Description, not Painting

In the foreword "À Arsène Houssaye" of Baudelaire's Petits Poème en Prose: Le Spleen de Paris, he says that the idea came to him to "apply to the description of modern life, or rather to a life that is modern and more abstract, the procedure that [Bertrand] had applied to the painting of an ancient life, so strangely pictorial". Aloysius Bertrand's posthumously published book of prose poems, Gaspard de la Nuit, Fantaisies dans la manière de Rembrandt et Callot, is considered by many poets to be the father of the genre–disputes about whether it is a genre to be here ignored.

Why is modern life to be described in words, whereas the life that once was permitted painting with words? Baudelaire wanted illustrations to his work, which makes this statement even more intriguing because he is clearly distinguishing himself from Bertrand, his short descriptions to Bertrand's small pictures, his life to a past lifestyle. Something about this ancient life allowed picture making that is no longer there. Perhaps it is the abstractions?

Baudelaire claims this modern life is more abstract but he does not make clear what the comparison is based upon. The abstraction of modern life seems particularly odd given his emphasis on the modern. Modern is the current and only if we are at a remove can we abstract, that is generalize by presenting an overview. On the other hand, to abstract is also to condense to the essence of the thing. But an abstract is a condensation of something that has happened, simply because we can not reduce the immediate. So if we believe that Baudelaire is going to present a life that is more abstract than we have to believe that it is a life that is always a second behind the current. That indeed would be the very issue of the modern, that is always reviewing what is happening from a self-conscious distance that uses the present to think about the moment happening rather than engaging in it, a self-conscious review of the steps and techniques that permitted the moment or work to occur.

So how do descriptions permit this place where abstractions describe without representing in any figurative space? If it is answered in the poems, it is not done clearly–of course how could it be clear composed in a genre, poème en prose, without distinct boundaries or definition. That is another issue of the modern: a multiplicity of viewpoints, explanations, relations that alter the perception of some objective thing.

The objective thing is not there anymore, so there is nothing to paint in words. At best, we can provide a list, a vertical axis of description, and climbing ever higher build a tower of Babel but one that has no hope of reaching an end. Perhaps only because of painting's just beginning to venture into impressionism did Baudelaire not conceive that painting could be equally abstract, as proven sometimes painfully over the course of the 20th century...or how painting would incorporate words and flip the comparison...but that conversation waits for another day.