Gustave Courbet
by Sylvain Amic
from Hatje Cantz
Nowadays it is difficult to conceive of the impact that Gustave Courbet's paintings made on French art of the mid-nineteenth century. At once casting himself as revolutionary, bohemian and peasant, Courbet (1819-1877) overturned a deeply-entrenched tradition of academic painting in France, and, eschewing the Romanticism of Delacroix and the NeoClassicism of Ingres, coined instead an idiom he named "Realism." Realism was not pretty, classically proportioned, or literary; rather, it confronted the conditions of rural working life, then an unimaginable subject for art. The first masterpiece of this new style was "Burial at Ornans" (1849-1850), a colossal anti-epic that depicted an ordinary funeral in Courbet's home town. The contrast between the work's scale and its subject matter was pronounced, and its murky earth tones struck critics as willfully ugly--a defining reaction that would recur throughout Modernism, particularly in the reception of early works by Manet and Picasso. Courbet's palette emphasized mass and body politically--that is, in a manner that affirmed the world itself rather than the transcendence of it. His equally famous "The Origin of the World" of 1866, which presented the female genitalia close-up, made this stance explicit. The conceptual beginnings of the "painting of modern life" are as much in Courbet's "Realism" as in Charles Baudelaire's famous essay of the same name.
In this new assessment, published on the occasion of the major 2008 traveling exhibition, renowned experts shed light on the development of Courbet's realistic, critical style and trace his influence on his contemporaries and subsequent generations, as well as his relationship to early photography. At 480 pages, this monumental volume provides a long-overdue reckoning of this great artist's work.
Courbet
by Ségolène Le Men
from Abbeville Press
When Gustave Courbet (1819--1877) began his career in the late 1840s, French painting was dominated by two competing styles: neoclassicism, exemplified by Ingres, and romanticism, exemplified by Delacroix. Courbet, a dynamic and boundlessly self confident man, proud of his rural origins and guided by his strong Republican beliefs, quickly established a third way. Rejecting the historical and literary subjects of the prevailing styles as too remote from actual experience, Courbet instead depicted scenes of everyday life, particularly among the peasants and the working class, with a naturalism then considered shocking. His paint handling was correspondingly direct: disdaining equally the idealized contours and cool tones of the neoclassicists and the expressive line of the romantics, he laid on his colors almost roughly, often with a palette knife instead of a brush. While Courbet's brand of realism bears a family resemblance to those of his contemporaries Daumier and Millet, its scope is much broader: his masterworks range from the Burial at Ornans (1850), a heroically scaled depiction of a villager's funeral, to the very different Origin of the World (1866), a detailed close-up of the female anatomy, and he also painted many straight landscapes, portraits, and still lifes.
This lucidly written monograph from noted art historian Ségolène Le Men provides a new understanding of how Courbet's life and milieu shaped his vast oeuvre. Le Men organizes her text both chronologically and thematically: while the five chapters correspond to the successive phases of Courbet's career, each comprises several subsections that discuss individual aspects of his work. This hybrid approach allows Le Men to present an expansive and multifaceted view of Courbet's realism, emphasizing its evolving relations with the various ideas and artistic currents of its time.
309 full color illustrations
Gustave Courbet: 1819-1877 (Taschen Basic Art)
by Fabrice Masanes
from Taschen
Unsentimental realism
"I maintain," stated Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), "that painting is clearly a concrete art whose existence lies only in the representation of real and existing objects...." Courbet, who influenced and advised the fledgling Impressionists, was an outstanding representative of a naturalistic realism that highlights the contradictions and inequities in society. Revolutionary were Courbet's style, with dark hues and heavy brushstrokes, and choice of subject—depictions the life of plain people treated in an unsentimental, down to earth manner. His influence was enormous during his lifetime; he was offered the cross of the Legion of Honor in 1872 but he refused it. A man always at odds with authority, be it artistic or political, Courbet became a member of the Paris Commune and was briefly imprisoned and forced to flee to Switzerland for the final years of his life.
Courbet
by Linda Nochlin
from Thames & Hudson
The product of a lifetime's scholarship: Linda Nochlin's complete writings on Courbet's work.
Linda Nochlin is one of the most influential art historians of our time. For more than four decades, she has been at the forefront of the feminist critique of art history, playing a pivotal role in shaping the course of the discipline. Ever since completing a doctorate on Gustave Courbet in the early 1960s, she has devoted herself to a lifelong study of the artist, arguably the most radical of all nineteenth-century painters and one of the fathers of modern art.
Now, in this landmark volume, every aspect of Courbet's oeuvre comes under Nochlin's scrutiny—from his vast realist depictions of provincial French life, allegorical works, and paint-encrusted landscapes to his dark, brooding portraits, sensual nudes, and earthy still lifes. In a specially written introduction, she considers Courbet's lasting impact not only on later painting but also on the practice of art history itself.
With essays spanning forty years, Courbet is much more than a monograph on a single artist. It is also the story of the intellectual development of one of our leading writers on the visual arts. 130 illustrations, 10 in color.
Courbet and the Modern Landscape (Getty Trust Publications: J. Paul Getty Museum)
by Mary Morton
from Getty Publications
With its fittingly dramatic design, Courbet and the Modern Landscape accompanies the first major museum exhibition specifically to address Gustave Courbet's extraordinary achievement in landscape painting. Many of these carefully selected works produced from 1855 to 1876--gathered from Asia, Europe, and North America--will be new to readers.
The catalogue--which accompanies an exhibition at the Getty Museum to be held from February 21 to May 14, 2006--highlights the artist's expressive responses to the natural environment. Essays by the curators examine Courbet's distinctly modern practice of landscape painting. Mary Morton's essay situates his landscapes in relation to his work in other genres, his critical reputation, and his role in establishing a new pictorial language for landscape painting. Charlotte Eyerman's essay investigates how later generations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists responded to Courbet's example. The catalogue also includes an essay by Dominique de Font-Reaulx, curator of photographs at the Musee d'Orsay, on the relationship between Courbet's work and landscape photography of the 1850s and 1860s.
Letters of Gustave Courbet
by Gustave Courbet
from University Of Chicago Press
pivotal figure in the emergence of modern painting, remains
an artist whose interests, attitudes, and friendships are
little understood. A voluminous correspondent, Courbet
himself, through his letters, offers a tantalizing avenue
toward a keener assessment of his character and
accomplishments. In her critical edition of over six hundred
of the artist's letters, Petra ten-Doesschate Chu presents
just such a look at the inner life of the artist; her
unparalleled feat of gathering together all of Courbet's
known letters, many heretofore unpublished and untranslated,
is sure to change our evaluation of Courbet's creativity and
of his place in nineteenth-century French life.
Beginning when Courbet left his provincial home at
eighteen and ending eight days before his death in exile in
Switzerland, this correspondence enables readers to follow
the artist's development from youth to mature artist of
international repute. Addressed to correspondents such as
the poet Charles Baudelaire, the painter Claude Monet, the
writers Champfleury, Victor Hugo, and Théeophile Gautier,
the political theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and the
politician Jules Simon, the letters offer numerous insights
into Courbet's life and art as well as the cultural and
political activity of his day. In fascinating detail, they
present the artist's relation to the contemporary media, his
deliberate choice of subject matter for Salon paintings, his
preoccupation with photography, and his participation in the
Commune.
Besides collecting, translating, and annotating the
letters, Chu provides an introduction, a chronology,
biographies of persons appearing frequently in the letters,
and a list of paintings and sculptures mentioned in the
letters. Her work is an essential resource of immediate use
to historians of art and culture, political and social
historians, and readers of biography.
Petra ten-Doesschate Chu is professor and head of the
Department of Art and Music at Seton Hall University.
Courbet A&I (Art and Ideas)
by James Henry Rubin
from Phaidon Press
The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture
by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu
from Princeton University Press
The modern artist strives to be independent of the public's taste--and yet depends on the public for a living. Petra Chu argues that the French Realist Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) understood this dilemma perhaps better than any painter before him. In The Most Arrogant Man in France, the first comprehensive reinterpretation of Courbet in a generation, Chu tells the fascinating story of how, in the initial age of mass media and popular high art, this important artist managed to achieve an unprecedented measure of artistic and financial independence by promoting his work and himself through the popular press.
The Courbet who emerges in Chu's account is a sophisticated artist and entrepreneur who understood that the modern artist must sell--and not only make--his art. Responding to this reality, Courbet found new ways to "package," exhibit, and publicize his work and himself. Chu shows that Courbet was one of the first artists to recognize and take advantage of the publicity potential of newspapers, using them to create acceptance of his work and to spread an image of himself as a radical outsider. Courbet introduced the independent show by displaying his art in popular venues outside the Salon, and he courted new audiences, including women.
And for a time Courbet succeeded, achieving a rare freedom for a nineteenth-century French artist. If his strategy eventually backfired and he was forced into exile, his pioneering vision of the artist's career in the modern world nevertheless makes him an intriguing forerunner to all later media-savvy artists.
Gustave Courbet (Da Capo Paperback)
by Gerstle Mack
from Da Capo Press
Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution
by T. J. Clark
from University of California Press
When Image of the People and its companion volume, The Absolute Bourgeois, appeared in 1973, they signaled a new direction for writing about art. "The book's success is crucial," wrote Michael Rosenthal, "because there are few models for this type of study, and it is of necessity pioneering." New Left Review said the book's great merit was that "it elucidates a number of crucial theoretical problems through the concrete analysis of a concrete situation. To the eternal--and false--question: 'What is revolutionary art?' Clark gives an implicit reply by substituting for it another, more fertile one: 'What were the effects of a particular Revolution upon pictorial practice?'"
Clark's focus is on Gustave Courbet in the four years following 1848. His book aims to show how Courbet's wholesale recasting of the terms and ambitions of modern art, in paintings like The Stonebreakers and A Burial at Ornans, was bound up with the texture of French history at a fateful moment: the battle of pamphlets and images being waged in the countryside in 1849-50, the search for a means to connect with a "popular" audience, the deepening enigma of peasant politics, and the confusions and dangers of class.
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