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               {Courbet as Rebel}
               {A bit of humour}

Courbet



  
Courbet as Rebel

See also:  [
in the art world of Paris. His independentce brought him into conflict
with Nieuwekerke in 1854 only a year  before the International [EMPH mine]
Exhibition in Paris.  Nieuwekerke invited Courbet to lunch in an
attempt to avoide embarrassement, hoping to bring Courbet into line:

    As soonas he saw me he threw himself at me, shook
    my hand and cried that he was delighted that I had 
    accepted, that he wanted to deal openly with me
    and wasn't concelaing the fact that he'd come to
    convert me.

    [LOCAL NOTE 6: As per Patricia Mainardi, P.57, Art and Politics of the 
     Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867
     (New Haven and London, 1989). Milner notes:  In 1861, Courbet 
     explained that 'The basis of realism is a negation of the ideal,
     a negation towards which my studies have led me for fifteen
     years and which no artist has dared to affirm until now.
     ... Thought my affirmation of the negation of the ideal, I
     have arrived at the eamancipation of the individual and 
     finally at democracy. Realism is esstentially the democratic
     art'.  Les Précurseurs d'Anvers (Antwerp, 22 August 1861),
     cited in G. Mack Gustave Courbet (London, 1951), P. 89.

     [Back to REALISM page]
 
     [END LOCAL-NOTE-6]        

Courbet was not moved: 'He continued, telling me that the Government was 
unhappy to see me goingit alone, that it was necessary to moderate my views,
to put some water in my wine, that the Governmeent wanted to help me, that
I ought not to be so obstinate. [LOCAL NOTE 7: Mainardi, OpCit, P.57]

Courbet was offered a commisssion with conditions attached which he 
rejected outfright in favour of his own private display. Even allowing
for Courbet's re-telling of this event and allowing for a degree of
tollerance on the state's side, Courbet was clearly a difficult case 
as he wished to retain independence outside the prevailing structure
of patronage and oppurtunity. This alone marked him out as an aritst 
undermining the sytem and it made him newsworthy. His sheer avility,
his ambtion as a painter, his arrogant self-confidnce and his friendship
with the social theorist Proudhon made it clear
that Courbet was powerfully subversvie and a danger to the cultural
coherence of imperial Paris. This was indeed the basis of the realist
approach as Courbet saw it. Working fom his own experience, with minimal
referecne to convetnion, this self-confessed privincial painter 
challenged the whole framework of court patronage. In his own pavillion,
bulit ajacent to the official International Exhibition, he displayed
some of his largest and most ambitious works, incuding The Painter's
Studio. A real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic life.


[Oil on canvas, 359x598cm (12x20.5ft), 1855; signed and dated
 lower left '55 Courbet'. Musée d'Orsay, Paris (see map;)]

[In] which a figure appears who is probably Napoléon III distinguished
by his extraordinary moustache extended horizontially to end in fine 
points. He appears in the role of rat-catcher with none of the pomp
of imperial grandeur. Courbt, in a word, rejected his authority and
not merely in the arts.

END BLOCK-QUOTE

Quotes


Important works


Chronology


A bit of humour

From: [Realism Now, by Linda Nochlin]

      Courbet was accused of painting objects just as one might 
      encounter them, without any compositional linkage, and of 
      reducing art to the indiscriminate reproduction of the first 
      subject to come along. "He makes his stones as important 
      as his stone breakers", complained one outraged critic of 
      the eponymous painting.

Well, I should certainly hope so!  As we all know eponoymouse
can spread to all sorts of things if this sort of thing isn't sorted
out and stopped here-to-with a-fore-foot.