The crowd was a major artistic subject and inspiration for the poet Charles Baudelaire. This exhibition seeks to explore and extend Baudelaire’s poetic interest in the crowd through the visual arts. Each of the selected works, accompanied by lines from Baudelaire’s writings, demonstrates a different perspective, from viewing the crowd as spectacle to looking at the tension between the majority and the margins of the crowd. These depictions of the Parisian crowd interacting with elements of the city may also illuminate the kind of links that Baudelaire drew between the crowd and the changing cityscape of the nineteenth century, of Paris in modernity.
This installation has been organized by the students of Poetry and the Arts (French 373), taught in the Princeton University Art Museum by Professor Effie Rentzou in the Department of French and Italian, spring semester, 2014.
The newly refurbished Works on Paper Study Room is located on level 2, via the Museum's main elevator.
