The Poetics of Black: Manet's Baudelairean "Masked Ball at the Opera"
By: Jennifer S. Pride
Contributors: Lauren S. Weingarden
Publisher: VDM Verlag
Published: May 20, 2009
Place of publication: Germany
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 148
ISBN-13: 9783639132717
Description: Édouard Manet's "Masked Ball at the Opera" (1873) shares formal and thematic relationships with Charles Baudelaire's poetry and art criticism. Although previous studies reveal visual sources for Manet's painting, here I reveal that Baudelaire's poetry was the textual paradigm for Manet's "Masked Ball." Women are studied alongside Baudelaire's poems and his essay "The Painter of Modern Life." Also examined are the ways in which Haussmannization presented new problems and opportunities for the artist-as-flâneur. Baudelaire's poem "The Crowds" corresponds to Manet's painting in that both use the mask as a means by which individuals assume a double-identity as they experience the spectacle of modernity. The painting and Baudelaire's "Danse Macabre" are analyzed as modernized versions of traditional danse macabre schema. Both works comprise oppositional pairs, such as life/death, that establish them as signifiers for the funeral of Parisian culture under Haussmannization. This book should be especially useful to the fields of art history, literature, feminist theory, visual and cultural studies, and anyone interested in the history and art of 19th-century Paris.
Notes: Jennifer S. Pride is the author of The Poetics of Black: Manet's Baudelairean "Masked Ball at the Opera" (2009, VDM Verlag). She studied Art History at Florida State University and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, specializing in 19th-century European art and architecture and Word and Image Studies. She is a regular contributing author to Kunstpedia.com and an is an adjunct professor at Florida State University and Barry University in Tallahassee, FL.
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