THE BAULDELAIRE ITINERARIES EXHIBITION

Andreas Grimm Munich
May 4 - June 16, 2007




01. Portrait of Baudelaire




02. Installation view – gallery northeast




03. Itinerary Based on Baudelaire’s Review of the Salon of 1846, p. 89




04. Art in Paris




05. Installation view – gallery northwest




06. Don’t Play the Heartless One




07. Itinerary Based on Baudelaire’s Review of the Salon of 1846, p. 69




DESCRIPTION

I have created travel itineraries to see works of art referenced in the footnotes of Charles Baudelaire’s review of the Salon of 1846.* The minimal installation consists of both text-based works on canvas and photographs which are all unique pieces. The highly aestheticized “paintings” are paired with the photographs of the source material. The series explores how art is experienced and how our understanding of the world is always filtered though the history of representation.
Each work is based on a single page taken from the Baudelaire Review. Based on rigorous research, the spare formal aspects of the framed canvases exist in contrast to their rich and complex content. Focusing on the pivotal year 1846, just two years before revolution brought Louis Napoleon to power and marked the start of the events leading to the second empire in France, the series focuses on the end of the Romantic movement and the beginnings of Decadence which Baudelaire, as a dandy and Symbolist poet, was a leading figure.
For example, Itinerary Based on Baudelaire’s Review of the Salon of 1846, p. 89, proposes a trip to fly from New York to London to see one work of art at the Wallace Collection by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and read two books: an E.T.A. Hoffman short story about a talking dog, and a novel by Madame de Stäel titled "Corinne or Italy."

* All works are derived from Jonathan Mayne’s Art in Paris 1845-1862, Salons and other Exhibitions, Reviewed by Charles Baudelaire, published 1965 by Phaidon Press Limited. The footnotes are a combination of Baudelaire’s and Jonathan Mayne’s.