Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet, essayist, translator and art critic. His poems are described as exhibiting mastery of rhyme and rhythm, containing an exoticism inherited from the Romantics, and are based on observations of real life.
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 literature, the term avant-garde identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, 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, the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times.
Les Fleurs du mal is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire.
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, Jewish mysticism, and neo-Kantianism, Benjamin made influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders, though the friendship between Arendt and Benjamin outlasted her marriage to Anders. Both Arendt and Anders were students of Martin Heidegger, whom Benjamin considered a nemesis.
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; they include many loggias, but here arches are not an essential element. An arcade may feature arches on both sides of the walkway. Alternatively, a blind arcade superimposes arcading against a solid wall.
François Marie Charles Fourier was a French philosopher, an influential early socialist thinker, and one of the founders of utopian socialism. Some of his views, held to be radical in his lifetime, have become mainstream in modern society. For instance, Fourier is credited with having originated the word feminism in 1837.
Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard was a prolific French illustrator and caricaturist who published under the pseudonym of Grandville, and numerous variations throughout his career. Art historians and critics have called him "the first star of French caricature's great age", and described his illustrations as featuring "elements of the symbolic, dreamlike, and incongruous" while retaining a sense of social commentary, and "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, alternatively fantasmagorie and/or fantasmagoria, 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's Consulate (1799–1804) and Empire (1804–14), the Restoration (1814–30), the July Monarchy (1830–48), the Second Republic (1848–52), the Second Empire (1852–71), and the first decades of the Third Republic (1871–1940).
Flâneur is a French term popularized in the 19th century for a type of urban male "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", or "loafer". The word has some nuanced additional meanings. Traditionally depicted as male, a flâneur is an ambivalent figure of urban affluence and modernity, representing the ability to wander detached from society, for an entertainment from the observation of the urban life. Flânerie is the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations. A near-synonym of the noun is boulevardier.
The Painter's Studio is an 1855 oil-on-canvas painting by Gustave Courbet. It is located in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, France.
Das Passagen-Werk or Arcades Project was an unfinished project of German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, written between 1927 and his death in 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 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.
Henry Langdon Childe (1781–1874) was an English showman, known as a developer of the magic lantern and dissolving views, a precursor of the dissolve in cinematic technique. While the priority question on the technical innovations Childe used is still debated, he established the use of double and triple lanterns for special theatrical effects, to the extent that the equipment involved became generally available through suppliers to other professionals. By the 1840s the "dissolving view", rooted in Gothic horror, had become a staple of illustrated talks with restrained animations.
A Lorette is a type of 19th-century French prostitute. They stood between the kept women (courtesans) and the grisettes. A grisette had other employment and worked part-time as a prostitute whereas a Lorette supported herself exclusively from prostitution. The lorette shared her favours among several lovers; the Lorette's "Arthurs", as they called them, were not financially able or too fickle to have exclusivity.
"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.
