Word: courbets
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Gustave Courbet was a handsome farmer's boy who grew up to be a beer-swilling, loud-mouthed giant-and one of the great painters of the 19th Century. While he lived, Courbet was generally belittled, and after his death he was eclipsed by the sunny brilliance of Manet. But the retrospective exhibition of Courbet's art staged in a Manhattan gallery last week, the biggest Courbet show ever seen in the U.S., gave ample proof of the big fellow's permanence and power...
Socialistic Plumpness. Because they had none of the sickly romanticism fashionable in his day, Courbet's paintings were laughed at. One critic complained that Courbet must be a socialist: his nudes were so plumply inelegant. Another of Courbet's critics may have been the first, but by no means the last, man to look at a picture and remark that his kids could do it better...
...Courbet did see the world with a childlike directness and delight. He painted it, according to one contemporary, "as simply as an apple tree bears apples." He didn't much like being called a realist-it was a term of opprobrium in some circles in those days, too-but he used to pound on the table and insist that painting was a physical language having nothing to do with history, romance or religion. "Show me an angel," he shouted, "and I will paint...
...Courbet's best admirers were realists like himself (men like Novelist Zola), men who also swam against the popular current. To 20th Century eyes, Courbet looks like a rock-solid conservative. Actually, his realistic art not only ran counter to the great traditions of his day, it profoundly influenced Manet, Renoir and Cezanne, the founding fathers of modern...
...curly-maned old lion could never have dreamed it, but his kind of painting, which put ideas ahead of emotions, was on the verge of obscurity for a century or more. The romantic French masters who followed him, from Courbet and Delacroix on, were apt to consider David more of a pedant than a painter-and a passionless clod to boot. They were wrong, as a huge David exhibition, the biggest showing of his work ever held, proved last week in Paris...