Patti Smith’s adoration of the 19th-century French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud began in a bookstall opposite a bus depot in Philadelphia when she was 16. Like most teenage crushes, it was all-consuming. ‘My unrequited love for him was as real to me as anything I had experienced,’ she would later write in her 2010 autobiography, Just Kids. ‘It was for him that I wrote and dreamed.’ When she found fame as an artist and punk poet in the 1970s New York music scene, Rimbaud became her muse.
Artists’ muses often hold as much fascination as the work they inspire. Overwhelmingly women, and more often than not artists themselves whose talent is put on hold so they can serve as inspiration to some critically exalted male artist, the modern muse’s raison d'être – at least since the 19th century – seems to stem from the requirement of artists to experience exquisite beauty, love and torment in order to make their mark(s). Even when, rarely, a muse is male, as was the case of George Dyer for Francis Bacon, the same principle seems to hold true: the painter became infatuated with the handsome model and painted him obsessively; their relationship was tempestuous, and shortly before the opening of a Bacon retrospective in Paris in 1971, Dyer was found dead from an overdose in the bathroom of the Hotel des Saint-Pères. The same pattern played out with artist Elizabeth Siddal, who entranced the Pre-Raphaelites, particularly Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who eventually married her, but not before she had become depressed and addicted to laudanum. She’d later die of an overdose. Camille Claudel turned Rodin’s head (and hand) to new ways of sculpting; he abandoned her after seeing the success of her work, and she was later confined to an asylum. Factory superstar Edie Sedgwick was a source of total fascination for Andy Warhol, not least because she mirrored him, and starred in around ten of his films until a disastrous falling-out; she overdosed at 28.
If a muse survives their indenture, they’re often forever fixed within the frame of their role. When Françoise Gilot died earlier this year aged 101, with 80 years of artistic output behind her, as well as a bestselling memoir and a Légion d’Honneur to her name, newspaper headlines described her as a ‘muse to Picasso’ – a man she had walked out on half a century earlier.
In any case, Rimbaud, being dead, had no such misfortune in his status of muse in the modern world, nor the indignity of being reduced to object of desire and inspiration in spite of his own work. ‘Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story,’ opens Homer’s Odyssey, which seems a more apt description of Patti Smith’s relationship with the 19th-century poet.
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Patti arrived in New York at 20 with little more than a suitcase containing Illuminations, the book of Rimbaud’s poetry she’d pilfered from that Philadelphia bookstall, and a head full of dreams of being a poet. Around a century earlier, Rimbaud had fled his rural home in the French countryside (where he too had stolen books from local shops) and washed up in Paris, beginning a wild and often violent love affair with the poet Paul Verlaine. Smith would also start a romance and artistic collaboration with a Verlaine – Tom, frontman and guitarist for the band Television – in the early days of the New York punk scene. One wonders if this synchronicity was at least partially intentional. Framed this way, Smith’s connection with Rimbaud can be seen as the channelling of a certain spirit. On the belly band of the 150th anniversary edition of Une Saison, she’s holding a revolver – no doubt a reference to the gun with which Paul Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the arm during one of their brutal quarrels.
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Patti Smith was not the only artist who felt an affinity with the poet, however. ‘In Rimbaud, I see myself as in a mirror,’ wrote Henry Miller in The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud. In this 1946 exploration of the poet’s life and work, he identifies with the nomadic Frenchman – a ‘wanderer, a man both in the world and outside it, another spirit in revolt who was caught in a destiny difficult to define’.
Rimbaud was also an unlikely icon of 1970s pop culture, held up as kind of patron saint, revered and referenced by musicians including Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan and Richard Hell. ‘The ghetto prince of gutter poets… His words like flamethrowers’ intoned the Clash and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg on ‘Ghetto Defendant’, the band’s 1982 post-punk political jam. Smith’s identification with Rimbaud went a bit further than her male peers – into the realm, aptly enough, of artistic Symbolism. ‘Some of the best sex I ever had was with Rimbaud,’ she said in an interview with Mademoiselle in the mid-1970s, after her wildly successful break-out album Horses was released. ‘Nothing sick about it, ya know. Get a lot of good poetry out of it. Me and Rimbaud have made it a million times.’
The appeal of a 19th-century French poet to the Beats and punks of the 1970s New York scene may seem bizarre, but it’s not really. ‘A thousand dreams within me softly burn,’ wrote Rimbaud, capturing the universal affliction of being young, bright and blazing to get out into the world. A jumped-up country boy who never really knew his place (to crib the Smiths), Rimbaud had a meteoric rise as a precociously talented and provocative teenage poet, only to burn up in the atmosphere of 19th-century Paris, spurning his lover Verlaine, literature and even the act of writing itself to retreat into the quieter life of a traveller and trader. That early, tragic arc provided the blueprint for a romantically torrid artistic life, however, and his disassembling of language survived to become instrumental in the emergence of punk. Symbolically, he was the first rock ’n’ roll star.
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On the 150th anniversary of the publication of Une Saison en Enfer, Galerie Gallimard has paid tribute to a love affair of the imagination by exhibiting a shrine of sorts, the artistic output of Patti Smith that’s been inspired by Rimbaud. A companion text to the exhibition, designed by Smith, compares the poems in Une Saison en Enfer with moments from her own life, illustrated with drawings, photographs, documents and previously unpublished texts. ‘A Season in Hell was the drug of my youth, the elixir containing the tools and method for toppling false idols,’ she says. ‘Such is the exhilarating power of poetry.’
Rimbaud died in 1891, at the age of 37, and was buried near his childhood home in Charleville. The inscription on his tombstone reads Priez pour lui (‘Pray for him’). The ecstasy with which Patti Smith has invoked the poet as eternal flame and muse throughout her artistic career is as if in answer to this exhortation.
‘Patti Smith: Photographies, Ecrits, Dessins’ – a love letter to Arthur Rimbaud – runs at Galerie Gallimard until 7 Oct. For more information, visit galeriegallimard.com
Patti Smith is the custodian of Arthur Rimbaud’s reconstructed home in Roche and the patron of the Arthur Rimbaud museum in Charleville. Details: www.musear.fr
