TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/010989/01098900.066

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 7KB | 120 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.