Baudelaire and caricature

by Michele Hannoosh

"Baudelaire's essays on caricature offered the first sustained defense of the value of caricature as a serious art, worthy of study in its own right. This book argues for the crucial importance of the essays for his conception of modernity, so fundamental to the subsequent history of modernism. From the theory of the comic formulated in De l'essence du rire to his discussions of Daumier, Goya, Hogarth, Cruikshank, Bruegel, Grandville, Gavarni, Charlet, and many others, Baudelaire develops not only an aesthetic of caricature but also a caricatural aesthetic--dual and contradictory, grotesque, ironic, violent, farcical, fantastic, and fleeting--that defines an art of modern life." "In particular, Baudelaire's insistence on the dualism and ambiguity of laughter has radical implications for such emblems of modernity as the city and the flaneur who roams its streets.^ The modern city is the space of the comic, a kind of caricature, presenting the flaneur with an image of dualism, one's posi