I was going to write something using a long-familiar epigram from nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-67): “sculpture is boring.” When I looked up his Salon of 1846 where he wrote that, I found that Baudelaire dismissed sculpture because it was “primitive” (in a negative sense). For him, only painting incarnated what I call white sight. This gave me pause and instead of writing what I had intended I went down this rabbit-hole: must we, as Simone de Beauvoir might have had it, burn Baudelaire?
Baudelaire and Racialized Looking
Let’s look at what Baudelaire said:
The origin of sculpture is lost in the night of time (la nuit des temps); It is therefore an art of the Caribs. In effect we see all peoples most adroitly carve fetishes (fétiches) long before tackling painting, which is an art of profound reasoning and whose mere enjoyment (jouissance) demands a particular initiation.
For Baudelaire, the problem with sculpture is that it can be seen in many ways. On the other hand, “painting has only one point of view; it is exclusive and despotic” (La peinture n’a qu’un point de vue; elle est exclusive et despotique).” It is this technology of directing and dominating sight that makes white sight. In this perspective, the long hegemony of painting in the Western art world—which arguably still continues—is that of white sight over its alleged primitive others in terms of medium.
So what’s going on here? What’s the connection with the indigenous Kalinago, known to the French as Caribs? Why did Baudelaire use sculpture to make a hierarchical, racialized break in “rational” sight? How can we replace hierarchy with relation, even and especially among imperfect people?
Baudelaire and the Caribs
I found that in 2021 the writer James Hall had used Baudelaire’s racist paradigm to discuss the monument movement in, of all places, the Times Literary Supplement, a Murdoch paper. Unfortunately, he did not appear to realize that the Caribs are not, as he translates it, the “Caribbeans” but the French name for the indigenous Kalinago. The European misnomer began with Columbus. It does give us the English Caribbean but there were no “Caribbeans.” A letter-writer pointed out that the reference was to Indigenous people but acquitted Baudelaire of racism because Diderot had used the name as well.
The Kalinago were known to French settlers as “Caribs” from their first efforts to settle and colonize islands that they called Martinique and Guadeloupe.
Map of Martinique (1667)
By 1667, Martinique was divided between the French and the Kalinago. The Kalinago were famed for their dedication to freedom. The missionary Père Labat noted that they “prefer to die of hunger than live as a slave.” In their “wild” zone, as indicated on the map (above the highlight) the mapmaker noted where “the Caribs have their assemblies.” Wild democracy both preceded colonial order and prefigures the end of coloniality.
The Kalingo’s resistance tactic was “strike and sail,” meaning they abandoned one place and sailed to another, the seaborne form of being ungovernable. By the time they signed a treaty to strike Martinique for Dominica and St. Vincent in 1660, the Kalinago had already been on a 150-year strike against slavery. They were reported to have made silverware and their canoes were legendary. But no oil paintings.
Baudelaire and Carlyle
Baudelaire used the “Caribs” to a break in seeing between the “night” of the “fetish” and the “profound reasoning” of white sight in painting. In his later work on the dandy, Baudelaire referenced Thomas Carlyle. Was he evoking Carlyle’s 1841 On Heroes and Hero-Worship in his 1846 Salon, where he would, after all, famously celebrate the “heroism of modern life”?
As I’ve often pointed out, Carlyle’s visuality was an exclusive category, available only to certain (white) people, his Heroes, who could see history as it was happening. It was an imagined top-down viewpoint of racialized surveillance, expressed in its full vulgarity in his nasty 1849 pamphlet On the Negro Question.
Baudelaire acknowledged that Michelangelo and a few others were artists but reiterated that all sculptors as such were “Caribs.” It’s a less repugnant form of racialized hierarchy than Carlyle’s but it is one nonetheless. Remember that at the time Baudelaire was writing, slavery continued in the surviving French Caribbean colonies.
Jeanne Duval
Edouard Manet, Jeanne Duval (1861).
There was, of course, no slavery in Haiti by then, whose 1791 revolution had driven it out. In his response to the TLS letter, Hall claimed that Baudelaire was using the term “Carib” in relation to his Haitian partner, the actor Jeanne Duval. It’s pure projection on his part, as has happened so often to Duval, about whom little is now known except via Baudelaire.
Manet painted her late in her life, using his “Spanish” style. He would later paint the artist Berthe Morisot in similar fashion in The Balcony. There’s no hint of the “primitive” here. Duval is calm and frank in her look out of the picture space—profoundly rational one might say. Her fan, pose and dark hair recall Goya more than lurid contemporaneous depictions of Haiti as a wilderness.
The artist Lorraine O’Grady has also imagined Baudelaire learning from Duval over the course of their twenty-year relationship. For O’Grady, this partnership expressed “the meeting of modernism’s challenges” from colonialism to industrialization and urbanization. Expressing her love for Baudelaire, O’Grady argues
In spite of its name, the binary always contains a hidden third term. It’s the thing that has been passed through, the thing that has been experienced or received.
I call that “thing” visible relation.
Lorraine O’Grady, Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good (1999).
To Place in Relation
Drawing from O’Grady, perhaps Baudelaire and Duval can be seen as a certain paradigm of relation as Martinican Edouard Glissant has defined it: “the conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures…in confrontation.” Perhaps that relation was more effective and worthwhile than the heroic hierarchy of vision described in Baudelaire’s writing.
In 1952, Simone de Beauvoir followed her signature text The Second Sex with a long essay called “Must We Burn Sade?” The title was all it said about burning. It referred to an article published during the war by the Resistance magazine Combat. Under the title “Must We Burn Sartre?” the journal refuted criticism of de Beauvoir’s partner. That is to say, it is a question expecting the answer “no.”
At the end of her long essay, de Beauvoir sketched her own theory of relation:
If we can ever hope to surmount the separation of individuals, it is on the condition of not underestimating it; otherwise, the promises of happiness and justice will entail the most serious threats… What constitutes the supreme value of [Sade’s] testimony is that it disturbs us. He obliges us to call into question once again the essential problem which, under many faces, haunts these times: the true relationship of man to man [sic].
The editor of the English translation sees this call as analogous to W.E.B. Du Bois’s famous declaration that the “problem of the twentieth-century is the problem of the color line.”
I don’t think there’s a single “true” form of visible relation. If I agree with Baudelaire (for entirely different reasons) that monumental statues are not visible relation, nor is most painting. Visuality is top-down hierarchy from the overseer to the drone. Visible relation has to be worked out on the ground, by careful groundwork, day-to-day, as a ceremony. Act accordingly .