speak to us because of its beauty. In other words, we have become accustomed to viewing Rembrandt's paintings in a modern way. The modern painting movement is, fundamentally speaking, a sad contrivance of how painters can escape from the authority or coercion of their chosen subjects and achieve the autonomy or independence of painting.
Modern society is moving toward having separate worlds of various specialised tasks. Art, of course, very acutely reflects this tendency of modern society, in which the forms and domains of human cultural activity are clearly separated from each other, and not only painters but also poets were quick to sense this and tried bold innovations in the modernity of the time. Modern painting and modern poetry were, after all, centred in France, but the revolutionary movement first emerged in the poet-founder. Baudelaire was the senior of Manet. The poetics of Baudelaire, in the simplest terms necessary here, is this: the public is moved by the poetry of the leading poets of the time, such as Hugo, Lamartine, and Musset. But this is only vaguely moved by something poetic, because the poets in question have only vague ideas about what poetry is. It is true that these great poets could not have been writing poems innocently, and they must have been talking about very conscious efforts to improve the effect of their poems, but what is the original purpose of poetry? Because they lack the basic clarity of what is possible, they allow their works to contain a strange and impure mixture of poetry and things that are not poetry, that is, things that can be expressed in prose. With Hugo, for example, there is history, there is legend, there is philosophical thought. What Baudelaire did, therefore, was to eliminate as much as possible that which was not poetry from poetry, that is, that poetry should have a pure charm inherent in it, and to master the conditions of language that would enable this indefinable charm to be established. The idea is not that a poem should be a poetic expression of an object or a subject, but that a poem should simply be a poem.
It is well known that Baudelaire realised his belief in the modernity of poetry in 'The Flowers of Evil.' Although the 'The Flowers of Evil' had not yet appeared in the art world, the spirit was moving everywhere, and talented new painters were working towards it. Baudelaire recognised the sensibility of these pioneers, painters who, in his words, had their clocks far ahead of those around them. He left behind many critiques of painting, but it is in this prophetic insight into the modernity of painting that his critique, as a model of modern pictorial criticism, is still alive today. Baudelaire was the first critic of painting to deal with painting with the clear awareness that painting is enough if it is painting. Why? What is poetry?
Baudelaire was a great admirer of Delacroix. Wagner's and Delacroix's theories are the twin pillars of his legacy of critical writing. In his essay on Delacroix, which is my own summary, he said something to the effect of: "The world has not seen the history of Delacroix's paintings. The public is so fascinated by the dramatic subject matter of Delacroix's historical paintings that they fail to recognise his new talent. These people should look at Delacroix's paintings from a distance. Look at the painting from a distance, so far away that you cannot see what is being painted. Suddenly the magic of Delacroix's colours will become clear to your eyes." In this case, the pure fascination of the colours in your eyes has a completely different source from the fascination of the subject of the painting, and even if you can understand the subject of the painting when you look at it closely, you will feel that the subject adds nothing to the fascination of the colours, nor can it take anything away from this fascination. This harmony of colours, which has nothing to do with the subject, is the essence of the artist's thought.
By "thought," I do not mean, of course, any kind of thought in the common sense of the word. I mean the power of colour to make you dream and think. Delacroix was a passionate lover of the passions, and yet I have never seen another painter with a palette as meticulously and delicately organised as Delacroix's. The colours on his palette are arranged like a bouquet of flowers. I wonder how keenly aware the artist is of the emotional value of each of these various colours. The painter's work of meticulously combining these colours to create a great, unified harmony is very similar to the procedure of a musician or a mathematician, is it not? Through constant practice and measurement, the painter's emotions appear, given a name, brilliance, and certainty This is the thought of the journey. Delacroix said that nature is a dictionary, but he is submitting nature to the authority of a dictionary, not nature. He searches out from nature the elements that are adapted to his inner self and gives them a completely new interpretation. For the painter, nature is the unifying accumulation of opportunities and materials that prompt him to create a completely different order of painting. In the artist's view, there are no lines or colours in nature. Line and colour are created by the painter.
Baudelaire wrote of the idea that nature imitates art. Wilde's famous paradox that nature imitates art can already be found here. But while nature had clearly ceased to be a model for Delacroix, history, it seems, was not a dictionary that he could use at will. The great theorist of the palette was also a pessimist with a deep literary education, whose thoughts seemed to wander constantly over the eternal, cruel, and barbaric nature of man. There is a famous painting, 'The Massacre at Chios.' The waves of colour that rise up on the screen sound like an intricately orchestrated piece of music. As I listened to this music, wondering what would happen, I heard it disappear somewhere like the sound of a flute, from the hollow gaze of a dying Greek. Every time I visited Delacroix's room in the Louvre, I clearly felt the intensity of Baudelaire's gaze. Pascal might say, what a vain occupation it is to be a painter, with all the wealth of colour devoted to singing the folly and meaninglessness of life. Be that as it may, it is certain that Delacroix saw war, fire, and murder every time he opened the dictionary of history. His bouquet-like palette seems to have been fighting against the weight of the historical and literary subjects on which his imagination hung.
In order to escape this burden and find the pure joy of being a painter and not a man of letters, it took the emergence of wild men like Courbet, who called the paintings of Delacroix and Michelangelo "pictorial literature" and did not care for them. "I have never seen a man with wings on his shoulders, that's why I don't paint angels," were the words he needed to say. Next came Manet, who admired Courbet's determination to paint only what he could see. Courbet painted a portrait of Baudelaire, but there was no room in the artist's strained vision for the poetry collection 'The Flowers of Evil.' What emerges is a very ordinary middle-aged man reading a book. Manet painted a portrait of Mallarmé. The portrait has nothing to do with the world of Mallarmé's poetry. Rather than a loom, it moves boldly, like a living thing, and has a number of subtle movements like music. It can be said that it has a blue tone. Baudelaire wrote a prose poem entitled 'L'Edit' with a dedication to Manet. It is a masterpiece among his prose poems, which, with its sober and frank observations, draws the reader into an enchantment that treads the border between reality and illusion, poetry and psychology. Although Baudelaire did not leave behind any specific discussion of Manet, we might say that this prose poem is a theory of Manet. At least some of his works must have been written in the hope that Manet would understand them. Manet was very different from Courbet, but Baudelaire, as an innovator of vision, pointed to a fundamental quality they had in common. It is, he says, a "big-hearted, selfless sense of reality."
The new realism that Baudelaire recognised in Manet was of the same nature as the realism of Baudelaire's own poetry, and is, in essence, based on the poet's idea of modern domination of life. If he were to break free from the power of tradition and promise, resist the temptations of emotion and thought, and approach life with pure consciousness, the poet would traverse the "forest of symbols" that is his own human life. It is, as he puts it, like the night, where the light knows no evil and the serpents are pure, responding to each other with colours, scents, and sounds. Such a world emerges from an extremely awakened consciousness that doubts the promises of historical and social perspectives. It is the point where what he calls the "searching mind" encounters the naked object. Baudelaire believed that in order to restore the autonomy of poetry, the light of the poetic soul must first destroy all the objects that are shaped by conventions and promises. Only then could he achieve the freedom of language, and rebuild the enchantment of a poetic world that did not depend on anything else. He saw in Manet the soul of a painter of this nature. He saw in Manet's paintings a thorough sensuality with a conscious organisation of colour. The painting does not refer to the value of the subject outside, but to the fascinating organisation of colours within the frame itself. The narrow, extreme impressionist technique soon became a sad accent on this conscious path.
I once read in a book by André Roth that the impressionist technique is fundamentally of the same nature as the technique of perspective, which emerged at the beginning of the modern era, and I thought this made sense. In short, both perspective and impressionism are techniques that do not depict things as they are, but as they appear, and where the users of perspective applied it to the form of things, impressionist painters applied it to the colours.
Children do not paint with perspective, they do not paint a dog bigger than a house because a dog in the vicinity looks bigger than a house in the distance. This does not mean that medieval painters who did not know about perspective were children. They saw no need to invent such a thing. The Middle Ages were by no means a time of childish superstition. It was a time when people lived in the deep conviction that the rational order of the world as ordained by God was self-evident and certain in the light of reason. For the merchants, of course, the Bible was neither legend nor religious literature. It was a record of historical facts that could not be moved. It was the task of the merchants to reproduce such order and facts as faithfully as possible. In such an age, what was so interesting that, depending on the position of a person's point of view, large things could appear small and small things could appear large? It would have been inconceivable to replace the order of existence with an illusion of vision.
The technique of perspective, which emerged during the Renaissance, was also based on the idea of the liberation of human nature at that time. Paolo Uccello was said to have been so moved by the beauty of his painstakingly and illegally successful paintings that he could not sleep at night. It is true that the house is bigger than the dog, the tears tell a lie, but if the truth is boring and the lie is so much fun, as a painter you have the freedom to choose the lie. Well, Uccello would not have thought in such a way. He would have painted religious imagery according to popular belief, but his domestic instincts were sometimes anti-religious. In other words, it can be said that he abandoned the certainty of the universal spirit and moved toward the unstable pleasure of individual vision. Painters who had tasted Uccello's joy would have seen clearly that medieval painting was done more by the eye than by the artist. What historians expressed in words, painters used to express in colour, but now the order of facts is left to historians; for painters, the appearance of facts is already sufficiently complex. Now, if we have to wait until the impressionists of the nineteenth century before we can apply the analytical technique of the differentiation of the visible form to the visible colour, we are left with a painter who has done a very half-hearted job of reproducing the subject as it appears to him. In a very ordinary sense, this half-hearted approach may have been necessary for the realism of the merchants, who wanted to portray real thing as it really was. The painter's consciousness was balanced between what is and what can be seen, just as the common sense person's consciousness is balanced. With the arrival of Impressionism, this equilibrium was broken. Baudelaire was clearly aware that "Romantic art" was a flower that could only bloom on the basis of the artist's social and rebellious nature, a veritable "forest of symbols."
Isolation was as bright as light, but also as dark as night.