Abstract
Édouard Manet's "Masked Ball at the Opera" of 1873 shares formal and thematic relationships with Charles Baudelaire's poetry and art criticism. Although previous scholars have suggested visual sources for Manet's paintings, I argue that Baudelaire's poetry was the textual paradigm for Manet's Masked Ball. My argument considers the roles of women, masks and the danse macabre in these works as analogous in both form and content. The women in the Masked Ball parallel those in Baudelaire's poetry, such as "To a Passerby" and "The Mask," and his art criticism in The Painter of Modern Life. The women in both the image and text are constructed with oppositional concepts, words and phrases that indicate their role in nineteenth-century Paris and the many masks they wear in daily life. Next I examine the ways in which Haussmannization, the destructive reordering of Paris during the middle part of the century, presented new problems and opportunities for the artist-as-flâneur. Baudelaire‘s poem "The Crowds," corresponds to Manet's painting in that both use the mask as a means by which the poet/flâneur/masked ball participants assume a double-identity as they experience the spectacle of modernity as part of the crowd but distanced from it. Lastly, I argue that in the Masked Ball Manet modernized traditional danse macabre schema by conflating it with funereal attributes. Like the painting, Baudelaire's poem, "Danse Macabre," is a modernized version of the schema due to its contemporary poetic form comprising oppositional pairs, such as life/death, and thus establishing both as signifiers for the funeral of Parisian culture, specifically word and image, under Haussmannization. Ultimately, I demonstrate that the binary structures of the Manet's painting and Baudelaire's poetry develop from the same social milieu and are thus reciprocal objects that signify the prevailing cultural condition of nineteenth-century Paris.
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