The book in my hand is a collection of poems and a collection of paintings. At the age of 74, Henri Matisse selected 33 poems from Charles Baudelaire's poetry collection The Flower of Evil, illustrated them, and rearranged them, bringing together the efforts of two masters in the history of modern art.
Baudelaire was a man of nearly half a century before Matisse. When Matisse was born, Baudelaire had just died two years later. Speaking of Baudelaire, thinking of this photo, presents a wet, melancholy but obedient feeling, a pair of vicious eyes, and shows that the person's spirit is excited and difficult to calm.
Yes, Baudelaire was a man who boldly embraced loneliness, extremely confident in his achievements in the art of poetry, and believed that his poetry would be in line with the best poetry of Hugo and Byron. Symbolism came out of his hands, and urban life and ugliness entered poetry. His ideas inspired artists who followed their hearts' desires, and the territory of art was boundless.
As early as 1904, Matisse collided with Baudelaire's poetry. Influenced by the influence of pointillist painting and Impressionism, "Luxury, Tranquility, Joy" is titled after a sentence from Baudelaire's poem "Invitation": "There is only beauty, order, luxury, tranquility and fun." (Translated by Zheng Klu, p. 89).
In this illustrated edition of The Flower of Evil, Mattis re-illustrated the poem twice. At this time, Matisse was already ill, although he could not paint as in the past, he did not lose his mastery of lines, and the lines in his hands, even more pure, refined, natural, and a strong sense of shape, complemented Baudelaire's poetry.
In Beauty and Cats, Baudelaire writes:
"I am very disgusted by the movement of moving lines"
My fingers caressed leisurely
The back of your head and elastic feet,
My hands revel in this joy,
Gently stroke on your charged body.
As a bourgeois prodigal son, obsessed with the female flesh, with "eternity" to embellish the melancholy Baudelaire, like the undulating movement, like the snake he has repeatedly used as an image, like the waves of the ship, like the rich body of women. He hated things with edges and corners, which foreshadowed rupture. Imagine that whether it is eternal or melancholy, it is continuous and infinite, how can there be edges and cracks.
"The grave is my confidant of infinite dreams, because the grave is always able to understand the poet." In a poem inspired by the mixed-race Jeanne Dival, Remorse after Death, Baudelaire wrote. This reminds me of Li He's similar expression in "Autumn Coming": "Thinking of tonight's intestines should be straight, rain and cold incense soul hanging booker." The autumn tomb ghost sang Bao family poems and hated the blood of the thousand-year-old soil. "It is difficult to find a voice in the world, and I am afraid that only graves and ghosts can understand."