Courbet Reconsidered
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Courbet Reconsidered Details
Essays discuss Courbet's life and career and are accompanied by selected paintings and drawings
Reviews
This book is the catalogue to the exhibition of the same name mounted at The Brooklyn Museum from October 1988 to January 1989, the first comprehensive exhibit of Courbet's works in the United States in thirty years. It was co-curated by Sarah Faunce and Linda Nochlin. Sarah Faunce, author of the Courbet volume in the Abrams series Masters of Art, was at the time Chair of The Brooklyn Museum's Department of Painting and Sculpture and is the Director of the Courbet Catalogue Raisonne Project. Linda Nochlin, esteemed for years as the founding figure and leading light of feminist art history, is currently the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University and one of the most distinguished Courbet scholars in the world, whose most recent publication is a collection of her many essays on the artist, entitled "Courbet" (see my review on this website). Given such credentials, one expects the most exacting curatorial standards, and the catalogue completely satisfies our expectations. One frustration inevitably attendant on any Courbet exhibition is that fact that some of his most important and best known canvases are too large or now simply too fragile to travel, yet no comprehensive treatment of Courbet can be complete without them. The editors have addressed this problem by including a section of plates of paintings that figure in the discussion but could not be exhibited, including fine fold-out reproductions of "A Burial at Ornans" and "The Painter's Studio," which are the largest reproductions of these enormous canvases that I have found in any of the recent Courbet books. There are also a good chronology, comprehensive notes to the texts, a title index, and a short but serviceable bibliography.The catalogue consists of 101 entries (drawings and paintings), all in good reproductions of adequate size, ranging from a pencil portrait of Courbet's sister Juliette from ca. 1840 to the final canvas, left unfinished upon his death in Swiss exile in 1877. The exhibition collection was excellently chosen, so that all of the categories of Courbet's paintings are represented by major, if not the most outstanding works. Some of the finest portraits and early self-portraits are here (the famous portrait of Proudhon could not be exhibited, but it is reproduced as a plate), as are the landscapes of his native province of Franche-Compte (including the many scenes of the sources of the famous local streams and the hidden stream beds), the hunting scenes, the seascapes (or "landscapes of the sea," as this inveterate mountaineer preferred to call them), the occasional flower-arrangements and even the fruit still lifes and the hooked trout paintings he made in post-Commune imprisonment--these are all represented by outstanding works. And there are also a couple of the nudes for which Courbet was also famous, even though they constituted a minuscule fraction of his output: "Bather Sleeping by a Brook" (1845) and "The Bathers" (1853). And also the notorious "Sleep," the Lesbian lovers intertwined in postcoital slumber, commissioned from the artist in 1866 by the dissolute Turkish diplomat Khalil Bey. And also, even, astonishingly, that other painting commissioned by Bey, the canvas once acidly described by Maxime du Camp as the portrait of a woman-- except that the artist had "neglected to represent the feet, the legs, the thighs, the stomach, the hips, the chest, the hands, the arms, the shoulders, the neck, and the head"--which Courbet, in tribute to what was left, called "The Origin of the World," and which is now mounted in the Musee d'Orsay. For this near-legendary painting to have been exhibited to the public for the first time since its creation in this Brooklyn exhibition was a stunning curatorial coup and must have been a great personal triumph for Linda Nochlin, who devotes a chapter in her Courbet book mentioned above to a description of one frustrating and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to locate the original, which for 120 years was in private collections and known to the public only through black-and white reproductions of poor quality and which in this catalogue receives its first book publication. This and the other reproductions are accompanied by concise and authoritative commentaries by the curatorial staff.Six scholarly essays precede the catalogue. In "Reconsidering Courbet," Sarah Faunce examines some of the changes that have taken place in Courbet studies since the installation of his paintings in the Musee d'Orsay has enabled a more convenient comparison with the work of his contemporaries, and she gives a general overview of the issues currently surrounding his work. Linda Nochlin presents a new interpretation of "The Painter's Studio," probably the most enigmatic of his paintings, seeing it as an allegory in a number of ways, including that of the origins of painting itself, from a resolutely feminist perspective. This essay is set up as a dialogue of sorts with Michael Fried's "Courbet's 'Femininity,'" which contends that the artist is attempting in much of his painting to suspend his own spectatorhood and to merge corporeally with figures in his paintings. Nochlin takes issue with that in her essay, and Fried replies to her in his: it is an interesting way to set up a discussion between two essays in the same volume. If that discussion occupies the rather rarified air of a very theoretical approach, Petra Chu brings us back to earth with her examination of Courbet's experience of landscape as a continuously evolving presence and the way he adapted his painting techniques to accommodate his perceptions. There is an interesting short article on the artist's early reception in America and a concluding essay by Claudette Mainzer, "Who is Buried at Ornans?" that looks at the setting and society depicted in Courbet's first huge canvas as the context in which the artist's early social and artistic viewpoints were formed, and she answers the question: Not Courbet's maternal grandfather, as has often been thought, but one Claude-Etienne Teste, "Cultivateur," a more distant relative, but pointedly also a liberal Republican during the Revolution.