Baudelaire et la sculpture ennuyeuse de son temps

To understand the significance of Baudelaire's apparent diatribe against sculpture in his Salon of 1846, Hamrick reconstructs the contemporary discourse within which Baudelaire and other forwarding-looking critics were reassessing the place of sculpture in creative expression. She brings to light allusions and similarities in critical commentary to reveal the presence of a submerged ideolect, elements of which can already be found in the 1830s in Gautier's critique of contemporary neoclassical sculpture, in Vivant Denon's note to an engraving of "primitive" art objects, some of which were exhibited at the Musée de la Marine, and in the window displays of sculpted "marchandises fétiches." Hamrick concludes that Baudelaire's attack is not aimed at sculpture per se, nor at the art de Caraïbes, but at the monotonous replication of neoclassical models and the trivialization of sculpture through the serialization of miniature figures for a commerce-minded bourgeois public. (In French)