The Crimea, Constantine Guys and the hurried sketch of Modernism (under construction)

This essay will argue that Baudelaire's model of modernity, the artist/dandy Constantine Guys, developed his 'passion for contemporaneity' through his Crimean battlefield sketches for the Illustrated London News and that, together with the sensational reportage which accompanied these images, journalism contributed greatly to an early modernist sensibility; formed within the vacuum left by the imploding paradigm of a 'natural order' presided over by the aristocracy.

© Stuart Currie 2010