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Gustave Courbet
Metropolitan Museum of Art
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Gustave Courbet (1819-77) speaks to us today partly because of his wise-cracking attitudes directed at authority and partly because of his physical achievement. He is at the center of the Modernist canon via Realism but that almost seems to miss the point. It is a little bit like praising Eakins for making realistic pictures derived from photographs. It’s not brain surgery! Courbet was a painter like others of his time in being influenced by the classic French and Spanish work before him and endeavoring to make a name by breaking with tradition. At this courting of controversy he was particularly gifted, though some paintings do this better than others. He and Manet surely took standard subjects like the reclining nude and woke them up; they wanted to be bad boys. Most of Courbet’s works fall somewhere between a generic realistic approach – beware the pallet knife, friends – and the seascapes that stand on physicality alone, thanks to the same knife work. (Cezanne said he could feel the spray! That is high praise from PC.) The show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York certainly emphasized the usual points of Courbet's influence but gave a couple of new twists to the story. Seeing the work all in one place helped make some claims real and others not so pertinent. Perhaps it is the niggling term realism that bothers me: it covers a multitude of sins. Courbet wasn’t so much about painting what was “real” or in front of him but what was socially unfit, politically motivated, or taboo. Is that what makes him great or is it the method by which he makes his work? It might be more precise to say he worked between the newly developing photographic tropes of the mid-19th century and the age old art of painting which was at the end of its long run; no one could foresee the form Modernism was to take. Standing in front of some of the stark sea landscapes, there seems to be a complete break with the picture as window. Courbet physically constructs the image with a knife; there is no composition to speak of, no narrative or romanticizing. Hardly two sections, there is only sea and sky. This is at once a ‘real’ depiction and also an internal image, one inside the mind. That is a different sort of Realism -- they aren’t simple depictions of waves breaking on a shore. With the hunting scenes, Courbet seems on the verge of displaying some macho tendencies, and I begin to wonder what it is he is trying to do. There is a routine romantic sense here: all the dead deer speaks of the alpha-artist but some of the palette knife seems to suggest frivolity. I wonder if he was aware of that. (Is it because Stubbs could beat Courbet at animals?) It could be that this painterly method has been ruined by the multitude of imitators who have given this type of work a bad name. At to his earlier paintings, they seem too backwards looking towards the Renaissance -- simply academic. Several of the portraits contain a likeness, some panache, and not much else. In the early “highway” paintings I began to see what the initial criticism was about. His contemporary critics thought them crude! Some of the feet of the cattle don’t seem to touch the ground. Preparation of the Bride (c. 1850) directly prefigures Cezanne and Picasso not to mention much present day Gustonian paint application. Looking at this painting, which may have originally been a funeral scene with a central figure (once nude) being dressed for a wake – we sense the bulk of clunky forms. What the paint represents foremost is not a room full of activity but a culmination of a painterly process. For all supposed mystery – from funeral to wedding – it is the forms and paint that count. The allegories, as intriguing as they are, are almost secondary. The inclusion of the Bride in the Met's show did not make up for a key missing component from 1855, The Artist's Studio, which resides in Paris and was too large to be transported for this exhibition; its presence was felt, however, in the form of illustrated wall text along with several smaller oil portraits that were studies for the final piece. Here was Courbet summing up the Parisian cultural fervor of the time and his place in this metier, accompanied by his model and many notable intellectuals. (Poet and critic Charles Baudelaire is on the far right happily ensconced in a book!) Of course, the section on nudity was riveting. Never before have I seen so many people interested in female genitalia -- well, not in a museum anyway. The Origin of the World (1866) was kept under wraps at first. Thanks to his kinky Turkish patron, we have some strange pictures like this that defy modern interpretation. This is macho Courbet, the man who paid keen attention to the birth of modern pornography. Courbet certainly recharged the erotic and moved it away from classical convention, although today I wonder if it was worth the trouble. His legacy in this one department, which has roots in Cranach and Giorgione, was picked up by Duchamp in the twentieth century (check out the Philadelphia Museum of Art door/peephole assemblage from 1946-66, Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage) and reflected in Picabian cheesecake, perhaps not all that erotic by pin-up standards. It has continued more recently with John Currin, Jeff Koons, Lisa Yuskavage, and many others. Now, brightly colored hook rugs of porn stars are everywhere! (Shall I make a “shag” pun?) I was also reminded of the compelling work of Paula Rego, the female Balthus (Balthus himself borrowed from the erotic elements in Courbet). The placement of the clothed Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (1856-57) is ambiguous and suggestive but totally beautiful; the Japanese have their own version, Lolitacom, that plays with similar taboos. Courbet went on to paint a nude version in 1866 called Sleep, which lacks the subtlety of the earlier work and has some rather wonky anatomy. In any case, with the nude paintings Courbet was aided by the burgeoning photography of the day, supplying him with convenient shots of models, supposedly for artistic reference. (Nudge, nudge.) This genre is not all that erotic by our current sophisticated barometer, but they would have appealed to Ruben’s sense of weightiness in the figure. Sadly, it could not have been forseen in Courbet's time that as photography’s erotic content steam rolled into our internet age, you would no longer be able to hide the stuff in the top drawer. Seems a pity. Having spent a year trying to decipher the nude, as it were, for art historical purposes, it is confusing -- there has always been obscene graffiti, so why did artists feel the weight of that taboo? Is it the process of requiring fine art to always address the base as opposed to the sublime? Courbet, of course, pushed the envelope and his models take on new and strange angles as if looking for the most ungainly or satisfying position. He was looking for an odalesque that is unconnected to Titian and he found it, although he may have not been thinking how it would look in his retrospective a hundred years on. He was not about denying any sort of "male gaze," though it may seem that this particular agenda is outside his usual wholly formal product. Alas, his feet were on the ground even while he courted continual controversy; he painted nudes when it paid and made seascapes when the market made that profitable. In the end, it was the pursuit of painting that was less an illusion and more of an object that set him apart and put him way ahead of the curve. Preparation of the Bride is proof enough. Back to InLiquid's Commentary section index © 2008 James Rosenthal and InLiquid.com; images copyright © Metropolitan Museum of Art |
