Book Description
Nowadays it is difficult to conceive of the impact that Gustave Courbet's paintings made on French art of the mid-nineteenth century. At once casting himself as revolutionary, bohemian and peasant, Courbet (1819-1877) overturned a deeply-entrenched tradition of academic painting in France, and, eschewing the Romanticism of Delacroix and the NeoClassicism of Ingres, coined instead an idiom he named "Realism." Realism was not pretty, classically proportioned, or literary; rather, it confronted the conditions of rural working life, then an unimaginable subject for art. The first masterpiece of this new style was "Burial at Ornans" (1849-1850), a colossal anti-epic that depicted an ordinary funeral in Courbet's home town. The contrast between the work's scale and its subject matter was pronounced, and its murky earth tones struck critics as willfully ugly--a defining reaction that would recur throughout Modernism, particularly in the reception of early works by Manet and Picasso. Courbet's palette emphasized mass and body politically--that is, in a manner that affirmed the world itself rather than the transcendence of it. His equally famous "The Origin of the World" of 1866, which presented the female genitalia close-up, made this stance explicit. The conceptual beginnings of the "painting of modern life" are as much in Courbet's "Realism" as in Charles Baudelaire's famous essay of the same name.
In this new assessment, published on the occasion of the major 2008 traveling exhibition, renowned experts shed light on the development of Courbet's realistic, critical style and trace his influence on his contemporaries and subsequent generations, as well as his relationship to early photography. At 480 pages, this monumental volume provides a long-overdue reckoning of this great artist's work. ... Read more

Book Description
Unsentimental realism

"I maintain," stated Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), "that painting is clearly a concrete art whose existence lies only in the representation of real and existing objects...." Courbet, who influenced and advised the fledgling Impressionists, was an outstanding representative of a naturalistic realism that highlights the contradictions and inequities in society. Revolutionary were Courbet's style, with dark hues and heavy brushstrokes, and choice of subject—depictions the life of plain people treated in an unsentimental, down to earth manner. His influence was enormous during his lifetime; he was offered the cross of the Legion of Honor in 1872 but he refused it. A man always at odds with authority, be it artistic or political, Courbet became a member of the Paris Commune and was briefly imprisoned and forced to flee to Switzerland for the final years of his life. ... Read more

Book Description

The modern artist strives to be independent of the public's taste--and yet depends on the public for a living. Petra Chu argues that the French Realist Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) understood this dilemma perhaps better than any painter before him. In The Most Arrogant Man in France, the first comprehensive reinterpretation of Courbet in a generation, Chu tells the fascinating story of how, in the initial age of mass media and popular high art, this important artist managed to achieve an unprecedented measure of artistic and financial independence by promoting his work and himself through the popular press.

The Courbet who emerges in Chu's account is a sophisticated artist and entrepreneur who understood that the modern artist must sell--and not only make--his art. Responding to this reality, Courbet found new ways to "package," exhibit, and publicize his work and himself. Chu shows that Courbet was one of the first artists to recognize and take advantage of the publicity potential of newspapers, using them to create acceptance of his work and to spread an image of himself as a radical outsider. Courbet introduced the independent show by displaying his art in popular venues outside the Salon, and he courted new audiences, including women.

And for a time Courbet succeeded, achieving a rare freedom for a nineteenth-century French artist. If his strategy eventually backfired and he was forced into exile, his pioneering vision of the artist's career in the modern world nevertheless makes him an intriguing forerunner to all later media-savvy artists.

Customer Reviews (1)

The Man with the Pipe
"COURBET, without ideals and without religion." Courbet is said to have used this phrase occasionally on his writing-paper, surmounted by a drawing of two crossed pipes. And he was rarely seen without his pipe. Critics try to make him out as some kind of social revolutionary(painter of social realism) but as Mack tells it he did not define himself by the labels others coined. Courbet, however he may have been interpreted, was the one man revolution which challenged the academies and Salon system of showing art in France. He is a great and colorful figure and his story is very exciting to follow(complete with tales of beer and Vendome toppling). This biography is a very enjoyable telling of Courbet's life and the history of France at the time.There is plenty of detailed analysis of paintings here and the approach is scholarly and full of facts allowing all the various interpretations of Courbet's work to gently coexist but there is enough story here to attract the more casual follower of the visual arts as well. My copy of this has black and white reproductions of the paintings( not sure why they even bothered) but they put them all at the very end so they don't get in the way. You will want to see the paintings as they are discussed so save your money and buy a book of beautiful reproductions to sift through as you read. And get yourself a clay pipe to assist you in your viewing. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description

Customer Reviews (1)

Excellent, thorough, interesting compendium
This compendium of letters by Courbet, translated from the French, offers a firsthand insight into his personal and professional life from when he was a young man, writing letters to his parents, throughout his long career, when he was corresponding with art dealers, friends, family, and so on. Many of these letters are previously unpublished, so this tome is a very thorough biography as told through letters. A must-have resource for scholars looking for primary source material. ... Read more

Book Description
With its fittingly dramatic design, Courbet and the Modern Landscape accompanies the first major museum exhibition specifically to address Gustave Courbet's extraordinary achievement in landscape painting. Many of these carefully selected works produced from 1855 to 1876--gathered from Asia,
Europe, and North America--will be new to readers.
The catalogue--which accompanies an exhibition at the Getty Museum to be held from February 21 to May 14, 2006--highlights the artist's expressive responses to the natural environment. Essays by the curators examine Courbet's distinctly modern practice of landscape painting. Mary Morton's essay
situates his landscapes in relation to his work in other genres, his critical reputation, and his role in establishing a new pictorial language for landscape painting. Charlotte Eyerman's essay investigates how later generations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists responded to Courbet's
example. The catalogue also includes an essay by Dominique de Font-Reaulx, curator of photographs at the Musee d'Orsay, on the relationship between Courbet's work and landscape photography of the 1850s and 1860s. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Unavailable
I have not received the book so it is impossible to review it.Mary Mathews ... Read more

Book Description
When Image of the People and its companion volume, The Absolute Bourgeois, appeared in 1973, they signaled a new direction for writing about art. "The book's success is crucial," wrote Michael Rosenthal, "because there are few models for this type of study, and it is of necessity pioneering." New Left Review said the book's great merit was that "it elucidates a number of crucial theoretical problems through the concrete analysis of a concrete situation. To the eternal--and false--question: 'What is revolutionary art?' Clark gives an implicit reply by substituting for it another, more fertile one: 'What were the effects of a particular Revolution upon pictorial practice?'"
Clark's focus is on Gustave Courbet in the four years following 1848. His book aims to show how Courbet's wholesale recasting of the terms and ambitions of modern art, in paintings like The Stonebreakers and A Burial at Ornans, was bound up with the texture of French history at a fateful moment: the battle of pamphlets and images being waged in the countryside in 1849-50, the search for a means to connect with a "popular" audience, the deepening enigma of peasant politics, and the confusions and dangers of class. ... Read more