The Poetics of Black

Édouard Manet's Masked Ball at the Opera (1873)shares formal and thematic relationships with CharlesBaudelaire's poetry and art criticism. Althoughprevious studies reveal visual sources for Manet'spainting here we reveal that Baudelaire's poetrywas the textual paradigm for Manet's Masked Ball.Women are studied alongside Baudelaire's poems andhis essay The Painter of Modern Life. Also examinedare the ways in which Haussmannization presented newproblems and opportunities for the artist-as-flâneur.Baudelaire's poem The Crowds corresponds to Manet'spainting in that both use the mask as a means bywhich individuals assume a double-identity as theyexperience the spectacle of modernity. The paintingand Baudelaire's Danse Macabre are analyzed asmodernized versions of traditional danse macabreschema. Both works comprise oppositional pairs suchas life/death that establish them as signifiers forthe funeral of Parisian culture underHaussmannization. This book should be especiallyuseful to the fields of art history literaturefeminist theory visual and cultural studies andanyone interested in the history and art of19th-century Paris.