Regine Prange: The Heroic in an Age of Decadence. Baudelaire’s Aesthetics of Modernity between Realism and Supernaturalism

Gustave Courbet, Rocky Landscape near Ornans, c. 1855–1860 © Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Gustave Courbet laid the foundations for modern painting in his rural homeland, Franche-Comté. His friend Charles Baudelaire found, in the city of Paris alone, a ‘heroic’ beauty in modern life that could stand on equal terms with the classical tradition. This lecture traces the poet and art critic’s anti-modern conception of modernity.

(Lecture in German)

Regine Prange, holder of the Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art History, Art and Media Theory at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main until 2025. Main areas of research: modern and contemporary visual art, including the avant-garde in film; the history and methodology of art history; materialist aesthetics. Current interdisciplinary publication project on Realism as a Problem of Form.