Thinking art at present: Baudelaire and the painter of modern life

Abstract

This article proposes to return to what constitutes one of Baudelaire’s probably major contributions to the thought of modern art: the promotion of a theory of the present, which is not without a reconfiguration of time - particularly in the reference to the past and tradition - or without a reflection on memory. The example of Constantin Guys, painter of the present, of the snapshot and the fugitive, led Baudelaire to re-evaluate the artist’s very status and to re-qualify the data of art. It takes part in the measure of the present’s dislocation force. But too aware of the risks of scattering and blindness that it entails, Baudelaire strives to distance and “cushion” the waves of shock (Benjamin) of the modern.