Word: courbets
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Every aspect of his work is thoroughly set on view in Brooklyn: landscape, portraiture, animal painting, social commentary, erotica. And from them Courbet rises more vividly and intensely now than ever before in living memory, at least in America. Courbet -- this combative, ambitious, narcissistic and earthy man, crazy about women, convinced of his own historical mission -- thought he was the painter of his time. His egotism still grates. What school did he belong to? "I am Courbetist, that's all. My painting is the only true one. I am the first and unique artist of the century; the others...
Without this battleship of an ego, Courbet would hardly have survived the attacks of the critics of his day. What was realism to his enemies? Atheism, socialism, materialism, crudity: a denial of all decent control. An audience that doted on the rococo peasant had insuperable difficulties with Courbet's frieze of worn faces and homespun black suits in Burial at Ornans, 1850. He painted, someone gibed, the way one waxed boots. He was seen as a dangerous socialist, a besmircher of the ideal, a bucolic thug from the Franche-Comte trampling all over the classical tradition with his wooden clogs...
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...