Absent Presence: Reading Other Artists in Baudelaire's Critical Essays

This essay considers the absent presence of other artists in Baudelaire's art criticism. In his salons and reviews, other artists (Delacroix, Dante, Gautier, Guys, et alia) are frequently there and not there: invoked or evoked, but not named; or inversely, named but only to be elided, effaced or erased. Crossing multiple borders–between artistic genres, between present and past, between sensation and memory–Baudelaire presents a praxis of reading that emphasizes an intertextual process taking place in the tension between presence–what is on the canvas, the page, the musical stage–and absence–what isn't there but is supplied by the perceiving consciousness. These evocations and erasures of other artists present a model for understanding Baudelaire's aesthetics of artistic reception and the generation of meaning in painting, in music, and in poetry itself.