"Curiosity has become a fatal, irresistible passion!"

- Charles Baudelaire, writing in favour of "Monsieur C.G" (Constantin Guys, 1802-92)

Source: Baudelaire, Charles. 1859. Originally printed in essay "Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne". Le Figaro, Paris, 26 & 28 November and 3 December 1863. Translation by Jonathan Mayne (ed). 1964. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. In Chapter: III - The Artist, Man of the World, Man of the Crowd, and Child. London: Phaidon Press. p.7. Available online from http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/dossier_4/Baudelaire.pdf [Downloaded 2010-05-26].

"The mainspring of his genius is curiosity"

- Charles Baudelaire, writing in favour of "Monsieur C.G" (Constantin Guys, 1802-92)

Source: Baudelaire, Charles. 1859. Originally printed in essay "Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne". Le Figaro, Paris, 26 & 28 November and 3 December 1863. Translation by Jonathan Mayne (ed). 1964. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. In Chapter: III - The Artist, Man of the World, Man of the Crowd, and Child. London: Phaidon Press. p.7. Available online from http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/dossier_4/Baudelaire.pdf [Downloaded 2010-05-26].

"It was not precisely as an artist, but rather with a man of the world with whom I had to do. I ask you to understand the word artist in a very restricted sense, a man of the world in a very broad one. By the second i mean a man of the whole world, a man who understands the world and the mysterious and lawful reasons for all its uses; by the first, a specialist, a man wedded to his palette like the serf to the soil. Monsieur G. does not like to be called an artist. Is he not perhaps a little right? His interests is the whole world; he wants to know, understand and appreciate everything that happens on the surface of our globe. The artist lives very little, if at all, in the world of morals and politics. If he lives in the Bréda district, he will be unaware of what is going on in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. (...) the majority of artists are no more than highly skilled animals, pure artisans, village intellects, cottage brains. Their conversation, which is necessarily limited to the narrowest of circles, becomes very quickly unbearable to the man of the world, to the spiritual citizen of the universe."

- Charles Baudelaire, writing in favour of "Monsieur C.G" (Constantin Guys, 1802-92)

Source: Baudelaire, Charles. 1859. Originally printed in essay "Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne". Le Figaro, Paris, 26 & 28 November and 3 December 1863. Translation by Jonathan Mayne (ed). 1964. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. In Chapter: III - The Artist, Man of the World, Man of the Crowd, and Child. London: Phaidon Press. p.6-7. Available online from http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/dossier_4/Baudelaire.pdf [Downloaded 2010-05-26].

"Today I want to discourse to the public about a strange man, a man of so powerful and so decided an originality that it is sufficient unto itself and does not seek approval. Not a single one of his drawings is signed, if by signature you mean that string of easily forgeable characters which spell a name and which so many other artists affix ostentatiously at the foot of their least important trifles. Yet all his works are signed - with his dazzling soul (...) A passionate lover of crowds and incognitos, Monsieur C.G. carries originality to the point of shyness. (...) He drew like a barbarian, or a child, impatient at the clumsiness of his fingers and the disobedience of his pen."

- Charles Baudelaire, writing in favour of "Monsieur C.G" (Constantin Guys, 1802-92)

Source: Baudelaire, Charles. 1859. Originally printed in essay "Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne". Le Figaro, Paris, 26 & 28 November and 3 December 1863. Translation by Jonathan Mayne (ed). 1964. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. In Chapter: III - The Artist, Man of the World, Man of the Crowd, and Child. London: Phaidon Press. p.5-6. Available online from http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/dossier_4/Baudelaire.pdf [Downloaded 2010-05-26].

"Not a single one of his drawings is signed, if by signature you mean that string of easily forgeable characters which spell a name and which so many other artists affix ostentatiously at the foot of their least important trifles. Yet all his works are signed - with his dazzling soul"

- Charles Baudelaire, writing in favour of "Monsieur C.G" (Constantin Guys, 1802-92)

Source: Baudelaire, Charles. 1859. Originally printed in essay "Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne". Le Figaro, Paris, 26 & 28 November and 3 December 1863. Translation by Jonathan Mayne (ed). 1964. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. In Chapter: III - The Artist, Man of the World, Man of the Crowd, and Child. London: Phaidon Press. p.5. Available online from http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/dossier_4/Baudelaire.pdf [Downloaded 2010-05-26].

"This is in fact an excellent opportunity to establish a rational and historical theory of beauty, in contrast to the academic theory of an unique and absolute beauty; to show that beauty is always and inevitably of a double composition (...) Beauty is made up of an eternal, invariable element, whose quantity it is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be, if you like, whether severally or all at once, the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions. (...) The duality of art is a fatal consequence of the duality of man. Consider, if you will, the eternally subsisting portion as the soul of art, and the variable element as its body."

- Charles Baudelaire

Source: Baudelaire, Charles. 1859. Originally printed in essay "Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne". Le Figaro, Paris, 26 & 28 November and 3 December 1863. Translation by Jonathan Mayne (ed). 1964. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. In Chapter: Beauty, Fashion and Happiness. London: Phaidon Press. p.3. Available online from http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/dossier_4/Baudelaire.pdf [Downloaded 2010-05-26].

"Even in those centuries which seem to us the most monstrous and the maddest, the immortal thirst for beauty has always found its satisfaction"

- Charles Baudelaire

Source: Baudelaire, Charles. 1859. Originally printed in essay "Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne". Le Figaro, Paris, 26 & 28 November and 3 December 1863. Translation by Jonathan Mayne (ed). 1964. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. In Chapter: Beauty, Fashion and Happiness. London: Phaidon Press. p.3. Available online from http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/dossier_4/Baudelaire.pdf [Downloaded 2010-05-26].

"Thoughtless people - people who are grave without true gravity"

- Charles Baudelaire

Source: Baudelaire, Charles. 1859. Originally printed in essay "Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne". Le Figaro, Paris, 26 & 28 November and 3 December 1863. Translation by Jonathan Mayne (ed). 1964. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. In Chapter: Beauty, Fashion and Happiness. London: Phaidon Press. p.2. Available online from http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/dossier_4/Baudelaire.pdf [Downloaded 2010-05-26].

"These costumes, which seem laughable to many thoughtless people - people who are grave without true gravity - have a double-natured charm, one both artistic and historical (...) And then, if they are worn and given life by intelligent actors and actresses, we shall be astonished at ever having been able to mock them so stupidly. Without losing anything of its ghostly attraction, the past will recover the light and movement of life and will become present"

- Charles Baudelaire

Source: Baudelaire, Charles. 1859. Originally printed in essay "Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne". Le Figaro, Paris, 26 & 28 November and 3 December 1863. Translation by Jonathan Mayne (ed). 1964. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. In Chapter: Beauty, Fashion and Happiness. London: Phaidon Press. p.2. Available online from http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/dossier_4/Baudelaire.pdf [Downloaded 2010-05-26].

"The idea of beauty which man creates for himself imprints itself on his whole attire, crumples or stiffens his dress, rounds off or squares his gesture, and in the long run even ends by subtly penetrating the very features of his face. Man ends by looking like his ideal self. These engravings can be translated either into beauty or ugliness; in one direction, they become caricatures, in the other, antique statues."

- Charles Baudelaire

Source: Baudelaire, Charles. 1859. Originally printed in essay "Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne". Le Figaro, Paris, 26 & 28 November and 3 December 1863. Translation by Jonathan Mayne (ed). 1964. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. In Chapter: Beauty, Fashion and Happiness. London: Phaidon Press. p.2. Available online from http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/dossier_4/Baudelaire.pdf [Downloaded 2010-05-26].

"My concern today is with the painting of manners of the present. The past is interesting not only by reason of the beauty which could be distilled from it by those artists for whom it was the present, but also precisely because it is the past, for its historical value. It is the same with the present. The pleasure which we derive from the representation of the present is due not only to the beauty with which it can be invested, but also to its essential quality of being present"

- Charles Baudelaire

Source: Baudelaire, Charles. 1859. Originally printed in essay "Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne". Le Figaro, Paris, 26 & 28 November and 3 December 1863. Translation by Jonathan Mayne (ed). 1964. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. In Chapter: Beauty, Fashion and Happiness. London: Phaidon Press. p.1. Available online from http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/dossier_4/Baudelaire.pdf [Downloaded 2010-05-26].

"The world - and even the world of artists - is full of people who can go to the Louvre, walk rapidly, without so much as a glance, past rows of very interesting, though secondary, pictures, to come to a rapturous halt in front of a Titian or a Raphael - one of those that have been most popularized by the engraver's art; then they will go home happy, not a few saying to themselves, 'I know my Museum.' Just as there are people who, having once read Bossuet and Racine, fancy that they have mastered the history of literature.

Fortunately from time to time there comes forward righters of wrong, critics, amateurs, curious enquirers, to declare that Raphael, or Racine, does not contain the whole secret, and that the minor poets too have something good, solid and delightful to offer; and finally that however much we may love general beauty, as it is expressed by classical poets and artists, we are no less wrong to neglect particular beauty, the beauty of circumstance and the sketch of manners"

- Charles Baudelaire

Source: Baudelaire, Charles. 1859. Originally printed in essay "Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne". Le Figaro, Paris, 26 & 28 November and 3 December 1863. Translation by Jonathan Mayne (ed). 1964. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. In Chapter: Beauty, Fashion and Happiness. London: Phaidon Press. p.1. Available online from http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/dossier_4/Baudelaire.pdf [Downloaded 2010-05-26].

"As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life."

- Charles Baudelaire

Source: Quoted in BrainyQuote.com. Available from URL: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/charles_baudelaire.html [Downloaded 2010-02-03]

"Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust."

- Charles Baudelaire

Source: Quoted in BrainyQuote.com. Available from URL: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/charles_baudelaire.html [Downloaded 2010-02-03]

"Det å male et ansikt er således ikke noe man bør gjøre - hvis man nå har forstå meg rett - med det vulgære og tarvelige mål for øye å etterligne den naturlige skjønnhet og rivalisere med ungdommen. Man har for øvrig bemerket at hesligheten slett ikke blir forskjønnet gjennom kunstgrep; de kan bare tjene skjønnheten. Hvem ville våge å tilkjenne kunsten den åndsfattige funksjon å skulle etterlikne naturen? Sminkekunsten behøver ikke å skjule seg eller prøve å gjøre seg usynlig; den bør tvert imot stilles til skue, om ikke med skapaktighet så i hvert fall med en slags oppriktighet"

- Charles Baudelaire

Source: Baudelaire, Charles. Fra Kunsten og det moderne liv (1863). Translation to Norwegian by Arne Kjell Haugen. I Bale og Bø-Rygg. 2008, s. 167-172. Quoted in Bale, Kjersti. 2009. Estetikk: En Innføring. Oslo: Pax Forlag. s. 56.