Courbet

Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) was the leader of the Realist School and the most controversial practioner of the style. Austere and direct, Courbet's canvases of peasants and laborers reflected his strong political views and social commitment. His first breakthrough image was A Burial at Ornans (1849-50) which announced the Realist aesthetic. In this shocking painting, Courbet portrayed ordinary people in an ordinary activity - a funeral procession - on a monumental scale (22 feet long with 51 figures) usually reserved for historic events and famous figures in history painting. Moreover, the provincial working-class mourners, based on real citizens of Ornans, were deemed by the public to be too ugly to be subjects of a work of art. The work was conceived of, and received as, both an attack on bourgeois art and a commentary on the politics of class at mid-century, for Courbet borrowed the style and scale of high art to elevate the working classes to a subject position. The fragmentation of the composition into three discrete groups (the women on the right, the clergy on the left and the bourgeoisie in the middle), the flatness of tone and palette (limited to black and white punctuated with the red of the clerics) and its "deliberate ugliness" all contributed to the critical and public disapproval of this radical image.
 
Equally radical was Courbet's refusal to privilege any single element or group in the painting. Rejecting hierarchical values, the painter opts instead for a pictorial democracy, where everything is of equal importance. There is no central focal point in the horizontal composition that concentrates on the secular rather than spiritual aspects of death. Thus, Courbet's image focuses neither on the dead nor on the afterlife, but on the mourners, the community and the nature of their rituals. The priest, beadle and choirboys are no less prosaic than the other citizens, all of whom have concrete human identities. The unembellished faces, local costumes and directness of presentation all indicate the influence of photography on Realist painting. His Young Women from the Village was equally controversial and the source of much mockery for its prosaic subject and unidealized figures.
 
Courbet embarked on his most grandiose image - The PainterÕs Studio: Interior of my studio; a real allegory determining a phase of the last seven years of my life (1854-55) for the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1855. The painting was rejected, so Courbet opened his own independent "Pavillon du Réalisme," not far from the Universal Exposition, to display his own works. This dense and difficult triptych allegorizes the trajectory of his Realist career from 1848-1855 and he includes representations of all aspects of his life and art in the 20 x 12 foot canvas. On the left he included the external, political world, including soldiers, laborers, hunters, and other figures from his art as well as Louis Napoleon (seated with spaniels). On the right, in what he termed the interior or aesthetic world, are found patrons, bohemians and artists, including Baudelaire (sitting on the table reading) and Champfleury (seated). At center is the artist at his easel, admired by a naked woman (allegory for art) and a small boy (the future). His painting of a landscape signals a move away from his overtly political canvases of the daily lives of peasants in the countryside. In the decades to follow, Courbet's Realism focused on hunting scenes (After the Hunt) and non-idealized female nudes (Woman with a Parrot). He remained politically engaged throughout his life and was active in the Paris Commune of 1871. Accused of organizing the demolition of the Vendême Column, he was jailed after the overthrow of the Commune and later spent four years in exile.
 
Courbet's Realism found a vocal champion in the author and critic Champfleury, who helped to defend the painter and enunciate the new aesthetic. He insists that Courbet "n'a rien inventé" and that in criticizing the Enterrement à Ornans one criticizes the peasants themselves, who do not resemble the Greek gods of Classical art. A "chef-d'oeuvre du laid," Courbet's early masterpiece is seen by Champfleury as an anti-academic tribute to the real people of France in the nineteenth century and a "réhabilitation du moderne."