Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic and translator. His poems exhibit mastery of rhyme and rhythm, contain an exoticism inherited from Romantics, and are based on observations of real life.
A dandy is a man who places particular importance upon physical appearance and personal grooming, refined language and leisurely hobbies; every activity pursued with apparent nonchalance. A dandy could be a self-made man in person and persona, who imitated an aristocratic style of life, despite his middle-class origin, birth, and background, especially in the Britain of the late-18th and early-19th centuries.
Panoramic paintings are massive artworks that reveal a wide, all-encompassing view of a particular subject, often a landscape, military battle, or historical event. They became especially popular in the 19th century in Europe and the United States, inciting opposition from some writers of Romantic poetry. A few have survived into the 21st century and are on public display. Typically shown in rotundas for viewing, panoramas were meant to be so lifelike they confused the spectator between what was real and what was image.
In the arts and in literature, the term avant-garde identifies a genre of art, an experimental work of art, and the experimental artist who created the work of art, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus how the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times.
Sir Peter Courtney Quennell was an English biographer, literary historian, editor, essayist, poet, and critic. He wrote extensively on social history.
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist.
An arcade is a succession of contiguous arches, with each arch supported by a colonnade of columns or piers. Exterior arcades are designed to provide a sheltered walkway for pedestrians. The walkway may be lined with retail stores. An arcade may feature arches on both sides of the walkway. Alternatively, a blind arcade superimposes arcading against a solid wall. Blind arcades are a feature of Romanesque architecture that influenced Gothic architecture. In the Gothic architectural tradition, the arcade can be located in the interior, in the lowest part of the wall of the nave, supporting the triforium and the clerestory in a cathedral, or on the exterior, in which they are usually part of the walkways that surround the courtyard and cloisters.
François Marie Charles Fourier was a French philosopher, an influential early socialist thinker and one of the founders of utopian socialism. Some of Fourier's social and moral views, held to be radical in his lifetime, have become mainstream thinking in modern society. For instance, Fourier is credited with having originated the word feminism in 1837.
Jean Ignace Isidore Gerard was a 19th century French illustrator and caricaturist who published under the pseudonym of Grandville. He has been called "the first star of French caricature's great age", and Grandville’s book illustrations described as featuring "elements of the symbolic, dreamlike, and incongruous, and they retain a sense of social commentary." "His perverse vision sought the monster in everyone and took delight in the strangest and most pernicious transfigurement of the human shape ever produced by the Romantic imagination." The anthropomorphic vegetables and zoomorphic figures that populated his cartoons anticipated and influenced the work of generations of cartoonists and illustrators from John Tenniel, to Gustave Doré, to Félicien Rops, and Walt Disney. He has also been called a "proto-surrealist" and was greatly admired by André Breton and others in the movement.
Phantasmagoria was a form of horror theatre that used one or more magic lanterns to project frightening images, such as skeletons, demons, and ghosts, onto walls, smoke, or semi-transparent screens, typically using rear projection to keep the lantern out of sight. Mobile or portable projectors were used, allowing the projected image to move and change size on the screen, and multiple projecting devices allowed for quick switching of different images. In many shows, the use of spooky decoration, total darkness, (auto-)suggestive verbal presentation, and sound effects were also key elements. Some shows added a variety of sensory stimulation, including smells and electric shocks. Such elements as required fasting, fatigue, and drugs have been mentioned as methods of making sure spectators would be more convinced of what they saw. The shows started under the guise of actual séances in Germany in the late 18th century and gained popularity through most of Europe throughout the 19th century.
19th-century French art was made in France or by French citizens during the following political regimes: Napoleon Bonaparte's Consulate (1799–1804) and Empire (1804–1814), the Restoration under Louis XVIII and Charles X (1814–1830), the July Monarchy under Louis Philippe d'Orléans (1830–1848), the Second Republic (1848–1852), the Second Empire under Napoleon III (1852–1871), and the first decades of the Third Republic (1871–1940).
Flâneur is a French noun referring to a person, literally meaning "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", or "loafer", but with some nuanced additional meanings. Flânerie is the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations. A near-synonym of the noun is boulevardier. Traditionally depicted as male, a flâneur is an ambivalent figure of urban affluence and modernity, representing the ability to wander detached from society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of industrialized, contemporary life.
The Painter's Studio: A real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life is an 1855 oil on canvas painting by Gustave Courbet. It is located in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, France.
Passagenwerk or Arcades Project was an unfinished project of German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, written between 1927 and 1940. An enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, it was especially concerned with Paris' iron-and-glass covered "arcades".
"The Man of the Crowd" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe about a nameless narrator following a man through a crowded London. It was first published in 1840.
The Gran Hotel Manzana Kempinski La Habana is a luxury hotel in Havana, Cuba. It is located in the historic Manzana de Gómez building, an early-20th-century building that was Cuba's first shopping mall. The Kempinski Hotel chain, belongs to the oldest hotel groups in Europe, Kempinski Aktiengesellschaft.
Franz Hessel was a German writer and translator. With Walter Benjamin, he produced a German translation of three volumes of Marcel Proust's 1913-1927 work À la recherche du temps perdu in the late 1920s.
The badaud is an important urban type from 18th and 19th-century French literature, one that has been adapted to explain aspects of mass culture and modern experience.
"The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" is one of a diptych of completed essays that was composed during the preparatory outlining and drafting phase of Walter Benjamin's uncompleted composition of the Arcades Project. "Paris, Capital of 19th Century" is its sister essay. The major themes of The Arcades Project—the construction of the Parisian arcades in the early 19th century, their blossoming as a habitat for the flâneur, their demolition during Haussmanization—appear as leitmotifs in both essays.
One Way Street is an anthology of brief meditations by Walter Benjamin collected and published as a book in 1928. The reflections composing its cycle were mostly written coterminously with the drafting phase of his doctoral thesis The Origin of German Tragic Drama, during his personally transformative though ultimately failed romance with Asja Lācis. Many of the pieces that were published individually prior to their appearance as a collection first ran as feuilleton in newspapers—a critical, artistic, sometimes purely humorous or bizarre space-filling feature of newspaper formats in Europe at the time.
