Baudelaire’s Voyages: The Poet and His Painters at the Hecksher Museum, Huntington, N.Y.
August 28 – November 14, 1993
This exhibition is at once fascinating and infuriating, informative and exasperating. Its premise: to chart the relationship between literature and visual art that lies at the core of Baudelaire’s work. So far, so good. That the celebrated poet and critic believed in profound “correspondence”—his word—between the arts, between sounds, words, movements, and images is readily documented. That he was an informed observer of the art of his day is clear to anyone who has read his criticism. Yet absorbing and illuminating as that criticism often is, Baudelaire frankly declared that he valued pictures chiefly for the associations they provoked in him; the curator of the ambitious exhibition at the Hecksher Museum shares that point of view.
The show is divided into four sections, or “voyages,” each, according to the copious text panels, “based on an important motif in Baudelaire’s poetry”: the depths, the city, the dream, the new. Each “voyage” pairs “selected poems with related sequences of visual works. In some cases the poem was directly inspired by the art, or the art by the poem; however, most of the pairings reveal correspondence, a word Baudelaire used to signify an almost mystical relationship among the arts.” That is, while some pictures are by artists whose work Baudelaire knew, or who based their work on his, many examples were chosen because they evoked “Baudelairean” associations in the curator.
It’s