Word: courbets
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...Courbet relished this reputation: "I am the first and unique artist of this century. The others are students and drivelers." No artist, up to then, had ever set himself so firmly against the reigning taste of his day, and none since Jacques-Louis David had had a stronger sense of political mission. Moreover, unlike the great salon artists who went before him, Courbet was capable of lavishing enormous trouble on a work doomed to unsalability, since it had no comprehensible message: this was his masterpiece, The Studio of the Artist, 1855, which he subtitled "a real allegory, setting forth...
Nevertheless, the idea of a fusion between radical art and radical politics, of art as a direct means of social subversion and reconstruction, has haunted the avant-garde since Courbet's time. On the face of it, it has a kind of logic. By changing the language of art. you affect the modes of thought; and by changing thought, you change life. The history of the avant-garde up to 1930 was suffused with various, ultimately futile, calls to revolutionary action and moral renewal. They were all formed by the belief that painting and sculpture were still the primary...
...chief of the Met's Department of European Paintings, has arranged a survey of the century's progress that is unmatched anywhere. The central space is devoted to the century's culminating stylesimpressionism and postimpressionism. With 13 flanking galleries, he could give one to Courbet alone, three to Degas, others to Millet and the Barbizon School. Besides a solid representation of the century's early neoclassicists and a number of Goyas, the new spaces allow a full sampling of the sentimental and pretentious salon art that the century's avant-garde...
...David to Courbet--Fogg Art Museum, Jan.22 March...
...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...