‘Réalisme, un grand mot vide de sens’: Baudelaire, Gautier, and Landscape Painting

‘On fit de [Courbet] l'apôtre du Réalisme, un grand mot vide de sens, comme bien des grands mots’, writes Gautier in his Salon of 1868. Confusion over the meaning of the term is also noted by Baudelaire: ‘… réalisme, – injure dégoûtante jetée à la face de tous les analystes, mot vague et élastique’, he writes in his 1857 essay on Madame Bovary. Later, in notes for his unfinished essay, ‘Puisque Réalisme il y a’, Baudelaire appears to question whether the word has any meaning at all. In the drive to renew art, Realism appears to have fallen off course, stripping landscape painting of the principles of unity and cohesiveness that underlie what might be called a kind of pre-ecological vision of nature. This article repositions the writings on art of Baudelaire and Gautier, two of the most progressive, yet paradoxical voices of their time, with respect to the debate on Realism and its implications for the rapidly evolving area of landscape painting