Colleagues and students are warmly invited to join the School of Modern Languages and Cultures’ guest lecture

Prof. Michèle Hannoosh (University of Michigan)

"The beautiful is always bizarre": Baudelaire, Caricature and the Universal Exhibition of 1855 Baudelaire’s essay on the Universal Exhibition of 1855 contains one of the most important statements, and concepts, of his entire œuvre. “The beautiful is always bizarre” would go on to have a long and rich afterlife in his work as well as in the future of modern art. Yet the statement is just that, a pithy aphorism with little substance: the essay fails to explain what Baudelaire means or to give any examples, a lost opportunity that scholars have long lamented. In this talk, I will argue that, to understand Baudelaire’s idea, we must make a detour through another art on which he was meditating at the same time: the art of caricature. In his essays on caricature, Baudelaire develops, in both theory and practice, his concept of the bizarre which in turn informs his late work, notably the prose poems and his essay on the painting of modern life.

Followed by refreshments