Gustave Courbet

by Laurence Des Cars, Kathryn Calley Galitz, Sylvain Amic

Nowadays it is difficult to conceive of the impact that Gustave Courbet's paintings made on French art of the mid-nineteenth century. At once casting himself as revolutionary, bohemian and peasant, Courbet (1819-1877) overturned a deeply-entrenched tradition of academic painting in France, and, eschewing the Romanticism of Delacroix and the NeoClassicism of Ingres, coined instead an idiom he named "Realism." Realism was not pretty, classically proportioned or literary; rather, it confronted the conditions of rural working life, then an unimaginable subject for art. The first masterpiece of this new style was "Burial at Ornans" (1849-1850), a colossal anti-epic that depicted an ordinary funeral in Courbet's home town. The contrast between the work's scale and its subject matter was pronounced, and its murky earth tones struck critics as willfully ugly--a defining reaction that would recur throughout the Modern period, particularly in the reception of early works by Manet and Picasso. Courbet's palette emphasized mass and body politically--that is, in a manner that affirmed the world itself rather than the transcendence of it. His equally famous "The Origin of the World" of 1866, which presented the female genitalia close-up, made this stance explicit. The conceptual beginnings of the "painting of Modern life" are as much in Courbet's Realism as in Charles Baudelaire's famous essay of the same name.
In this new assessment, published on the occasion of a major 2008 traveling exhibition, renowned experts shed light on the development of Courbet's realistic, critical style and trace his influence on his contemporaries and subsequent generations, as well as his relationship to early photography. At 480 pages, this monumental volume provides a long-overdue reckoning of this great artist's work.

Genres: Art

480 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Annabelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Le catalogue de l'expo Courbet, aussi disponible sous la forme de mini-catalogue qui résume tous les panneaux de l'exposition à seulement 8 Euros (Belle innovation en termes de démocratisation de l'Histoire de l'Art).

La VA de ce livre pour quelqu'un qui a vu l'expo se situe vraiment dans les nombreuses caricatures du peintre faites par la presse parisienne d'alors et par le parallèle construit entre la ie et l'oeuvre de l'artiste, avec ses "doubles" caricaturaux".

Je peste toujours contre l'écriture des conservateurs dans les catalogues, toujours plus ampoulée et précieuse.

[Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

For my review of the recent Courbet retrospective, see http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080324/schwabsky.