TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010989/01098900.066

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.9 KB | 134 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 68

An Abiding Passion for Reality


The character of Courbet is captured in a rich new show

By Robert Hughes


    Gustave Courbet has been seen for most of this century as
the patriarch of the avant-garde ideal, a man both embodying his
time and working in defiance of bourgeois taste: in short, a
hero. He was born in 1819 the son of a farmer, lived as a
socialist, and died in 1877 exiled in Switzerland, his paintings
deemed unexhibitable in France on political grounds. In the end,
Courbet was financially crushed by a judgment imposed on him by
the French government of more than 300 million francs --
precisely the cost of re-erecting the Vendome Column, the
imperial symbol for whose toppling, during the Paris Commune of
1871, he was unjustly blamed.

    All that, and a painter of unassailable, though uneven,
greatness!  Courbet has become one of the titans of radical
nostalgia. There cannot be a political artist alive who does
not dream of having Courbet's sweeping breadth of access to the
public. "Courbet Reconsidered," the show of 97 paintings and
drawings, organized by the art historians Sarah Faunce and Linda
Nochlin, currently at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City (and
scheduled to open at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in
February), is not, and could not have been, a "complete" show.
But it is the first attempt by an American museum to show
Courbet whole in nearly 30 years.

    Unlike the Courbet exhibition in Paris in 1977, it leaves
out several of the most ambitious Second Empire paintings: A
Burial at Ornans, The Meeting, The Bathers -- with its
"Hottentot Venus," as one hostile critic called her, that
waddling wardrobe of a nude that became the scandal of the 1853
Salon. Also missing is Courbet's "real allegory," The Painter's
Studio, which hangs at the Musee d'Orsay. Such things can no
longer be moved. Without them, can a Courbet retrospective make
full sense? Emphatically yes. The character of Courbet the
painter is richly distributed through his work, not just in its
most famous images; in any case, the curators have secured other
magisterial works from French museums, such as his great image
of lesbian love, Sleep, 1866, and The Young Ladies on the Banks
of the Seine (Summer), 1856-57.

    Every aspect of his work is thoroughly set on view in
Brooklyn: landscape, portraiture, animal painting, social
commentary, erotica. And from them Courbet rises more vividly
and intensely now than ever before in living memory, at least
in America. Courbet -- this combative, ambitious, narcissistic
and earthy man, crazy about women, convinced of his own
historical mission -- thought he was the painter of his time.
His egotism still grates. What school did he belong to? "I am
Courbetist, that's all. My painting is the only true one. I am
the first and unique artist of the century; the others are
students or drivelers."

    Without this battleship of an ego, Courbet would hardly
have survived the attacks of the critics of his day. What was
realism to his enemies? Atheism, socialism, materialism,
crudity: a denial of all decent control. An audience that doted
on the rococo peasant had insuperable difficulties with
Courbet's frieze of worn faces and homespun black suits in
Burial at Ornans, 1850. He painted, someone gibed, the way one
waxed boots. He was seen as a dangerous socialist, a besmircher
of the ideal, a bucolic thug from the Franche-Comte trampling
all over the classical tradition with his wooden clogs.

    What one sees today, especially in Brooklyn, is a different
Courbet. He is a painter immersed both in popular art and in
the traditions of his medium (Caravaggio, the Le Nains, Corot).
He is inventive, yes, but not in a burn-the-Louvre way. He is
an empiricist (though not without sentimental moments) for whom
the sense of touch preceded that of sight. What the vibration
of light would be to Monet, the force of gravity was to Courbet.
It is the physical law that insinuates itself into almost every
one of his images, confirming their materiality and stressing
their essential subject matter -- the weighty body of the world.

    His disheveled girls on the banks of the Seine, in the
painting that initiated a spate of such images among the
impressionists 20 years later, are drawn into the earth, their
limbs and puffy faces asserting the heaviness of sleep. His
trellised roses are inordinately fleshy; his apples, red and
bruised -- no perfect objects of oral desire here -- are solid
as stone. He painted hair, especially the thick curly tresses
of Whistler's Irish mistress Jo Heffernan, as though he were
running his fingers through it.

    This predisposition made him a great painter of the nude,
though undoubtedly  a phallocratic one. One sees him at full
stretch in Sleep, the painting of two life-size lesbians
entwined on a bed. It proves the impossibility of
distinguishing, at a certain level, between pornography and art.
The painting has little to do with lesbian perceptions of sex:
it is a seraglio scene, an enactment for men's eyes only. But
despite the corniness of the flowers and pearls that allegorize
Luxury, the creamy rose of those bodies, shadowed with olive and
held within the complicated machinery of the pose, is a
breathtaking pictorial achievement.

    The surprise of the show is Courbet's Origin of the World,
1866, by far the most transgressive image in 19th century
painting. Long presumed lost, it turned up appropriately enough
in the collection of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. It
is a frontal view of a woman's pubes, painted with vast
enthusiasm: the symbolic climax, one might say, of the series
of dark caverns Courbet painted in his native countryside, The
Source of the Loue, 1864. The objectivity of Courbet's work
connotes a deep and sensuous love of whatever he painted.
Sometimes his portraits of dead birds and animals -- like the
brilliant Girl with Seagulls, Trouville, 1865 -- hark back to
18th century prototypes like Oudry, but their pressing reality
comes from Courbet's own love of hunting.

    Time and again, in this show, one sees proleptic hints of
art to come. The limestone crags and ledges of the valleys
around his native Flagey, capped with dense dark green and
anchored by thick clefts of shadow, have a solidity that young
Cezanne would emulate, along with the pasty, almost mortared
paint that evokes their surfaces. His rolling waves, marbled
with foam as solidly as a steak with fat, reappear on the other
side of the Atlantic in Winslow Homer's seapieces at Prout's
Neck in Maine. Picasso would do versions of the sleeping girls
on the banks of the Seine. In fact, Courbet has always been a
painter's painter, because the scope of his appetite could show
others how not to be afraid of their own vulgarity. His career
reminds us that great and idiotic artists have something in
common -- both are shameless.