Courbet: Painting as Politics

By ROBERT HUGHES

The realist-revolutionary in a Paris retrospective

Any artist who feels mashed by critics can take comfort in what used to be written about Gustave Courbet. Consider the broadside he got from Alexandre Dumas fils in 1871: "Under what gardener's bell, with the help of what manure, as a result of what mixture of wine, beer, corrosive mucus and flatulent edema can have grown this sonorous and hairy pumpkin, this aesthetic belly, this imbecilic and impotent incarnation of the Self?"

Dumas was not alone in his fury. The French political journals, center and right, ravaged Courbet for years, and beside their vilifications the attacks on impressionism and cubism were mere Ping Pong. Such vehemence only rises from the conviction that art changes life: that painting has a public role.

One contemporary critic described Courbet's work as "an engine of revolution." Courbet agreed. He thought of himself as a subversive force: the epitome of the avantgarde, a one-man realist movement. "I am Courbetist, that's all. My painting is the only true one. I am the first and the unique artist of the century; the others are students or drivelers . . ." Pipe, Assyrian beard, clogs and beer gut: all his life he projected an image of invincible roughness and solidity. In fact, his greatest paintings were rarely the work of a simple realist. For example, The Meeting, 1854, showing Courbet's encounter with his patron Alfred Bruyas and a manservant on the road near Montpellier, was based on a woodcut of two bourgeois meeting the Wandering Jew; but its poses (oddly ritualized for a "realist" work) may carry an esoteric reference to Masonry. Nevertheless, Courbet seemed a monster of high animal spirits, rooting like a boar for sustenance in the gray rocks of his native Ornans--a man of the people (in reality, the son of a well-off landowner) who never lost his country accent to the Paris salons.

"You are very proud, monsieur!" exclaimed a high cultural official after one of Courbet's outbursts against government. "Monsieur," he retorted, "I am the most arrogant man in France." So he was. Courbet considered himself the Michelangelo of socialism. In the 1848 revolution, he bragged, "there were only two men ready--me and Proudhon." The 1871 revolution found him on the side of the Paris Commune, which called for the demolition of that symbol of "false glory," the Vendome Column. Later, the Commune crushed, a vengeful state passed a law to make Courbet bear the cost of restoring the column. Bankrupt, he fled to Switzerland and died in exile in 1877. There is always room for argument over the extent of Courbet's realism. The man who insisted on setting down the bald truth of visual experience, from a drunken priest's red nose to the drool on a stag's jaws, was allegorist and history painter as well as factual witness; and there he could be very puzzling indeed. The debate on Courbet has been stepped up by a magnificent retrospective that opened this fall at the Grand Palais in Paris and will move to London in January. With a catalogue by Art Historian Helene Toussaint, it brings together more than 140 paintings and drawings, centered around the huge machines that normally hang in the Louvre: A Burial at Ornans and (all 11 1/2 ft. by 19 ft. of it) The Painter's Studio.

It is Courbet's concreteness that strikes one first. He had an extraordinary power to realize sensations. No sky is airier, more washed with light, than the blue space of The Meeting. Apples in a dish acquire a red density, a solidity--a completeness of being--that no painted apple had before. As the English critic John Berger remarked, the force of gravity was to Courbet what the vibration of light was to Monet and the impressionists. He could put more death into a trout, hooked and flapping on the pebbles, than Raphael could inject into a whole Crucifixion. Courbet's flesh was not an ideal substance, like the flesh of Ingres or Meissonier. Rather, it was weighty, carnal and real. It could be smoothed by relaxation, as with the sumptuous lesbian couple in Sleep, 1866. Or it could be pinched and chapped, like the mourners' faces in A Burial at Ornans, 1850. The nude figure in The Bathers, 1853, that pink wardrobe waddling into the forest, was a scandal; one wag dubbed it "a 45-year-old woman at the moment of washing herself for the first time in her life, in the hope of assuaging her rash." But we now see in the figure's mounds, dimples and excited brush marks one of the most majestic nudes since Rubens.

In his heroic materialism, Courbet was one of the ancestors of cubism. But his sense of reality extended beyond material, to social organization; hence the storm over A Burial at Ornans. In that black frieze punctuated by village faces, all held under the chalk bluffs of the distant landscape as beneath a sarcophagus lid, Courbet realized a whole rural society: not "noble peasants" mourning in a generalized Arcadia, but real people. The painting revealed, in country life, the same kind of bourgeois complexity that existed in the city. This contradicted the Parisians' idea of rural harmony and was, for that reason, shocking.

The least "realist" of all Courbet's paintings, because it is the most purely allegorical, was The Painter's Studio. There are as many interpretations of this vast, ambitious and obscure 1855 work as there are Courbet scholars. Its format is a Last Judgment--Courbet painting in the middle, his enemies to the left, his friends to the right. "On the right, all the activists," Courbet explained in a letter to a friendly critic, "that is to say, the friends, the workers, the lovers of the world of art. On the left, the other world of trivial existence, the people, misery, poverty and wealth, the exploited and the exploiters, the people who feed off death." Some of the figures, particularly those on the right, have long been identified -- Baudelaire, Proudhon, the critic Champfleury. Professor Toussaint, however, gives a complicated new reading to the painting by suggesting that (for instance) the huntsman on the left is Napoleon III and that the central group is a Masonic allegory, with Courbet as master of the lodge. Whatever this puzzling giant of a painting may have been intended to mean, it remains one of the pictorial achievements of the 19th century. To see it surrounded by the rest of Courbet's work, as a climax to his prodigious energy, is a revelation. We are left with a less doctrinaire Courbet than before -- but a much more interesting one.

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