MICHAEL MAPES
Baudelaire(2023)Our portrait of the original flâneur, Charles Baudelaire, created by artist Michael Mapes, is a puzzle. Constructed of hundreds of tiny artifacts, these bits— photographs, postage stamps, buttons, bugs, glass vials of small artifacts, gelatin capsules holding mysteries, lines of text, pressed flowers, tiny book jackets, bark, strands of string, charts, feathers, and quills—coalesce to create a portrait of this brilliant 19th century French poet, essayist, and critic who is, in our minds, the Patron of The Fifth.