MICROSTORY OF ART

MICROSTORY OF ART
ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM

Dedicated to Charles Baudelaire

(6.6.2022) The expression une heure bleue (blue hour) was not invented by French poet Charles Baudelaire, the congenially nervous forerunner of nervous modernism, modernity, modern times or modern whatsoever. I have always admired Baudelaire, if only from a certain distance, finding him a bit too extreme and too negative at times, but admired him for his fabulous poem Le Voyage as a student for example, being still able to recite a few passages, and still admiring the image of the angel ›lashing the suns‹ (by which Baudelaire is referring to the power of our desires to enkindle our curiosities and longing for a distant beauty, or for a distant interest, in case one is suffering from boredom).
No, Charles Baudelaire was not the inventor of the term ›blue hour‹, but I am glad being able to say that Baudelaire invented something else, even before the term ›blue hour‹ was coined (probably by Rimbaud in 1872), and something that not only fits him, Baudelaire, very well, but simply is also significantly characteristic for Baudelaire as a poet: Charles Baudelaire, namely, can be referred to as the inventor as the artificial blue hour. And how is that, and what is that?
In the age of Environmental Art it is perhaps trivial to say that natural phenomena such as dusk and dawn can be or become a part, when being artificially created or simulated, of a work of art, for example an environment. But this is not the invention of Environmental Art either. In 1942 a Balanchine/Stravinsky ballet production, the notoriously famous Ballet for the Elephants, encompassed artificially created blue light. But Baudelaire, who is generally very subtle, did something else, in his prose poem La Chambre double (published posthumously in 1869, in Le Spleen de Paris), in which he is speaking of quelque chose de crépusculaire, de bleuâtre et de rosâtre. What is Baudelaire doing in this text? He is giving a description of his apartment, as being seen through the eyes of someone who has consumed opium, which enables that someone to idealize everything. But then, and also, through the eyes of a person just having woken up (due to nerve-wracking realities coming in, disturbing the most beautiful dream vision, and turning the idealized reality into a misery again. This quelque chose de crépusculaire, de bleuâtre et de rosâtre, thus, is to be seen, by the reader, as being the (artificial) effect of the drug, helping the author to see the misery transformed into something beautiful and enjoyable (again an artificial, now literary transformation); and part of that transformation, an effect of it, or something being a necessary ingredience to help the transformation happening, is blueish dusk- or dawn-like twilight.
Actually Baudelaire has often described dusk, sunset, night, of course; and he tends to see dusk as something to be associated with textiles, a cloth or a curtain. Dissertations have been written on dusk in Baudelaire, highlighting, of course, also the chapter on colours from his 1846 critique of the salon.
But his artificial blue hour, and Baudelaire being the inventor of the artificial blue hour, is highlighted here for the very first time. The artificial blue hour as well as artificial blue light have a history. It goes back to Baudelaire. A most worthy genealogy, as it seems, but not only worthy but also characteristic for someone who was so obsessed of the artificial, urban, modern life. In his descriptions of the city at dusk the colours blue or gray are lacking. Baudelaire is focussing on the yellow, the red and the rose, and in the history of light these colours, of course, have something to do with artificial light, and the history artificial light had during the 19th century, above all in the modern city. And blueish light, thus, could be imagined also as something artificial, and it could be used as a tool. As a literary tool, as we see in Baudelaire. Or as a tool framing a ballet, or being part of a 21st century environment, but only much later.

(Picture: PRA; recently discovered selfportrait by Baudelaire)

MICROSTORY OF ART
ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM
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