Word: courbet
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...contemporary critic described Courbet's work as "an engine of revolution." Courbet agreed. He thought of himself as a subversive force: the epitome of the avantgarde, a one-man realist movement. "I am Courbetist, that's all. My painting is the only true one. I am the first and the unique artist of the century; the others are students or drivelers . . ." Pipe, Assyrian beard, clogs and beer gut: all his life he projected an image of invincible roughness and solidity. In fact, his greatest paintings were rarely the work of a simple realist. For example, The Meeting...
...very proud, monsieur!" exclaimed a high cultural official after one of Courbet's outbursts against government. "Monsieur," he retorted, "I am the most arrogant man in France." So he was. Courbet considered himself the Michelangelo of socialism. In the 1848 revolution, he bragged, "there were only two men ready-me and Proudhon." The 1871 revolution found him on the side of the Paris Commune, which called for the demolition of that symbol of "false glory," the Vendome Column. Later, the Commune crushed, a vengeful state passed a law to make Courbet bear the cost of restoring the column. Bankrupt...
...Courbet's concreteness that strikes one first. He had an extraordinary power to realize sensations. No sky is airier, more washed with light, than the blue space of The Meeting. Apples in a dish acquire a red density, a solidity-a completeness of being-that no painted apple had before. As the English critic John Berger remarked, the force of gravity was to Courbet what the vibration of light was to Monet and the impressionists. He could put more death into a trout, hooked and flapping on the pebbles, than Raphael could inject into a whole Crucifixion. Courbet...
...heroic materialism, Courbet was one of the ancestors of cubism. But his sense of reality extended beyond material, to social organization; hence the storm over A Burial at Ornans. In that black frieze punctuated by village faces, all held under the chalk bluffs of the distant landscape as beneath a sarcophagus lid, Courbet realized a whole rural society: not "noble peasants" mourning in a generalized Arcadia, but real people. The painting revealed, in country life, the same kind of bourgeois complexity that existed in the city. This contradicted the Parisians' idea of rural harmony and was, for that reason...
...least "realist" of all Courbet's paintings, because it is the most purely allegorical, was The Painter's Studio. There are as many interpretations of this vast, ambitious and obscure 1855 work as there are Courbet scholars. Its format is a Last Judgment-Courbet painting in the middle, his enemies to the left, his friends to the right. "On the right, all the activists," Courbet explained in a letter to a friendly critic, "that is to say, the friends, the workers, the lovers of the world of art. On the left, the other world of trivial existence...