Excerpt from the New York Times [link to full story]
February 29, 2008
Art Review | Gustave Courbet
Seductive Rebel Who Kept It Real
By ROBERTA SMITH
At the moment the Metropolitan Museum of Art, always a paradise of painting, is more edenic than ever. In less than four weeks it has opened three large exhibitions, each devoted to a master of sublime strangeness. First Jasper Johns, then Nicolas Poussin and now Gustave Courbet.
Of the three, Courbet’s art may be the strangest of all, and in a time when seemingly old-fashioned representational painting is thriving, his work has a striking pertinence. Courbet the man was deeply out of sorts, independent, ambitious, wily, perennially dissatisfied with his lot, in addition to being, as he himself put it, “the most arrogant man in France.” A Republican whose career flourished noisily during the oppressive regime of Napoleon III, he aroused suspicions when he grandly declined the cross of the Legion of Honor.
This show of around 130 paintings and a smattering of drawings has an appropriate sweep. It was organized by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris; the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, France; and the Met. Its selection and majestic installation at the Met is the work of Gary Tinterow, curator in charge, and Kathryn Calley Galitz, assistant curator, both of the museum’s department of 19th-century, Modern and contemporary art. Running from the early 1840s to the early 1870s, it includes portraits, self-portraits, landscapes, nudes, group scenes, animals and hunting scenes.
The best of these canvases convert Courbet’s inborn dissonance into a commanding discombobulation. They challenge and seduce with their brusqueness of surface, inconsistencies of space or scale, emotional ambiguities and alternately frank and improbable accounts of the female form. Some paintings barely hold together; others collapse inward into strange, shapeless masses.
One of the greatest of these masses is Courbet’s drowsy masterpiece — cleaned since it was last seen in New York, 20 years ago — “Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine” of 1856-57. In it two reclining subjects form a pile of frothy garments, seemingly boneless female flesh, assorted flowers and moral lassitude set on a grassy riverside. The overt, possibly lesbian, eroticism that shocked viewers at the 1857 Salon remains palpable. So does the ebullient, almost taunting, hash of traditions, of public park with boudoir, of still life and figure painting, and most of all the way this hash is crowded from behind by a rough, strangely vertical plane of azure water. The whole lot might almost slide off the canvas, landing in a heap at our feet.
Courbet virtually wrote the definition of the modern artist as a bohemian, narcissistic loner and political radical who shunned the academy, tutoring himself at the Louvre and living by the phrase “épater le bourgeois,” or “shock the bourgeoisie.” He emerged in Paris in the 1840s, when court patronage was long gone, but the modern art market was still in formation. He was quick to grasp the usefulness of three related, also nascent phenomena: newspapers, popular illustration and especially photography, with its new realism. This exhibition is dotted with vintage photographs by the likes of Gustave Le Gray, and others of landscapes, peasants and nudes, similar to those Courbet owned and undoubtedly sometimes used in his work.
The show also indicates that he was not above painting additional copies of works if demand justified them, and that some of his most beautiful landscapes depict popular tourist spots.
Courbet is hailed as the founder of Realism, who willfully smashed the tidy boundaries separating established painting genres to record life as he saw it. He did this most famously in his murky manifesto, “The Burial at Ornans” (which the d’Orsay does not allow to travel), replacing sentimental stereotypes and strict social hierarchy with a ragged line of individualized villagers depicted on a scale usually reserved for history paintings.
But Courbet only grudgingly accepted the title of Realist. Even in front of his most realistic work, you often find yourself wrestling not so much with lived reality, as with the sheer — very real — uncanniness of painting itself. Observe the shifting veils of palette-knifed pigment in “The Stream of the Puits-Noir,” from 1855, which almost turn abstract. And Courbet’s is a continually shape-shifting uncanniness that mixes not only genres and styles, but also sexes, proportions and spatial logics with a subtle visual irony that might as well be called postmodern as modern.
Courbet’s life story is a rousing read, with its early fame, recurring controversies and tragic end. In 1873 he fled to Switzerland to avoid reimbursing the French government for the reconstruction of the Place Vendôme Column. (It was destroyed during the short, chaotic rule of the Paris Commune, when he was in charge of protecting all things artistic, public monuments included.) He died there, bitter and broken, four years later.
But stick with the paintings. No artist before Picasso left so much of himself on canvas. The first large gallery, dominated by Courbet’s tall, dark and handsome self-portraits, provides an almost sickening dose of his high self-regard, dramatic flair and roving attention to the old masters, variously Italian, Spanish and Dutch. […more]
