Édouard Manet's "Masked Ball at the Opera" (1873)
shares formal and thematic relationships with Charles
Baudelaire's poetry and art criticism. Although
previous studies reveal visual sources for Manet's
painting, here we reveal that Baudelaire's poetry
was the textual paradigm for Manet's "Masked Ball."
Women are studied alongside Baudelaire's poems and
his essay "The Painter of Modern Life." Also examined
are the ways in which Haussmannization 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 individuals assume a double-identity as they
experience the spectacle of modernity. The painting
and Baudelaire's "Danse Macabre" are analyzed as
modernized versions of traditional danse macabre
schema. Both works comprise oppositional pairs, such
as life/death, that establish them as signifiers for
the funeral of Parisian culture under
Haussmannization. This book should be especially
useful to the fields of art history, literature,
feminist theory, visual and cultural studies, and
anyone interested in the history and art of
19th-century Paris.