Courbet (Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, Stonebreakers)
Arguably the most influential of the mid 19th-century Realists, Gustave Courbet (goos-tav core-bay), is the first major artist that we can identify as avant-garde (ahh-vahhnt guard). This was originally a French military term subsequently adopted for certain radical artists and thinkers. Avant = advance or forward, garde like the English word, guard = soldier, so the original phrase referred to the vanguard or the troops that pushed ahead of the main battalions at great personal risk. In the art world, avant-garde refers to those artists willing to risk their reputations in search of new solutions that might, if ultimately successful, be adopted by the many.
Let us allow Courbet to introduce himself to us by taking a careful look at his canvas Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, 1854. Courbet has painted himself on the right side. This self-portrait offers a number of significant clues as to how the artist thought of himself or perhaps how he wished to be seen. Rather like dressing in the morning or applying makeup (if you do), a self-portrait allows for a degree of control over the way that others perceive you. Courbet, then, is announcing who he is. Our job is to read the clues that this image offers. Looking closely at the painting, Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, please try to identify clues that tell us about who these three people are. Before you say to yourself, “I don’t know how to do this.” Remember that you are in fact an expert in reading the clues given by the people around you. Everyday you respond to body language, types and styles of clothing, facial expression, hand gesture, and environmental context. Those judgments are based upon your quick and quite sophisticated assessment of these sorts of clues. So look at these figures as actors on a stage or, as Courbet has suggested, people who you’ve run across as you stroll a country road. What do the costumes, the props, the interactions express?
Let’s begin with the costume. The man in the green jacket beside the dog is very well dressed indeed. But is the man in brown next to him? He wears a suit, but it is worn and ill fitting. His name is Calas and he serves the man beside him. The rich man in the center is flanked by both his servent Calas and his dog. Is Courbet trying to draw a connection between this man and the dog as well as a distinction between himself and the group of three? Do you see this as a chance meeting? And what of the angle of the heads? Look closely at the angle of Courbet’s head in relation to the angle of the servant.
The fellow in green is the son of a banker, an industrialist named Alfred Bruyas who is one of Courbet’s patrons and had himself been a painter. Bruyas has also removed his right glove, presumably to shake Courbet’s hand, Courbet has not returned the gesture. The patron and artist, though, are unfairly matched, since Bruyas is on Courbet’s turf. We know that Courbet came from Ornans in eastern France, quite outside of the orbit of Paris where Courbet had moved. But here, Courbet is self-sufficient, he carries on his back a folding easel that contains everything he needs (paint, canvas, palette, oil, turpentine, and rags) to paint directly from nature. Bruyas on the other hand must be trailed by a servant and carries only a small cane. One can imagine that Bruyas and his servant had been transported by the carriage in the background, ill-prepared as they are for the countryside, while Courbet had evidently been making his way on foot. The meeting between the two men represents the vitality of the countryside contrasted to the mannered style of the city. Even the different treatment of Bruyas and Courbet’s beards, though related to each man’s true likeness, further underscores the contrast of the stuffy aesthete to the “worker-artist.” The issue we’ve discussed before, exaltation of the countryside as the Industrial Revolution progressed, sees its full expression in this work.
This then really is Courbet’s manifesto. Here is the artist, a man of the country who goes his own way… Unlike the other great painters of rural life and labor, painters such as Millet, the artist Gustave Courbet was very active politically. In 1848, he witnessed and read about a series of unsuccessful upraising in France, England, and Germany. These revolts had been inspired by earlier enlightenment thinking but unlike the American and French Revolutions of the 18th century, these more modern actions were now fueled by the depravations and mass dislocations caused by the industrialization of Western Europe and especially the laissez-faire capitalism that built both massive fortunes and the slums of the wretchedly poor.
And life was indeed wretched for most. When we think of the economic system currently employed in the United States, we think of modern capitalism. After all, the planned socialist economies of the “Iron Curtain” (the Soviet Union and its allies), have been discredited. However, before we come to feel too smug, we should remember that our system is actually is a highly socialized capitalism, which is a very good thing. As stated earlier, pure capitalism is brutal. This period saw young children chiseling coal from tunnels too narrow for adults and the common use of poisonous substances without even rudimentary safeguards required for workers. There was no safety net beyond one’s family and church. Many died of neglect, starvation, and disease.
If we look closely at Courbet’s painting, The Stonebreakers, c. 1849 (this, by the way, was a year after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote their influential pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto) the artist’s concern for the plight of the poor is evident. Here, two figures labor to break and remove stone from a road that is being built. In our age of powerful jackhammers and bulldozers, such work is reserved as punishment for chain-gangs. Unlike, Millet’s hale and hearty rural folk, Courbet’s figures wear clothing that is ripped and tattered. None of Millet’s idealized dream here. Courbet want’s to show what is “real.” Indeed, Courbet has replaced Millet’s young and powerful sower with a man that is far too old and a boy that is still too young for such back-breaking work. But this is not meant to be heroic, it is meant to be an accurate account of the abuse and deprivation that was a common feature of mid-century France. And as with so much great art, there is a close affiliation between the narrative (story) and the formal choices made. By formal, I am referring to the elements such as brushwork, composition, line, and color. Here the figures are set against a low hill of the sort common in the rural French town of Ornan, where Courbet had been raised and continued to spend a much of his time. The hill reaches to the top of the canvas everywhere but the right most corner where a sharp blue sky is seen. The effect is to close off these laborers. They almost feel trapped. The brushwork is a bit rougher than might be expected during the mid 19th century, perhaps a conscious rejection of the high finish sought by the Neo-classicists who still dominated French art in 1848. Perhaps most characteristic of Courbet’s style is his refusal to focus on the parts of the image that would usually receive the most attention. Traditionally, an artist would spent the most time on the hands, faces, and foregrounds. Not Courbet. If you look carefully, you will notice that he attempts to be even-handed, attending to faces and rock equally. So what then is Courbet’s Realism?
