Praeterita

This week's recommended book is 'Poets on Painters', edited by J. D. McClatchy (University of California Press, 1990). A friend gave this to me a few months ago (or at least I think it was a gift!). Several of the entries at the start of the book are familiar essays from the early twentieth century, written by poets in defence of the new art movements of the time. Examples: Ezra Pound on Vorticism, Gertrude Stein's essay 'Pictures', which is from a series of lectures given as part of a lecture tour of the USA in 1931, part-sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art. But the value of the book lies in the fact that it gathers up a lot of shorter, occasional pieces that don't often get reprinted. They are mainly by American poets - Stevens, cummings, Rexroth, Creeley, Ashbery - but they are full of interesting thoughts on art, which remain interesting even if I don't agree with them. For example, in Against Abstract Expressionism, Randall Jarrell writes: ...

(l-r) Charles Baudelaire, Edouard Manet One of the most significant friendships between an artist and a writer was that between the painter Edouard Manet and the poet Charles Baudelaire in the 1850s-1860s. It was a friendship that didn’t only influence their respective views on art and its relation to society: some historians say it influenced the development of modernism as it emerged over the next forty years from the artistic movements of the late nineteenth century. Baudelaire and Manet met in 1858 at a restaurant in Paris which hosted regular lunches attended by artists, journalists, poets, and hangers on. After that, they saw each other almost daily until Baudelaire went to live in Belgium in 1864. Baudelaire was already known as a writer on art, and as the poet who had published ‘Les Fleurs du Mal ’ in 1857 – vilified at the time, just like many of Manet’s great paintings, but acknowledged by twentieth century poets such as T. S. Eliot as a significant milestone in nineteenth...