Art Review / NATASHA KURCHANOVA
Courbet at the Met
- Gustave Courbet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
The current exhibition of the French painter Gustave Courbet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, organized by Gary Tinterow and Kathryn Galley Galitz, is impressive in scope, scholarly vigor, and quality of its organization. The second exhibition devoted to this painter in the Met’s history — the first one took place almost a century ago, in 1919 — it features more than 130 works and brings up to date the scholarship on this artist who is widely viewed, with all the complexities and contradictions that surround the debate on his work, as the father of modernism.
Courbet’s position as the progenitor of modernism is conditioned not only by his innovative painting methods, but also by his public persona and his republican sympathies in politics. These three faces of Courbet are inseparable in the display of his work, but in its scholarly treatment, the unity of the painter’s creation became analytically dispersed into a variety of thematic variations: Courbet the master-painter who introduced realism into the vocabulary of the art world; Courbet the political insurgent, supporter of the 1848 revolution, concerned with democratic values and the abolition of monarchy in France; and Courbet the new man, brash and rebellious, self-confident and independent, the maker of his own life. Thematically, then, our knowledge of this artist developed in bits and pieces, learned from deliberately taken points of view. First came T.J. Clark’s book in 1973, which looked at the artist from the position of a social historian of art, uncovering the “political sense and intention” of his work through its popular reception. Then, in 1976, Linda Nochlin published her dissertation, examining Courbet’s Realism as a style, which synthesized Courbet’s painterly innovations with his reactions to the chameleonic political situation in France in the second half of the nineteenth century. Finally, in 1990, Michael Fried published his close analysis of Courbet’s oeuvre, painting by painting, in which, using an approach taken from phenomenological philosophers, he argued for the importance of senses other than vision for understanding Courbet’s work and a peculiar kind of “embodiedness” of his paintings, resulting from projection of the artist’s own body onto them.
The history of Courbet’s retrospectives follows closely the publication of the monographs on the artist. In 1977-78, Hélène Toussaint exhibited his works at the Louvre and the Courtauld Institute. Because it was a re-introduction of this master to the public after a protracted period of relative obscurity, she arranged them chronologically, methodically going through the major periods in the artist’s life and career. In 1988-89, on this side of the ocean, Sarah Faunce and Linda Nochlin curated an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, which traveled to the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts. There, apart from chronological organization, Courbet was “reconsidered” (the title of the exhibition was Reconsidering Courbet) from the point of view of Nochlin’s argument, uncovering his stylistic development and the meaning of his realism through the iconographic analysis of his works and their stylistic alterations. The current retrospective goes even deeper into this formal/stylistic investigation; the fact that it begins with a room full of early self-portraits, not necessarily from the same period, bespeaks the organizers’ desire to engage Fried’s method, by comparing and contrasting works on the basis of iconographic criteria, rather than strict chronological order.
Indeed, upon entering the first room, the viewer is confronted with three self-portraits, hung side by side — The Wounded Man, The Man with the Leather Belt, and The Cellist — all of which were thoroughly explored in Fried’s monograph. Other self-portraits prominent in his analysis — The Sculptor, The Desperate Man, and The Man Mad with Fear — also form part of the display. The wall texts and labels, however, barely mention Fried’s phenomenological reading, оpting for straightforward historical information. Laurence des Cars, the curator from Musée d’Orsay, explained in the catalogue that Fried’s insights, although “brilliant,” ignored “cultural and stylistic” aspects of Courbet’s works. To remedy this one-sidedness, des Cars provided historically relevant commentary on the preponderance of self-portraits throughout the artist’s career: she noted that Courbet was not the only young painter to focus on his image and that this fixation on the self was a marked device of the generation of the Romantics.
After the grand opening by self-portraits, the exhibition unfolds by concentrating on particular themes: realism, modern life, the nude, landscape, politics. The section on realism features works other than self-portraits, done from the time Courbet arrived to Paris in late 1839 to 1855. Here, the importance for the artist of his roots in the rural county of Franche-Compté, his family, friends, and local customs becomes apparent. In the words of Dominique de Font-Réaulx, another curator from the Musée d’Orsay, this part of the display is premised on the fact that it was through “the prism of his own interiority that the painter looked, grasped, and represented his close family and native soil.” Both well-known paintings, such as The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair (shown at the Salon in 1850) and Young Ladies of the Village (which provoked furor at the Salon in 1852), and lesser known oils and drawings form part of the display. Here, the gems of the exposition, to my eye, are not the famous canvases, but small drawings of the artist’s sisters and his lover done in graphite pencil and charcoal. The little Juliette Courbet is shown fallen asleep upon her book, her delicate features and childish innocence masterfully rendered by the light strokes of the pencil. The middle sister Zélie and the lover Virginie Binet are rendered in gorgeously thick charcoal stumping, the grain of the paper and the thickness of charcoal producing a sensuous, almost palpable, texture of the drawings.
It becomes quite apparent from an attentive look at the show that Courbet delighted in painting women. His female subjects are opulent, eye-catching, and seductive in the portraits, genre scenes, and particularly in his nudes. Modern women — Courbet’s contemporaries — are pictured either in the classical vein as self-possessed society ladies (Madame de Brayer, Madame Auguste Cuoq) and stately riders (Woman in a Riding Habit), or, with a more modern take, as free-wheeling and money-loving bourgeoises (Mère Grégoire). Courbet was among the first painters to depict urban leisure taking place outside of the city, in its parks and outskirts. In Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine, finished in 1857, the artist, once again, broke all the rules by which a subject of “young ladies” could be presented to the public. Instead of chaste and virtuous demoiselles, we are confronted with loose women, most likely prostitutes, caught in the moment of languor and relaxation. With a quick glance forward, we can see that Manet, Monet, and especially Renoir took Courbet’s Young Ladies to heart.
Courbet’s influence on Renoir becomes even more apparent with the look at the master’s nudes, displayed in a small but beautifully arranged room. While he had been painting nudes from the early 1840s, it is only in 1852 that the artist decided to make a statement with his nudes in the next year’s Salon. Breaking with tradition, his Bathers of 1853 faced the Salon public with the rear of an overweight middle-aged matron coming out of water. Many people were offended, including the Emperor and his wife, but Courbet held firm in his insistence on painting “real women,” rather than idealized models. In 1866, the artist magnified this offence by accepting a commission from a Turkish diplomat to paint two women embracing in bed, as well as the shocking Origin of the World, the true to life depiction of female genitalia, open to everyone’s eyes. Despite their controversial subject matter and their destination for a private viewer, the canvases were not only notorious, but also known for the exceptional quality of craftsmanship. Courbet’s ability to convey sensuality and delicacy of flesh, rapture and freedom of movement brought these paintings of nudes to the level of masterpieces. In this section in particular — but also in the landscapes — curators made photography an important part of the display, highlighting the ubiquity of this emergent medium.
On the whole, this exhibition is carefully arranged and researched, with informative wall texts and a thorough, nearly 500-page catalogue. Its breadth can be explained, on one hand, by the Met’s collaboration with its French partners: the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and Musée Fabre in Montpellier, who brought in crucial works from their collections and whose curators — and the director of the Musée Fabre — wrote essays and contributed much of the research for the comprehensive catalogue. On the other hand, Courbet’s stature as the crucial figure in the genesis of modernism, developed in scholarship within the past 30 years, could not allow for less than thorough treatment of this artist. The only glaring gap of the exposition in New York is the absence of three famous paintings: After Dinner at Ornans, the winner of the gold medal at the Salon of 1849, which established Courbet’s reputation as an up and coming artist; the even more famous Burial at Ornans from 1850, a collective portrait of the Ornans society as Courbet knew it, rendered as a public funeral; and, most importantly, The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing up a Seven-Year Phase of My Artistic Life, refused from the Salon and exhibited in 1855 in Courbet’s personal Realism Pavilion and whose giant size — 3.5 × 6 meters — bespoke the artist’s ambition to make it his manifesto. According to the museum, the works could not travel because of their fragility and size.
Of the three masterpieces, only the absence of The Painter’s Studio is made explicit. The painting is yet another collective portrait, partly allegorical, showing the artist at his easel in the center, with a model behind him; to his right are his friends and supporters and to the left — itinerants and revolutionary types, presumed to stand for the society as a whole. To underscore its significance, the curators and designers devoted an entire room to this work. Instead of the painting, they displayed its life-size replica in gray photographic tones with clearly delineated figures but barely legible faces of the original. Several studies for the composition — portraits of Courbet’s friends and associates — are hung right on this reproduction, with the rest of the room devoted to portraits of his other Parisian friends and associates who did not find their way into the painting. For some reason, the Met has made a decision to show yet another copy of The Painter’s Studio, facing the visitor as she exits the exposition. Because the actual work is missing, the reminder about it makes a melancholic statement: it emphasizes not the importance of the painting, but the museum’s regret about its absence.
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