‘The thrill of the forbidden’: how Charles Baudelaire’s dark, taboo-busting poetry changed the life of a Sotheby’s executive

One of the seminal works of French literature, “Les Fleurs du Mal” (“The Flowers of Evil”; 1857) contains most of the poetry of Charles Baudelaire.

Strikingly innovative and taboo-busting in both style and subject, it foregrounded dark, controversial themes, from sexuality to death to self-disgust.

Nicolas Chow, Swiss-born chairman for Asia and worldwide head of Asian art at auction house Sotheby’s, tells Richard Lord how it changed his life.

I was 13 years old when I read Les Fleurs du Mal for the first time, right in the throes of teen angst.

The Chinese text that helped Gay Games Hong Kong co-chair embrace being a lesbian

It was my neighbour, and then my favourite partner in crime, Sébastien, who lent me his copy, and I remember the event was filled with a certain sense of gravity.

This is, after all, a book, many will say a bible, that has been a rite of passage for generations of emo teenagers, poetry fans, artists and cultural icons alike, and its author the poster boy for bohemians and wannabe doomed poets of all sorts.

As I read the first poem, the words were immediately mesmeric and I was under the spell of Charles Baudelaire – a visionary poet and a melancholic, suicidal character often considered debauched, whose poems, like alchemy, transform his self-lacerating melancholy into beauty.

I was seduced by the intoxicating quality of the writing and that search for beauty in the darker corners of the human experience, whether death, unrequited love, substances or the oppressive power of the modern city.

The thrill of the forbidden – some of the more obscene poems were censored up until the mid-20th century – was no doubt a draw, too.

One of my favourite poems is titled A Carcass and it is unashamedly self-indulgent, in true Baudelaire style.

While taking a walk, Baudelaire and his lover come across a decomposing carcass, a perfect lead into many themes that are leitmotifs in The Flowers: the beauty that resides in all things, life that springs from death, and the death of love.

“The forms disappeared and were no more than a dream,

A sketch that slowly falls

Upon the forgotten canvas, that the artist

Completes from memory alone.”

I still get goosebumps reading these verses. The writing is so extra­ordinary, Baudelaire’s ability for abstract imagery so radical for his time.

The Flowers changed my sensibility entirely, whether my taste for literature, visual arts, cinema or music – and almost 40 years in, I still have not quite shaken off that penchant for slightly dark, edgier things and their unique emotional charge.

Why is this sustainable fashion marketplace founder rereading Shakespeare?

The Flowers is intimately entangled in my mind with another book which I discovered a few years later, Junichiro Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows (1933).

To me, Shadows is to aesthetics what Flowers is to the human condition. The short book – it barely takes an hour to read – is a manifesto in praise of Japanese traditional aesthetics, darkness, imperfection and impermanence, and embracing the fleeting nature of the beauty of all aesthetics: the decayed, the flawed, the modest.

Those two classics continue to guide me in my personal explorations, and pretty much every single object, painting or photograph, that I have ever acquired, whether ancient or contemporary, comes as an extension of ideas that germinate in them.