“The Notion of Contempt in the Art Criticism of Baudelaire and Mirbeau”

Abstract

The nineteenth century sees a new vision of the artist. Faced with a bourgeois and materialistic society, he stands as a cantor of a haughty and disinterested art. Such a gap between the artist and the public must produce tension and give rise on both sides to the feeling of incomprehension which often degenerates into contempt. Charles Baudelaire contributes a lot to this conception of art, where the notion of contempt often comes up: contempt for the bourgeois public, the gentrified artist, the narrow-minded art critic – but also, the scorn of the profanum uulgus directed against the artist. Three decades later, Octave Mirbeau uses this same notion to build his model of artist – public relations, a model very similar to that of Baudelaire. Our objective is therefore twofold: to analyze the concept of contempt for both artists, and to identify many affinities that exist at the thematic, stylistic and rhetorical level in their writings on art.