Trials of Modernity: Nineteenth-Century Precursors of Modernism

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Trials of Modernity Nineteenth-Century
Precursors of Modernism

• Realism
• Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857) and
  Sentimental Education (1869)
• Gustave Courbet
• Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Fyodor
  Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, George Eliot
• Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil (1857)
• Naturalism
• Emile Zola, Thérèse Raquin (1867)
• Decadence
• Joris Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (À Rebours
  1884)
• Symbolism
• Stéphane Mallarmé, LAprès-Midi dun Faune
  (1876 later, music by Claude Debussy)
• Impressionism
• Edouard Manet, inspiration to the impressionists
• Edgar Degas, older contemporary of the
  impressionists

Claude Debussy, Prelude to the Afternoon of a
Faun, performed by the Detroit Symphony
Orchestra
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Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)
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Claude Monet, Saint-Lazare Train Station (1887)
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Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers (1850)
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Edouard Manet, Street Pavers in the Rue Mosnier
(1878)
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Gustave Courbet, Hunter on Horseback Recovering
the Trail (1864) Yale University Art Gallery
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The artist in his work should be like God in the
universe, present everywhere and visible
nowhere. Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
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• She repeated, I have a lover! a lover!
  delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had
  come to her. So at last she was to know those
  joys of love, that fever of happiness of which
  she had despaired! She was entering upon a
  marvelous world where all would be passion,
  ecstasy, delirium.
• From Madame Bovary

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Jane Austen (1775-1817)
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Edouard Manet, Olympia (1863)
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Edouard Manet, Portait of Emile Zola (1868)
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Composers Richard Wagner (1813-1883) Claude
Debussy (1862-1918)
Baudelaire and his successors Charles Baudelaire
(1821-1867) Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) Joris
Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) Painters Edouard Manet
(1832-1883) Edgar Degas (1834-1917) Claude Monet
(1840-1926)
Gustave Courbet, The Painter's Studio A
Real-Life-Allegory of the Last Seven Years of My
Life (1855), with Baudelaire at far right
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Edgar Degas, Absinthe (1876)
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Gustave Moreau, Salomé Dancing Before Herod
(1876)
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Edouard Manet, Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé
(1876)
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Edgar Degas, The Ballet Class (1874)
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Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines (1873-4)
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Edouard Manet, Déjeuner sur lHerbe (Luncheon on
the Grass 1863)
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Edouard Manet, Young Woman Reclining in Spanish
Costume (1862-63) Yale University Art Gallery
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Claude Monet, Impression Sunrise (1872)
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John Singer Sargent, sketch for a portrait of
Henry James Yale Collection of American
Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library