Chapter 31

The Move Toward Modernism

(ca. 1875–1900)

Late Nineteenth-Century Thought

The provocative German thinker Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who detected in European materialism a deepening decadence, called for a revision of traditional values.

While Nietzsche anticipated the darker side of modernism, Henri Bergson presented a positive view of life as a vital impulse that evolved creatively and intuitively.

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Poetry in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Symbolists

Symbolist poets, such as Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, devised a languageof sensation that evoked rather than described feeling.

In Stéphane Mallarmé’s L’apres-midi d’un faune, sensuous images unfold asdiscontinuous literary fragments.

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Music in the Late Nineteenth Century: Debussy

Symbolist poetry found its counterpart in music. The compositions of Claude Debussy engage the listener through nuance and atmosphere.

Inspired by Indonesian music, Wagnerian opera, and Symbolist poetry, Debussy created a mood of reverie in the shifting harmonies of his Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun.”

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Painting in the Late Nineteenth Century

The Impressionists, led by Monet, were equally representative of the late nineteenth-century interest in sensation and sensory experience. These artists tried to record an instantaneous vision of their world, sacrificing the details ofperceived objects in order to capture the effects of light and atmosphere.Renoir, Degas, and Pissarro produced informal, painterly canvases that offer a glimpse into the pleasures of nineteenth-century urban life.

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Painting in the Late Nineteenth Century (continued)

Two major influences on late nineteenth-century artists were stop-action photography and Japanese woodblock prints. The latter, originally popularized as souvenirs, entered Europe along with Asian trade goods.In the domestic interiors of Cassatt and the cabarets of Toulouse-Lautrec, scenes of everyday life show the influence of Japanese prints.

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Art Nouveau

Originating in Belgium, art nouveau (“new art”) was an ornamental style that became enormously popular in the late nineteenth century.The proponents of the style prized the arts of Asia and Islam, which featured bold, flat, organic patterns and semi-abstract linear designs. In America, the style was advanced in the art glass of Louis Comfort Tiffany.

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Sculpture in the Late Nineteenth Century

The works of Degas and Rodin reflect a common concern for figural gesture andexpressive movement.

Rodin’s efforts to translate inner states of feeling into physical form were mirrored by Isadora Duncan’s innovations in modern dance.

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The Arts of Africa and Oceania In Africa and Oceania, reliquaries, masks, and freestanding sculptures were among the power objects created to channel the spirits of ancestors, celebrate rites of passage, and ensure the well-being of the community.While sharing with some Western styles (such as Symbolism) a general disregard for objective representation, the visual arts of Africa and Oceania stood apart from nineteenth-century Western academic tradition.

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Primitivism

Colonialism and popular European travel to Africa and Oceania worked to introduce the West to cultures that were perceived by some as exotic and violent, and by others as “primitive” and blissfully close to nature.The Paris World’s Fair of 1880 brought non-Western culture to public attention, encouraging the establishment of ethnographic collections and a broader interest in the world beyond the West.

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Postimpressionism

Renouncing their predecessor’s infatuation with the fleeting effects of light, the Postimpressionists explored new pictorial strategies.Van Gogh and Gauguin used color not as an atmospheric envelope but as a tool for personal, symbolic, and visionary expression.Seurat and Cézanne reacted against the formlessness of Impressionism by inventing styles that featured architectural stability.

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