#Carolus Baudelaire

[mercuriicultores]

Charles Baudelaire – Les petits poèmes en prose, XXXIII. Enivrez-vous

Il faut être toujours ivre, tout est là; c'est l'unique question. Pour ne pas sentir l'horrible fardeau du temps qui brise vos épaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous enivrer sans trêve.

Mais de quoi? De vin, de poésie, ou de vertu à votre guise, mais enivrez-vous!

Et si quelquefois, sur les marches d'un palais, sur l'herbe verte d'un fossé, vous vous réveillez, l'ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue, demandez au vent, à la vague, à l'étoile, à l'oiseau, à l'horloge; à tout ce qui fuit, à tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce qui roule, à tout ce qui chante, à tout ce qui parle, demandez quelle heure il est. Et le vent, la vague, l'étoile, l'oiseau, l'horloge, vous répondront, il est l'heure de s'enivrer ; pour ne pas être les esclaves martyrisés du temps, enivrez-vous, enivrez-vous sans cesse de vin, de poésie, de vertu, à votre guise.

[HIS] Tienes que estar siempre borracho, todo está ahí; esa es la única pregunta. Para no sentir la horrible carga del tiempo que te rompe los hombros y te dobla contra la tierra, tienes que emborracharte sin parar. ¿Pero de qué? De vino, de poesía o de virtud, a su gusto, ¡pero emborráchate! Y si alguna vez, en la escalinata de un palacio, sobre la hierba verde de un foso, te despiertas, la embriaguez ya disminuida o pasada, pregúntale al viento, a la ola, a la estrella, al pájaro, al reloj; a todo lo que gotea, a todo lo que gime, a todo lo que rueda, a todo lo que canta, a todo lo que habla, pregúntale qué hora es. Y el viento, la ola, la estrella, el pájaro, el reloj, te responderá: "es la hora de emborracharse"; para no ser los esclavos mártires del tiempo, embriagaos, embriagaos sin cesar de vino, de poesía, de virtud, como queráis.

[beyondeastlane-blog]

East Lane: “Portrait of Madame X” 1884, John Singer Sargeant

When John Singer Sargent unveiled his portrait of a woman in black, Paris society was scandalized. But Manet had already painted a nude prostitute. So why all the fuss? (By Jonathan Jones).

Clothes are embarrassingly important in the history of art. If you think of painting in a high-minded way, it's annoying to have to admit how many masterpieces depend at least as much on puffy sleeves, wigs and jewelery as on the painter's genius. An El Greco portrait is as much ruff collar as man. A Venetian nude wouldn't be a Venetian nude if she were robbed of her pearl necklace.

I started to think about this while looking at the American artist John Singer Sargent's portrait of Madame Gautreau, better known as Madame X (or even, as first exhibited, Madame XXX), trying to understand why it caused such a riotous scandal in Paris in 1884.

Sargent's painting is a monument of American art. Today it is owned by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which is loaning it to the National Gallery's exhibition Americans in Paris 1860-1900. It is a notorious work. Like the row stirred up in London by Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold, this painting won a place among the incendiary legends of the avant garde, long, long before America (as a French book complains) stole the Idea of Modern Art. To this day Madame X inspires novels - Gioia Diliberto's I Am Madame X - and provocative theories, such as a recent claim that Madame Gautreau's profile is actually based on that of a beautiful young man.

Whistler had merely offended the Victorians. Sargent shocked the French. Madame X scandalised Paris, the city that had seen it all. Displayed in the huge jury-selected exhibition, the Salon, in 1884, it horrified Parisians so much that the ignominy drove Sargent across the Channel to take refuge in Britain. Of course, it was the making of him. He always kept Madame X in his studio. Its whiff of naughtiness generated demand for his portraits with a fashionable British and American public.

That's the official story. It's a cliche to look back at a work of art that once shocked people and is now part of the pantheon - say, Monet's Impression: Sunrise (1874) - and be delighted by the reversals of taste. But with Madame X there's more to say. Looking at her, I find it genuinely hard to see what the fuss was about. Sargent is a great, strange artist, and Madame X a delicious painting. But shocking?

Then it struck me. We like to think of the great avant-garde moments as epochal historic crises, but in this case it wasn't anything about the style, or the flash of naked shoulders, that upset a public used to "modern nudes". It wasn't the morbid paleness of the New Orleans-born high society personage Madame Pierre Gautreau, born Judith Avegno, or her abstracted surroundings, or even the impressionistic way in which Sargent, a friend of Monet, rejects the crispness of academic naturalism. No, it was the dress that caused distress.

You only have to examine the history of scandal in 19th-century French art to see there's something fishy about the myth of Madame X. Twenty years earlier, in 1865, Edouard Manet exhibited an altogether more serious breach of decorum. Manet's Olympia (painted in 1863) depicts a woman contemporaries assumed was a prostitute, naked except for slippers, bracelet, pink decoration in her hair and a bootlace around her neck instead of the pearl necklaces in the Venetian paintings Manet travesties. A black servant brings flowers from an admirer. Olympia looks at us coolly, as the painting does, speaking bluntly of city life.

"A sort of female gorilla," said one horrified reviewer. Olympia is, to this day, the recognisable ancestor of every modernist hand-grenade of sexuality from Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon to Duchamp's Large Glass. You can't say the same of Madame X. Painted long after the debacle of Olympia, it seems bizarre that it got Sargent in trouble. Things become clearer when you place his painting in context.

Madame X did not cause a row at just any exhibition but at the Salon, the prestigious, officially selected exhibition that had been the centre of artistic life in Paris since the 17th century. In his 1885 picture A Painting Jury - itself typical of the glossy "academic" style endorsed by the Academy of Fine Arts via the Salon - Henri Gervex shows the Beaux Arts professors and artists on the jury voting on which ornately framed canvases to include in this event that made and broke careers. Olympia got into the Salon and outraged the vast middle-class audience - who would probably only see this one contemporary art event.

Already, in 1863, the emperor Louis Napoleon had responded to artists' dissatisfaction with a one-off Salon des Réfusés. A Salon painting had to conform to genres: history, landscape, portrait. The Salon, avant-garde artists complained, exercised a stranglehold on art. The criticism it inspired - a type of essay itself called a "Salon" - became, in the hands of a critic such as Baudelaire, an enraged catalogue of mediocrities.

By 1884 modern artists scorned the Salon. The impressionists led the way, exhibiting in independent group shows from 1874. Art dealers took up their idea. Still, the huge, crowded spectacle that was the Salon had its appeal.

Madame X is a Salon portrait, and that's the point. Compare it with other portraits that triumphed here, and its subversion strikes you. Tall, beautiful women in Parisian finery were one of the year-in, year-out crowd-pleasing Salon genres. They celebrated Paris fashion and Parisian beauty. Claude Monet showed a classic example, Camille, or the Lady in a Green Dress, at the Salon in 1866; it was a hit. Another was Lady with a Glove, painted in 1869 by Sargent's teacher Carolus-Duran.

Clothes make the woman in these portraits. They are fashion plates on a grand scale, reflecting the Salon crowd as it wanted to see itself - in fashion. Compare Madame X and it's obvious how Sargent transgressed.

Here is the true look of high fashion in high society, reveals Sargent, and it is not a prettily coquettish look the French middle class might ape: it is aristocratically anti-bourgeois. Madame Gautreau wears a black dress that is almost strapless except for two slender gold threads; money and sex are both flaunted by a fashion utterly incompatible with bourgeois life. Manet shocked with low life. Sargent shocks with the secrets of high life.

It would be Proust who chronicled the decadence of high French society after Sargent legged it for Victorian England. But his great British society portraits have exactly the same flavour - even, or especially, when he's depicting men. Whether painting dandies, imperial administrators or - in a masterpiece now in the National Portrait Gallery - the politician Arthur James Balfour, Sargent's fascination with the dress and style of the best people created some of the most haunting portraits of the modern world.

Balfour leans against a mantlepiece in a spectacularly long jacket that makes him slender as a willow, his snaking, sensitive fingers those of a sensualist genius. Sargent found a brilliant secret in Madame X that he shared with the plutocratic Edwardian elite: money is sexy. It was an insight that would return to American art in the age of Andy Warhol.

[mallahanmoxie]

was tagged by the lovely @hauntedthief​and i have like tons of fake free time so thanks love!

Rules: answer the questions and tag 20 blogs you want to get to know better

Nicknames: as my mother did not, in fact, name me simba, that’s one to consider and my fave. any variant of sofia works, sofi sof, chofis, sofita, sopita, also idk why but a friend used to call me little lettuce (lechugita)

Star sign: aries

Height: not as tall as the men in my life, a constant source of bitterness (like 5′3 or something)

Time right now: 09:46 p.m.

Last thing you googled: star sign bc i wanted to check if it was the general zodiac one or if it was a variant like moon sun ascendant etc since i only know the one

Favourite music artist: Birdy is my all time fave

Song stuck in my head: this morning i couldn’t stop singing red velvet’s rookie AND ALSO SUHO’S CURTAIN STREAM HERE

Last movie i watched: MOONLIGHT ON THEATERS NOW GO WATCH IT

Last tv show i watched: Hwarang, most likely

What i’m wearing right now: oh boy. pink slippers, my white and green pijamas, a harry potter t shirt and a big ass red sweater that i stole from my grandpa #sleepingfashion

When i created this blog: 2011? yeah

The kind of stuff i post: 40% stupid text posts that are mostly liveblogs, 20% kpop, 20% assorted fandom stuff, 10% socially aware posts, 10% lamenting text posts with a touch of humour

Do i get asks regularly: not really, my followers insist on silence and i respect that

Why did i chose my url: because of my fave 13 year old reporter from an abandoned seaside town

Gender: cardboard but i wouldn’t know from where (probably like, pizza box)

Hogwarts house: slytherin, overall (huff primary, slytherin secondary)

Pokemon team: never played it

Favourite colour: red, most of my clothes are around that colour

Average hours of sleep: 4? 5? depends on the day and how much of an idiot im being

Lucky number: 3, 7, 15 (my birthday, a Wholesome number, my bffs birthday)

favourite characters: boy. all the pevensies, but especially peter and lucy. the baudelaires. lemony snicket. both beatrices. moxie mallahan. kang chul. kim bok joo, jung joon hyung, wooju (!!!), carolus from crusade in jeans, cat velis, eric bittle, jack zimmermann, kent parson, actually all of check please! etc etc etc

Number of blankets i sleep with: rn two bc it’s cold but usually one

Following: 584

To continue this, I tag: anyone that wants to do this? @belleillumina @valiantofmind save me