Recommendations
Books Like Curiosités esthétiques
Best books to read after Curiosités esthétiques by Baudelaire
Baudelaire's art criticism collection (posthumous 1868) — the Salon essays, 'Le Peintre de la vie moderne' defining modernity as the transitory, and essays on Delacroix and Guys. If this brilliant, influential art criticism fascinated you, these books explore similar territory.
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Buy on AmazonL'Art romantique
by Charles Baudelaire
The companion literary criticism collection — the same aesthetic theory applied to literature rather than painting; reading the two together gives the complete Baudelairean aesthetic theory.
- 2Buy on Amazon
Les Fleurs du mal
by Charles Baudelaire
The poetic practice that corresponds to the aesthetic theory of the Salon essays — reading the theory in Curiosités esthétiques makes the practice of Les Fleurs du mal more fully legible.
- 3
Buy on AmazonLes Paradis artificiels
by Charles Baudelaire
The other theoretical companion — the same tension between the ideal and the contingent that the art criticism develops in aesthetic terms is developed in philosophical terms in Les Paradis artificiels.
- 4Buy on Amazon
Salon de 1846
by Charles Baudelaire
The individual essay that is the theoretical center of Curiosités esthétiques — Baudelaire's fullest development of the argument about Romantic art and its relationship to color, passion, and modernity; the place to start.
- 5Buy on Amazon
Sur la peinture
by John Ruskin
Ruskin's great art criticism — the English contemporary whose theoretical ambition most closely matches Baudelaire's; where Baudelaire champions Delacroix and colorism, Ruskin champions Turner and Pre-Raphaelitism, from comparable theoretical foundations.
- 6Buy on Amazon
La Renaissance
by Walter Pater
Pater's great aesthetic criticism — the English translation of the Baudelairean tradition into the Decadent mode; 'All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music' is the English version of Baudelaire's theory of the correspondence between the arts.
- 7
Buy on AmazonA rebours
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
The novel that most fully develops the aesthetic theory of Curiosités esthétiques into fictional practice — des Esseintes's aesthetic program is the direct descendent of Baudelaire's theory, pushed to its logical extreme.
- 8
Buy on AmazonÉcrits sur l'art
by Émile Zola
Zola's art criticism — the great contemporary counterpoint to Baudelaire, championing Manet and naturalism rather than Delacroix and Romanticism; reading Zola's criticism alongside Baudelaire's shows the full range of the nineteenth-century debate about painting.
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