The Painter of Modern Life, Before Symbolism Had a Name

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Charles Baudelaire died in 1867, nineteen years before the poet Jean Moreas published the manifesto in Le Figaro that gave Symbolism its name. He is nonetheless the movement's most consistently cited precursor, and his 1863 essay Le Peintre de la vie moderne, written about the illustrator Constantin Guys, is a large part of why. The essay defined modernity itself as a subject: the fleeting, the fugitive, the contingent, all the passing detail of a specific modern city street that an artist chasing timeless classical beauty alone would consider beneath serious attention. Baudelaire argued the opposite, that true art had to capture both halves at once, the eternal and the immediate, and that an artist who refused the modern, transient half was not painting a purer beauty but half a subject. Symbolist writers a generation later inherited this argument nearly whole and pushed it inward, from the modern street toward the private symbol, dream and suggestion as the truer register of experience than direct description. The Symbolist poets did not so much depart from Baudelaire as extend a method he had already demonstrated in Les Fleurs du Mal itself, where the ordinary material of Paris, its fog, its ragpickers, its Sunday funerals, sits beside the frankly mystical and the openly allegorical without the poem ever treating one register as more serious than the other.