Baudelaire, Manet and the Visual Object

ABSTRACT This article begins by providing a contextual account of the different ways in which contemporaries of Baudelaire and Manet subscribed to a widespread, though not universal, assumption that the two shared common artistic aims. The article then seeks to establish aesthetic parallels between Manet’s La Musique aux Tuileries (1862) and Baudelaire’s ‘Le Thyrse’ (1863). Sidestepping the vexed question of the extent to which Manet may be seen as an embodiment of Baudelaire’s peintre de la vie moderne, the analysis focuses on the heterodox function of the visual object in triggering a self-reflexive representation of an act of seeing.