Baudelaire Fractal. Lisa Robertson

      When Courbet painted the young poet reading at his work table in 1848, the year of the Revolution so acerbically caricatured in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, the year the boy gesticulated with a revolver on a street corner calling for the assassination of his stepfather the Colonel Aupick, the year of his first translation of Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, in his moment of socialism, having just lost his inheritance, was living on rue de Babylone in the 7th arrondissement, perhaps in the room of his mistress, Jeanne Duval. This was one of a long series of rooms, either hotel rooms or borrowed apartments, occupied for varying brief periods from the age of twenty-three, when his family had seized his fortune by court order, then doled it back to him through their notary in direly inadequate monthly increments, until his death at forty-six. After a brief period of luxurious and extreme expenditure – garments for his mistresses and for himself, baroque furnishings and draperies, perfumes, wines, hashish, and antique paintings, most of which later proved to be forgeries – his scandalized bourgeois family had him declared a legal minor by the courts. From this moment until the end of his life, he lost all the legal and financial rights of his majority. He could not own, nor vote, nor marry. The poet spent twenty-three years of his life actively fleeing creditors, working clandestinely, moving on in the night, often assisted by Jeanne Duval. I am astounded that under these extreme conditions he was able to write anything. Here in Courbet’s portrait he seems to be sitting on a carmine-coloured divan and is wearing a matching lap rug. A bare wooden table is pulled close to balance on its lip the open weight of the thick black volume that the young man, pipe in mouth, is reading with intense focus. He is smoking. Two other books are stacked on a ribbon-tied dark green mottled cardboard folder of the kind still available in most French stationers’ shops, and as part of this studious still life, a long feather pen slashes diagonally, palely upwards from the inkwell into the putty-toned shadow. The opaque plume has captured the late slant of light; so has the creamy splayed deckle edge of the open book. Similarly lit is the poet’s delicate left hand, resting at his side, expressive even in its immobility. I recall the Goncourt brothers, in their journals, mentioning glimpsing Baudelaire some ten years later in the Café Riche, a stylish place for publishers and the last regency drunks, as they said. It was shortly after the damning 1857 obscenity trial of Les Fleurs du mal: ‘his shirt open at the neck and his head shaved, just as if he were going to be guillotined. A single affectation: his little hands washed and cared for, the nails kept scrupulously clean, like a woman.’ The two judgments, one against his legal majority and one against his book, determined the form of the poet’s adult life.

      His fine hands, one quizzically posed beneath his chin, chin decorated with a little quirky beard, beard worn as a self-amused form of punctuation, the other hand delicately worrying the carved arm of the ornate wooden armchair in which he was seated, also occupy the foreground of the earlier, and only other portrait, by Émile Deroy. This youthful likeness, which his friend Asselineau described as hanging in the poet’s apartment during his early period of luxury at the Hotel Pimodan, followed him through the long itinerancy of rented rooms that Baudelaire struggled to wear lightly in his later years. Deroy had made the painting over three nights, in lamplight, in Baudelaire’s salon, in the company of the poet Théodore de Banville, who later described the scene in his memoirs, the Guadeloupian Creole journalist Alexandre Privat d’Anglemont, and the Lyonais socialist songwriter Pierre Dupont, the five young men, inseparable then, smoking and talking about Delacroix and the tensions between colour and line, verse and girls.

      But for now I want to return to the story of Courbet, who was to show his own portrait of Baudelaire in 1855 along with forty other of his own works in a rented hangar-like wooden building, as part of a flamboyantly rebellious exhibition of his own devising called The Pavilion of Realism. Though the artist had previously enjoyed considerable success with his portraits, his monumental painting The Artist’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life was rejected by the jury of the Exposition Universelle. He responded to this rejection with enthusiasm, borrowing money from a collector to fund a temporary exhibition hall of his own. Initially imagined in his correspondence as a circus tent, it stood next to the exhibition hall of the prestigious and well-visited Exposition Universelle. The Pavilion of Realism was a large-scale work of hubristic publicity. Courbet converted the long exterior wall of the building into a billboard advertising his name; you paid a nominal entrance fee, the first time such fees had been charged to exhibition visitors in France, and you also paid to leave your umbrella or walking stick with an attendant, to purchase a souvenir photographic image of the rejected tableau, or to take an exhibition catalogue, within which was printed Courbet’s own text ‘The Manifesto of Realism.’ ‘I simply wanted to draw forth, from a complete acquaintance with tradition, the reasoned and independent consciousness of my own individuality,’ he wrote, defending the painting as a depiction of the present as a synthetic vision of the people he saw and dealt with daily in the city, people of various social classes and fortunes. He had been influenced by Baudelaire who, in his Salon of 1846, had first addressed the topic of the necessary relationship of art to urban modernity. Beauty, Baudelaire wrote in his Salon, was the beauty of the present only, and was necessarily composed of elements both absolute and quotidian, whose association caused the sensation of marvellousness, which is modern. Each age, each milieu, has its own beauty, as it has its fashions, elegance, debaucheries, and vileness. Each age has its own violence and injustice. All of this flickering together is what the new artist must represent. Beauty was only ever modern, in modernity’s costumes, said Baudelaire. It would not be dressed in classical robes and attitudes; the new beauty would be found in the daily life of the city, in its real mixtures and extremes. Already we live amidst beauty but we do not recognize it, he said. In his allegorical studio, Courbet had depicted the poet half-seated on a wooden table in the lower right-hand corner, bent over a large open book whose pages provide one of the few instances of intense light in a painting modelled according to a profound, almost baroque chiaroscuro.

      Influenced by his interpretation of Baudelairean realism, Courbet depicted himself in the centre of his crowded studio, painting a scenic landscape at his easel. Behind him, a naked white woman, plump, half-turned from the viewer, holds up some drapery to cover her breast, and watches the painter work. Her pale pink garments lie crumpled at their feet in the foreground, like an oversweet dessert. She is his model, but not for this image. On the left of the artist, in the darkest shadow, is a motley grouping of people from all parts of life: actors, a money lender, a clothier, a lactating Irish peasant woman with infant, musicians, an acrobat, a priest, a Christ figure, a radical, a farmer, and a standing boy, respectfully watching him paint. To Courbet’s right is a second group, his peers: intellectuals, critics, politicians, gallerists and their wives, all of them fashionably clothed – the men in dark suits, the woman closest to us in an opulently embroidered shawl. A child plays with a cat at the feet of the adults; he is drawing his own picture on a large sheet of paper laid flat on the floor. The figures in this modern allegory all float across the thickly painted darkness as if projected in a film. The artist, in the centre, is the hero of his drama or diorama. Baudelaire’s figure is set apart from the others; he is absorbed in his reading, apparently alone.

      When I arrived in Paris, my own experience of the life of an artist’s studio was limited to a memory of my grandmother’s paint-scented spare room, in her little postwar house in North Toronto, where she left her easel set up at the foot of the tidily made bed. Her diminutive canvases – ‘oils,’ as she called them – depicted the abandoned farmhouses and ruined barns and silos of Southern Ontario, in her tastefully muted palette of greyed-down greens and silvery taupes. Thus the colonial remnants of Kantian sublimity came to perch on an old lady’s easel in my grandmother’s spare room of a modest bungalow in suburban Toronto in 1971. I adored this room, its scent and mysterious equipment. I learned there that when I stood in front of paintings, I could feel an inner vibration. It entered flatly through the entire surface of my body if I let myself go blank. In my adolescent movements from my grandmother’s guest room to provincial art museums, I came to think of the mute mineral affinity that accompanied my blankness as a psychic life of pigment. In front of paintings, my body had autonomous gifts, useful only to my own inner experience. This pigment-sense didn’t have anything to do with representation or style, yet it was dependent on the proportions and specificities of mixture. I think my feeling for painting is a deferred material telepathy, an elemental magnetism.