The Painting of Modern Life, the first show at the Hayward Gallery curated by its American director, Ralph Rugoff, is an ambitious attempt to see how this artistic project stands nearly 150 years after Charles Baudelaire proposed it in his essay 'The Painter of Modern Life' (1863). There the poet called for a shift in subject matter - already begun in the practice of Manet and others - away from the grand themes of myth and history, and towards the everyday activities of urban life, especially of middle-class leisure. Such a shift in content implied a shift in form, even in medium; for example, to capture the mobility of bourgeois types on the town, the sketch might be more useful than other means (the exemplar in the essay is not the great Manet but Constantin Guys, who was then known for his quick studies). What better vehicle to convey 'the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent' - key qualities of the metropolitan kaleidoscope, according to Baudelaire - than the photograph? Yet the poet remained suspicious of the new medium, in part because he did not see its potential for imaginative invention, in part because he did not deem it suited to the 'other half' of his mandate for art, which was to extract 'the eternal and the immutable' from this protean modernity. The other half was still the province of painting, and so painting - perhaps pressured by photographic attributes - remained the essential medium.

LRB 1 November 2007 | PDF Download