Word: courbets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...illusion of a radical break today? Not likely. Precisely because the 19th century (except for impressionism and its consequences) was once shunned, for the past 20 years it has been the curator's mother lode. This new curiosity radiates not only from grand exhibitions like those of Degas and Courbet, but also from others more modest in size, like "The Romantic Spirit: German Drawings, 1780-1850," which is on view at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City through...
What one sees today, especially in Brooklyn, is a different Courbet. He is a painter immersed both in popular art and in the traditions of his medium (Caravaggio, the Le Nains, Corot). He is inventive, yes, but not in a burn- the-Louvre way. He is an empiricist (though not without sentimental moments) for whom the sense of touch preceded that of sight. What the vibration of light would be to Monet, the force of gravity was to Courbet. It is the physical law that insinuates itself into almost every one of his images, confirming their materiality and stressing their...
...surprise of the show is Courbet's Origin of the World, 1866, by far the most transgressive image in 19th century painting. Long presumed lost, it turned up appropriately enough in the collection of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. It is a frontal view of a woman's pubes, painted with vast enthusiasm: the symbolic climax, one might say, of the series of dark caverns Courbet painted in his native countryside, The Source of the Loue, 1864. The objectivity of Courbet's work connotes a deep and sensuous love of whatever he painted. Sometimes his portraits of dead birds...
...surfaces. His rolling waves, marbled with foam as solidly as a steak with fat, reappear on the other side of the Atlantic in Winslow Homer's seapieces at Prout's Neck in Maine. Picasso would do versions of the sleeping girls on the banks of the Seine. In fact, Courbet has always been a painter's painter, because the scope of his appetite could show others how not to be afraid of their own vulgarity. His career reminds us that great and idiotic artists have something in common -- both are shameless...
...character and genius of the flamboyant, narcissistic and defiant French painter Gustave Courbet are captured in a rich new retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum...