Courbet's the Sleepers is thus one of the first honest depictions of lesbian love in the history of Western art. There is no distortion of either of the two women's bodies, as we find in Ingres's painting. All of the details look nearly photographic in their authenticity. That is not to say that the image is crude, or inharmonious in its depiction of forms. The curvature of the women's bodies, particularly the leg of the woman on the left as she wraps it around her lover's waist, is highly stylized - but not stylized to the point of distraction.

Stylization would take precedence over faithful representation in the ongoing development of modernism, which would reach a critical peak in the work of Pablo Picasso. In his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which was completed in the summer of 1907, Picasso rendered five nude prostitutes in a brothel in a style that...
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