Gustave Courbet

Courbet, Gustave 

Born June 10, 1819, in Ornans, Franche-Comté; died Dec. 31, 1877, in Tour de Peilz, Switzerland. French painter.

Courbet was the son of a wealthy farmer. Beginning in 1837 he attended the drawing school of C. A. Flajoulot in Besançon. He received no systematic artistic training. Courbet settled in Paris in 1839, where he painted from models in private studios. He was influenced by 17th-century Flemish and Spanish painting and visited Holland in 1847 and Belgium in 1851. The revolutionary events of 1848, which Courbet witnessed, greatly helped to determine the democratic direction that his work was to take.

After passing through a stage close to romanticism, represented by a series of self-portraits and the painting Lovers in the Countryside (1844, Museum of Fine Arts, Lyon), Courbet began to question both romanticism and academic classicism. He rejected these traditions for, as he called it, a new type of “positive” art, which re-created life in a state of flux, affirmed the material significance of the world, and denied the artistic value of that which could not be embodied palpably and concretely.

A desire to reveal the significance and poetry of everyday life and of the French provincial countryside led Courbet to create major canvases imbued with realistic spirit, for example, After Dinner at Ornans (1849, Museum of Fine Arts, Lille), Burial at Ornans (1849, Louvre, Paris), and The Village Damsels (1851, Metropolitan Museum, New York). The composition of his works from this period is marked by confined space, static equilibrium of forms, compact or friezelike grouping of figures (as in Burial at Ornans), and subdued palettes.

Courbet was particularly interested in the theme of labor, which he understood as a process that enervated yet exalted man. This interest led him to seek images that were heroic, typical, and sculpturally expressive (for example, The Stone Breakers, 1849, destroyed, formerly in the Dresden Picture Gallery; The Winnowers, 1854). In The Bathers (1853, Musée Fabré, Montpellier), Courbet depicted women from the countryside with emphatic honesty, boldly setting the nude figures in a realistic landscape. True to the democratic ideals of his era, he treated social themes with critical acuteness, approaching the grotesque in the painting Returning From the Conference (destroyed; sketch, 1862, Public Art Collection, Basel) and in a series of anticlerical drawings (1863).

The principle of the social significance of art as put forward by the art critics of Courbet’s time, such as P. -J. Proudhon and J. Champsfleury, found expression in the artist’s works. These works include Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet (1854, Musée Fabré, Montpellier), which depicts the meeting of the proudly striding artist with the art patron A. Bruja, and The Artist’s Studio (1855, Louvre), an allegorical composition in which Courbet depicted himself surrounded by his creations and his friends. Courbet related the social significance of art in his theoretical works, including his declaration “Realism” (1855) and his speech at a meeting of artists in Antwerp (1861).

Using not local colors but tones and gradations of tones as the principal elements of his painting language, Courbet gradually abandoned the restrained and, at times, severe palette that characterized his works of the 1840’s and early 1850’s. Influenced by plein air painting, he lightened and enriched his palette, achieving luminosity of color and emphasizing the texture of the brush-work. Courbet’s landscapes and still lifes, in which color plays an important role as an element of organization, are characterized by a convincing concreteness and palpability (for example, Winter Landscape, 1867, Louvre; Mountain Hut, c. 1874, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow; Fruits, Tannhauser Gallery, New York). In his late pictorial compositions, primarily nudes and hunting scenes, elements of eroticism and high society appear (for example, Deer Hunt, 1867, Metropolitan Museum; The Spring, 1869, Louvre).

Courbet was active in the Paris Commune of 1871. Accused of participating in the toppling of the Vendôme Column and persecuted by the reactionary government, he emigrated to Switzerland in 1873.

REFERENCES

Tikhomirov, A. Giustav Kurbe. Moscow, 1968.
Giustav Kurbe: Pis’ma, dokumenty, vospominaniia sovremennikov. Moscow, 1970.
Zahar, M. Courbet. Paris, 1950.

V. A. KALMYKOV