La Folie Baudelaire by Roberto Calasso: review It is said that art critics are as much use to artists as bird-watchers are to birds. This is contradicted by the single example of Charles Baudelaire, whose masterly criticism gave direction to the artists who were to be called the Impressionists. The Italian intellectual Roberto Calasso gives a meditation on Baudelaire's creation of the modern in a book which is part biography, part philosophy, part art criticism. To ask for a little more narrative would be to betray oneself as irredeemably bourgeois. After all, who goes to art for the stories? Here we have the world of the poet Baudelaire, author of Les Fleurs du mal - the faded couches, the girls who talk with strangers, obscene books, tropical birds, dismembered bodies, the middle-aged writer's love letters to his mother, a posy of violets and a closed fan. All is immediate, but disjointed. Calasso starts with the only dream Baudelaire ever recorded, one of a brothel which is also a museum. Startling juxtapositions are a Baudelaire trait, such as his description of hashish that "spreads over the whole of life like a magic varnish" giving a user the experience of "a woman on the mature side, curious, with an excitable spirit." There are many women in this book. Baudelaire remarked on Ingres as being distinguished by "love for women. His libertinage is serious and full of conviction... the muscles, the folds of the flesh, the shadows of the dimples, the hilly undulations of the skin, nothing is missing. He described the yawning, ironing, gingerly stepping-out-of-the-bathtub creatures of Degas and the women of Delacroix: "almost all of them are unhealthy, and they shine with a certain inner beauty." Sometimes it is as if the bohemian excitement at the modern is in fact a celebration of uninhibited access to the female body. One artist, Georges Duthuit, put it succinctly: "If tits didn't exist, I wouldn't have painted." Calasso acknowledges this, and discusses the extent to which the origins of the modern in art were "marginal and erotic." He describes "the Baudelaire test," a challenge thrown down by the critic as a proof of modernity to ask any "patient and meticulous" painter to tackle a portrait of "a courtesan of the present day." If they couldn't do it, they just weren't modern enough. Calasso has the 19th-century savant's light touch in his knowledge of hieroglyphs, Greek myths and Hindu texts, Turkish and Chinese culture and the "dandified" behaviour of the American Plains Indian. With chapters headed "The Natural Obscurity of Things" and "The Fleeting Sense of Modernity," this well-illustrated volume is not a book for the faint-hearted. It is as red-blooded as art criticism gets, and a suitable encomium for the greatest of art critics. La Folie Baudelaire Roberto Calasso Allen Lane, £35, 337pp