Masters of Art: Courbet

Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism

Masters of Art: Courbet Details

From Publishers Weekly Creator of defiantly anti-official art, French realist painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) insisted on the right of artists to be independent witnesses to the truth of their own time. This attitude, according to Faunce, lies at the heart of our own concept of the modern. Faunce, curator of European painting and sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum, has written a fresh, timely reassessment of an artist who still looks contemporary. Courbet coined the term "real allegory" to describe his paintings of persons and places familiar to him, depicted as the embodiments of ideas. He "invented a whole vocabulary of touch" in his landscapes, powerful meditations on natural forces. Some of his erotic pictures startle even today. This beautifully illustrated study includes 40 color plates with facing-page commentaries and 59 in black-and-white. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more

Reviews

Sarah Faunce has for some time been one of our most eminent authorities on Courbet. As Chair of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Brooklyn Museum, she co-curated (with Linda Nochlin) and co-edited the catalogue of the 1988 exhibition "Courbet Reconsidered" (see my review on this website), an exhibition that had the distinction of being the first occasion on which the artist's notorious canvas "The Origin of the World" was publicly displayed and the first time all four versions of "Portrait of Jo" were shown together. She is also the director of the Courbet Catalogue Raisonne Project for the International Foundation for Art Research. In other words, she knows whereof she speaks, and that is obvious in this wonderfully prepared volume in the Abrams Masters of Art series. Her forty-page introductory essay, with its 59 excellently chosen black-and-white illustrations, is a model of concise commentary: all the important issues of Courbet criticism are clearly addressed, from the formal and technical characteristics of his painting to the social and political dimensions of the works--and even the two pages devoted to his rather murky involvement in the destruction of the Vendome column are the most succinct explanation of that affair that I have seen. It is always hard to know what to include and what exclude in such a short overview, but this is a masterful synthesis that bespeaks its author's thorough digestion of the material, including the great deal of new scholarship that had been occasioned by the 1977 centennial of Courbet's death.The forty full-page color plates are generally chronologically arranged to give a sense of Courbet's development, but they have also been judiciously chosen to illuminate the major pictorial genres and styles that he used. Quibbles are always possible, but on the whole this is a fair and representative selection, and the facing-page commentaries are as clear, concise, and authoritative as the introductory text. Faunce has a convincingly empathic sense of viewing and is particularly good at imagining what must have been going through the minds of the Salon visitors encountering these unfamiliar paintings for the first time. If there is an "agenda" to this book, it is one particularly suited to providing a comprehensive overview of Courbet's oeuvre. More than most writers, Faunce forges connections between his Realist project, his concept of allegory, and his desire to be a witness to his times--all interconnected aspects of his total epistemological and aesthetic experience of and response to reality. The foundation of the artist's Realist project, as Faunce sees it, is a "belief in the weight of reality and in the authenticity of witness" (21), which was shared by the emerging medium of photography. Thus, as Courbet writes to a friend in 1849, he was on his way to paint a landscape when he came upon two men breaking stones on the road: "It is rare to encounter such a complete expression of hardship," Faunce quotes him, "so the idea of a painting came to me on the spot" (20). From this and similar material Faunce distills the essence of Courbet's practice: "generating a work of art from an experience of vision which fuses the open-air idea of unmediated perception with the passion to embody in painting the people who formed the fabric of his own rural life" (20). The Realist project consists in bringing to public awareness the existence of a large and hitherto obscure class of people, of elevating themes of provincial life to the status of serious art, and of using actual people of the artist's own acquaintance to communicate the larger idea. This is the root of the "real allegory," the creation of great public resonance out of highly personal experience, which was most visibly operative in "The Artist's Studio" of 1855, the canvas he actually subtitled "A Real Allegory ..." But this process was already at work in many of the preceding pictures like "After Dinner at Ornans," "A Burial at Ornans," "The Peasants of Flagey," "The Young Ladies of the Village," "The Grain Sifters," et.al. Indeed, at an earlier stage it underlies the self-portraits in which the artist is bearing witness to himself in various possible roles even as he is exploring the range of styles and conventions open to him. At a later stage it also informs much of his landscape painting, with the part of personal human acquaintances being taken by personal topographical "acquaintances": the mountains, streams, and forests which were also an intimate part of the fabric of his lived reality and which came to be as much "real allegories" of political and social independence as his earlier figure painting. By applying Courbet's own concept of "real allegory" to paintings other than "The Artist's Studio," and by so clearly explaining the implications of the Realist project, Sarah Faunce has created a fruitful perspective from which to gain a comprehensive understanding of the artist's oeuvre. This volume is thus an excellent starting place for someone just becoming acquainted with Courbet (the short bibliography points out the best sources for further information), but it is also a handy companion for those already more familiar with these great paintings.

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