THE RHETORIC OF REALISM: COURBET AND THE ORIGINS OF THE AVANT-GARDE RHETORICS OF REALIST ART AND POLITICS USTAVE COURDET (1819-72) BELONGED TO THE Post-Romantic generation of French artists and writers, that included Honoré Daumier, J.-F. Millet, Gustave Flau- bert, and Charles Baudelaire. They were born at the close of, an heroic age. Tn their youth, they witnessed the breakdown of 1 common language of Classicism, the dissipation of revol- mnary idealism, and the growing division between artists and public. In their maturity, chey saw the abandonment of Enlightenment principle and widespread accommodation of authoritarianism, At the end of their lives, they beheld the promise and threat of Communist insurrection and the complete collapse of e bourgeois public sphere, Together, these crises and exesuras combined to convince the artists and writers of the mid-century that they were living through a cultural rupture of unprecedented dimension: the name given for that broad epoch of change was “modernity,” and the name for that specific post-Romantic generation was Realist. “T am not only a socialist,” Courbet wrote provocatively to a newspaper in 1851, “but a democrat and a Republican as wwell—ina word, a partisan of ll the revolution and above alla Realist... for ‘Realist’ means a sincere lover of the honest ruth.” ‘The rhetoric of Realism, however, is not confined to artists? rmanifestos or to France; itis written across the age and across Europe, in ts politics, literature, and painting. The artists and writers mentioned above may not have read Marx's Manifesto of the Communist Porty (1847), but their works shared with it a depiction of epochal anxiety, transformation, and desacralization: Phe bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. Ithas ‘converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, theman of science into its paid wage-laborers.... Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agi~ tation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from sl earlier ones. ‘All thats solid melts into air, all chats holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. ‘Marx’s words are redolent with images from Realist art and literature, Physician, lawyer, priest, poet, and man of science are veritebly the east of characters in Flauber’s bitter satire of ‘country life, Madame Bovary (1857); the depressing results {for humankind of the “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions” are exposed in Daumier’s The Third-Class Carriage (ca. 1862), Millet’s The Gleaners (1857), and Courbet’s The Stoncbreakers (1850); the poet stripped of his, halo is the subject of Baudelsire’s ironic prose-poem “The Loss of a Halo” in Paris Spleen (1868). nthe artand literature of Courbetand Flaubert, reverence for the ideal and honor of the Classic have no place: the former depicted gross wrestlers, drunken priests, peasants, prosti- tutes, and hunters; the latter described common scribes, pharmacists, journalists, students, and adulterers, In the caricatures of Daumier and the poems of Baudelaire, there appear no Romans in togas (except for purposes of satire) oF ‘medieval knights in armor: they preferred to honor ragpickers in their shreds and patches, country bumpkins in their ill- fitting city elothes, and bourgeois men in thei black suits. “It is true that the great cradition has becn lost,” wrote Baudelaire 196 iat the dawn of this new age, in “On the Heroism of Moder Life” (1846), and that the new one is not yet established. ... Buta the same, has not this much abused garb its own beauty and its native charm? Is it not the necessary garb of our suffering age, which wears the symbol ofa perpetual mourning even upon its thin black shoulders? Note, too, that the dress- coat and the frock-coat not only possess their political 196 HONORE DALAMER The Third-Claer Carriage cba. 5135 (664902), to7 JEANFRANGOIS MILLET The Claret 5p, xe TL) beauty, which is an expression of universal equality, but also their poetic beauty, which is an expression of the immense cortége of undertakers’ mutes ). We public soul— {anutes in love, politcal mutes, ourgeois mutes are each of us celebrating some funeral Compared to moder men in “frock-coats,” lke thse from Balrac’snovel, the poet then explains, “the heroes ofthe Tad are but pyemies.” RHETORICS OF REALIST ART AND-POLITICS + 207198 rink drt fame Ove: pin do rpc por te toon exe f pl po oe Seu, jo mo eink ‘Le panded Forum meat dated le gos ents da us et, Per! mdr, appre ma fue ghee & I yore de espe ot ou ther Aten par on fhenine at pape lk danas dae ‘aa, legen presi pels gute twa 18 GRANDVILLE “Apple of the Hesperides and um ic,” fom Ui ate Monde 144 In contrast to Baudelaire’s irony, Daumier and his fellow ccaricaturist Grandville (J.-L-1. Gérard, 1803-47) chose anachronism to satiize the “real conditions” of their “suffering age.” In the 1840's they highlighted the dubious heroism of the present by depicting the stylishness of figures from the Classical past, as in Daumier’s lithograph “The Abduction of Helen,” from Le Charivari (1842), and Grand~ ville’s engraving of Romans ordering an “apple of the Hesperides and rum ice.” Tn the latter sheet, from the Fourierist Un Autre Monde (1844, see pp. 203 and 298), a ‘modish ménage wearing Roman sandals are seated in a bistro, being served drinks by a surly waiter standing in Classical contraposto, Once again the rhetorics of Realist art and polities ‘may be seen to overlap. Anachronism and caricature were the Linguistic weapons of choice for Karl Marx a few years later when he sought to describe the hypocrisy and servility of the bourgeoisie who permitted Louis Napoleon (nephew to the first Napoleon) to destroy the Second Republic in acoup d'état ‘on December 2, 1851: 28 - RHETORICS OF REALIST ART AND POLITICS Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, 2s it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the seond as farce. Caussiditre for Danton, Louis Blane for Robespietre, the ‘Mountain of 1848-51 for the Mountain of 1793-1795, the Nephew for the Uncle. And the same caricature oceurs in the circumstances in which the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaite is taking place. [18 Brumaire is the date in 1799, according to the Revolutionary calendar, ‘when Napoleon I assumed supreme power] No longer ean Classial antiquity be plausibly invoked, Marx argues, to cloak from the men and women of 18SI the real nature of their unheroic deeds and attitudes. Neither the bourgeoisie nor their proletarian interlocutors can any longer have recourse to such idealist “self deceptions.” Because 1789 served to liberate only the bourgevisie and notall of humanity from oppression, Marx writes, the revolutionists of that day “equited world-historical recollections in order to drug. themselves concerning their own content.” Since, on the other hand, the present revolution was being waged by the proletariat on behalf of all humanity, it required absolute clarity as to means and ends, “In order to arrive at its content,” Marx says, “the revolution of the nineteenth ‘century must let the dead bury their dead. There the phrase went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the phrase.” In England no less than France, the style and phrase of ‘Classical antiguity—there only recently embraced—quickly gave way ton art and literature thet emphasized fidelity to the materiality of things, directness of emotional appeal, and honesty to natural appearances. The artists who formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) in 1848—William Hol- ‘man Hunt (1827-1910), John Everett Millas (1829-96), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82)—were inspired by the revolutionary events on the Continent and by the English working-class movement for a People’s Charter, to attempt a reform of British art, Rejecting the mannerism of the later Raphacl as much as the formulas of the Royal Academy, the PRB turned for inspiration to fifteenth-century Tralian and. Flemish painting and to early nineteenth-century German art by Runge, Friedrich, and the Nazarenes. (The Nazarenes, s0 called for their beards and long hair, were a brotherhood of Catholic-converted German artists active in Rome after 1810. “They included Peter Cornelius, Johann Friedrich Overbeck, and Franz Pforr.) From these near and distant sources, the PRB sought the bases for a regeneration (the group's journal ‘was named The Germ) of British culture and society Millais dispensed with Classical costume and architecture as well as with High Renaissance grace and timelessness in Christ in the House of His Parents (1850). The genre scene of 199gy JON EVERETT MILLAIS Cli nthe Howse of His Parents 200 WILLIAMHOLMANHUNE The Asaheing Concene 1853, 2922 50 3354 51822) Ghoxssm the boy-Christ and his working-class family instead enshrines rmatter-of-facness, physical labor, and the unidcalized body. Derived from his observation of a carpenter's shop on Oxford Street in London, M details of métier—tools and wood shavings—eonnoting the human and spiritual worth of sweat and handeraf, By contrast with Millais's Christ, the interior of Hunt's 200 The Awakening Conscience (1853) is filed with all manner of Victorian gewgaws and bric-a-brac. The picture records the moment when a young woman, “with 2 startled holy resolve,” in the painter's words, determines to escape her sinful, fallen life, Like the woman and man themselves, the drawing-room has physiognomy that tellsastory which is, as Ruskin wrote, “common, madera, vulgar. . . tragical.” Furniture, rugs, curtains, tapestry, book, clock, and picture all possess a “terrible lustre” and “fatal newness” which bespeak, in Ruskin’s words, ‘the moral evil ofthe agein which it is painted." As with Couture’s Romans of the Decadence, Hunt's Awakening Conscience argues that the issue of moral and material degeneracy is inseparable from “the woman question,” but whereas the one depicts a female as the hheedless agent of modern society's corruption, the other sees her as its guileless victim. illaie’s interior is Gilled with accurate RHETORICS OF REALIST ART AND POLITICS - 200207 Like Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents, Ford Madox Brown's (1821-98) monumental and complex paint- ing Work (1852-68) preaches the Christian Socialist gospel of work as the cure for the social unrestand moral iniquity that plagued mid-Victoran England. (Both paintings infact, were commissioned by the same evangelizing patron, the Leeds stockbroker and philanthropist Edward Plint.) Unlike the former painting, however, Brown's is based on contemporary London life not on biblical narrative. The sceneissetin mid aiernoon at Heath Street in Hampstead; a group of men known as navvies—“representing the outward and visible type of Work,” as Brown wrote in his extended explication of the picture—is shown digging # trench into which # new vwatermorks main wil be lad. To the lft carrying a basket of wildflowers for sale, stands a “regged wretch,” 2 represen- tative of the fumpen (ignorant and disenfranchised) pro- letarat. In eontrastto the “fully-developed navyy who docs his work andloves his bee,” he “has never been taught 1 work [and] doubts and despirs of every one.” Above him, on horseback and on foot, are the ile rich who “have no need to work.” One of them—with umbrells, bonnet, and downward- cast eyes—has just handed a temperance tract toa navey who revurns a skeprcal glance. To the fur right of the painting stand “tivo men who appear to have nothing to do,” but who arein fact “brainworkers.” Their job isto think and eriticize, like the “sages in ancient Greece,” thereby helping to assure “well ordsined work and happiness in others.” These “sages,” in fact, are the Chistian Socialist Frederick Denison Maurie at right and the great polemicist and “reactionary socialist” (as Marx wrote in 1848) Thomas Carlyle at left. Indeed, amid the extraordinary welter of persons, ancc- dotes, and details, “noe the smallest [of which] has been considered unworthy of thought and deep study” (as the artis’ granddaughter noted), the presence of Carlyle is especially significant. In his Past end Present (1843), Carlyle condemned the loss of affective human bonds in contempor- ary British society, and their replacement by a cold and impersonal “cash-payment nexus.” ‘The solution to the present crisis, he believed, ay in leadership by an aristocracy of talent, and in the cleansing power of hard work. Physical labor, he wrote: “fis like]... a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force... draining offthe sour, festering water... making instead of a pestilent swamp, a green fruitful meadow.” In Werk, Brown made the Carlyle metaphor concrete and real. His navvies are laying pipe, as the art historian Gerard Curtis has discussed, to provide fresh water to replace the fetid steams shat turned working-class neighborhoods into filthy and pesttential slams. Hard work, Brown and Carlyle believed, is essential to human health and ‘numan nature tselG itennobles people and cleanses their very 210 + RHETORICS OF REALIST ART AND POLITICS souls in the face of a system that would otherwise degrade them, and enslave them to filthy lucre. Millas, Hunt, and Browa’s pictures, like many others by the PRB and their associates in their first decade and a half, wore disdained by criti precisely for their insistent particu- larity, conterporaneity, and topicality, regardless of the subject depicted, Indeed, at almost the same moment when Courbet’s paintings of proletarian Iabor and ritual were condemned at the Paris Salon for their ugliness and vulgarity, Millais's Christ at the Royal Academy Exhibition was being attacked by Charles Dickens for its rejection of “all elevating thoughts... or beautifl associations” in the name of “what is mean, odious, repulsive and revolting.” Brown’s painting was subjected to no such abloquy when it was finally finished and exhibited in 1865; instead it was ignored for the most part, by cities and public alike. At no time in the nineteenth cencury wore the visual cultures of England and France closer than. during the European turmoil of 1848 and its aftermath In the exact middle ofthe nineteenth century, “the content went beyond the phrase,” to repeat Marx’s formulation, in both polities and ar. A cataclysmic, European-wide economic decline during the years 1846-8, coinciding with a series of national political crises, led to an outbreak of revolution in France in February 1848. Uprisings quickly followed in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Italy, among other states and kingdoms. The February revolution in France, however, was succeeded in June by a second and still more significant insurrection, The closure of the National Work- shops—whose recent establishment had been a half-hearted attempt by the Provisional Government to placate the left led to & massive proletarian rising on June 23. On the following day, berricades rapidly ribboned through the old twisting streets of Paris and a pitched bate was waged between working-class insurgents and the National Guard supported by a bourgeois and peasant ‘party of order.” By the 26th, the workers (and such intellectual fellow-travelers as Baudelaire) were isolated in their faubourgs, their defenses were in tatters, and their cause was doomed; 1500 died in the three days of battle, 3000 more were slaughtered in the immediate aftermath, and many thousands in addition were arrested, imprisoned, and transported to distant penal colonies. The June days, the conservative political theorist Alexis de Toequeville wrote, were "a struggle of class against ‘lass; Marx was in agreement, calling the insurrection “the first great battle... between the two classes that split modem. society.” The revolution was defeated in France and every where else in 1848, but the image of the quarante-huitord, armed and brinuning with revolutionary ardor, informed the shetoric of the age. During and after 1848, artists and revolutionaries in France (che names of the latter include P.-J. Proudhon, Louis Blane201 JEANFRANGOIS MILLET The Somer 1850. 3932) 101825) and Auguste Blangui felt compelied as never before “to face with sober senses [the] real conditions of life and {man's} relations with his kind.” Many now believed that, regardless of the immediate outcome of the insurrection, anew stage in European evolution had been reached in which working people pressed by circumstance to forge alliances and form ‘opinions oftheir own—were on the point of overturning or twansforming not just single policies, ministries, oF even governments, but society itself. On this point there was 3 strange unanimity between right and left, and betwoen sober politicians andl wisecracking artist journalists: writing inthe tense interregnum between February and June 1848, the right-leaning de Tocqueville exclaimed that he saw “Society ceutinto two: those who possessed nothing unite ina common reed; those who possessed something in common terror.” At the same time, the left-wing Daumier depicted a conversation ‘between a peasantand his local mayorin Le Chariari (May 5, 1848): "Tellme, whatis a communist” They are people who ‘want to keep money in common, work in common and land in common.” Thats fine, but how ean it happen if they have no common sense? OF the existence of a dominant rhetorical timbre to the French art and literature of mid-century, there ean be litle doubs, Such diverse writers as Flaubert, Baudelaire, and de ‘Tocqueville, and such varied painters as Courbet, Millet, Octave Tassiert, and Isidore Pils shared a perception of social dislocation alienation from the Classical pat, and concern ot joy about 4 pending revolution. The Realist Daumier, who lived at this time in the midst of the working-class 9th Arrondissement of Paris, described and depicted in his paintings and caricatures, contemporary urban street life and Teisure, and the domestic hardships and joys of working people. The Realist Millet, who left Paris in 1849 for the Desceful rural village of Barbizon, represented in The Cleaners and The Somer (1850) the view of agricultural labor and the biblical nobility of rural poverty. Both artists are Realists by virtue of their common focus upon contemporary working class life and urban and rural conflict. Yet the very commonality of this rhetoric of Realism should serve as a ‘warming that we are in the presence of an ideology whose fanction was to obscure as much as it was to reveal “the content heyond the phrase” of 1848. Indeed, by 1855 the dictator Louis Napoleon had succeeded in establishing a conservative school of official realism —including Pils, Tas- saert, Jules Breton, Rosa Bonheur, Théodule Ribot, and many ‘others —in opposition to the insurgent Realism of Courbet. ‘Thus, what was hidden beneath the Realist consensus was a fierce struggleamong tutions over precisely ‘the measures to be taken in ether advancing or retarding the great historical changes then underway in France and the West ‘The key question about Courbet and the Realiss, there- fore, does not primarily concern his and their particular auitudes toward modernity: all Realists more or less shared Daumnier’s eredoil faut étr de son temps;all morcor less agreed with the novelist, eriti, folklorist, and political chameleon Champfleury (Jules Husson) that art must represent the ‘everyday life of common people, Rather, the issue concerns the actual position and fanction of Realist works within the ‘mode and relations of production of their time. “This question,” Walter Benjamin writes, “is concermed, in other words, directly with the [artistic] secbnique of works.” Thus the argument made below will be that the innovative technique of Gustave Courbet—more than any other artist of the day—propelled political change by challenging’ the ‘existing institutional relationship between art and the public ike Jacques-Louis David before him, Courbetemployeda techniqucalien tothe established traditions and audiences for art, For the Enlightenment David, this alienation arase from his rejection of Rococo and aristocratic bon ton, and his ‘embrace af Neockssieal and bourgenis nobler. For the Realist Courbet, this alienation entailed a rejection of scademic and bourgeois juste miliw, and an espousal of the formal principles found in nonclassical and working-class istwand arti RHETORICS OF REALIST ART AND POLITICS + 211 201ses GUSTAVE COURBET Mae With Leather Bll x 1845. 8} (vox) popular art. By this means, Courbet attempted to cur. formerly neglected peasant and proletarian Slon spectators into artistic collaborators, thereby potentially ennobling and ‘empowering them at the expense of their putative betters. In the course of the decade following 1848, Courbet enacted an interventionist cultural role that has since been defined as avant-garde. Avant-garde art, I shall argue at the end of this chapter, is exceptional in the nineteenth century, and exceptionally fragile, By the end of Courber’s life, it lad ‘motated into a nearly quietist modernism, COURBET’S TRILOGY OF 1849-50 Courbet was born in the village of Ornans, near Besangon in the region of eenira-eastern France called the Franche- Comité. His father Régis wasa wealthy farmer who resisted his son's decision to become an artist, but nevertheless paid his ‘way to Pass in 1839, There, Courbet studied inthe private studios oa succession of mediocre academic masters, learning at frst a somewhat labored Romanticism which seclls the “Troubador Style” practised by Couture and others inthe 1840's, Yet oven as 4 young artist, Courbet demonstrated independence and selassurance: his self-portraits including 212 » COURBET’S TRILOGY OF 1849-50 ‘Man With Leather Belt (ca. 1845) and The Wounded Man (ca, 202 1844-54) in fact mark a kind of liberation from the reigning Juste miliew. In place of the Neoclassical tinearism of contemporary portraits by, for example, Hippolyte-Jean Flandrin and ‘Théodore Chassériau (Portrait Drawing of de 203 Tocquecille, 1844), Courber’s self-portraits reveal a Romantic painterliness combined with a compositional informality oF even awkwardness. In place of the sentimentality found in senre paintings by the emerging official Realists, such as Tessaert, Ribot, and Pils (The Death of a Sister of Charity, 204 1850), Courber’s paintings convey a psychological com- plexity, physical proximity, and eroticism that has its only precedents i Caravaggio and Géricault, (The former's Eastasy of Saint Francis is perhaps a source for The Wounded ‘Man; the latter's “portraits of the insane” are likely sources 61 for Man With Leather Belt) By 1848 Courbet was dividing his time among the Paris ‘museums, hs own atelier on the Left Bank, znd the bohemian Brasserie Andler; atthe Brasserie he came into contact with some of the most progressive and idiosyncratic figures of the day, inctading Baudeleite, the anarchist Proudhon, the leftist balladeer Pierre Dupont, and Champfleury. Bohemianism ‘vas a relatively new and contradictory subeultural stance in Paris—composed in equal parts of estheticism, asceticism, defiance, and sycophancy—and it functioned as a kind of laboratory for testing the vasious thetorics of Realism. In January 1848 Courbet wrote to his family: “I am about to make itany time now, for Tam surrounded by penple whore very influential inthe newspapers and the arts, and who are 03 TuitopoRe CHASSERIAU Porat Drang of Ae Toque 1844. 1*94G0%29)nq ISIDORE PS The Death of 22s GUSTAVE Cou COURRET'S TRILOGY OF 1849-50205 very excited ebout my painting. Indeed, we are about ro form 4 new school, of which I will be the representative in the field of painting,” Courbet was correct in his predictions, though he could not have known that a revolution would be necessary to help him accomplish his goals. According to his lerters, Courbet remained on the sidelines during the fighting in February 1848, though he was immensely pleased at the overthrow of Louis-Philippe and the establishment of a Republic. In June, too, he kept « safe distance from the shooting, tating ina letter to his family: “T do not believe in wars fought with guns and cannon... . For ten years now I have been waging a war of the intellect. It ‘would be inconsistent for me to act otherwise.” Despite this expression of principled pacifism, Courbet’s abstention from battle was probably the result of strategic as much as moral calculation: like many others, he quickly recognized the brutality and implacability of the bourgeois and peasant “party of order,” and understood that a war fought for “the democratic and social republic” could not be won on the barricades of June: On the contrary, the struggle for labor cooperatives, fair wages, housing, debt relief, and full political enfranchisement for workers and peasants would require ‘organization, propaganda, and a broadly based mass move~ ‘ment. Disdaining bayonets, therefore, Courbet became resolved to wage his combat with images; the time was ripe for such a battle, and he would not waste his chance. Afier February, the exhibition policies of the Salon were liberalized, permitting Courbet free access for the fist time. Whereas he had managed to show only 3 paintings in the previous seven years, he exhibited 10 worksin 1848 and 11 the following year, including the peculiar After Dinner ai Orman, An ambitious and provocative picture, After Dinner was oddly oversized for its genre, indefinite in is lighting and compo- 214 - COURBET'S TRILOGY OF 1849-50 sition, and indeterminatein its mood and subject, For all these anomalies, however, it sufficiently resembled Dutch genre paintings—then in renewed vogue—for it to garner praise ffom a number of Salon critics and the award of being purchased by the state ‘The historical significance of After Dinner lies in two factors outside ofits particular artistic weaknesses or merits first, the gold medal Courbet received for it in 1849 automatically entitled him to free entry to the 1850 Salon; secondly, After Dinner is precise mirror of Courbet’s interest in the concurrent crises of French rural and urban life. In the wake of agrarian recession and urban insurrection, the definitions and political allegiances of both country and city vere up for grabs, and any picture that treated ambiguously both realms could have been incendiary. The figures in After Dinner might a8 well be bohemians atthe Andler as peasantsat the home of the artst’s Ornans friend Cuénot, thus potentially calling into question the opposition between worker and peasant that had ensured the failure of the insurrection of June. After Dinner was not scandalous in 1849, bucits subject ‘was and Courbet knew it, Therefore, in October 1849 Courbet left Paris and returned to Ornans in order to reflect upon and plan his future “intellectual” interventions. “Iam alittle likea snake ... ina state of torpor,” he wrote tohis friends the Weys at the end of October. “Tn that sort of atitude one thinks so welll... Yet will eome out oft...” Indeed, in the course of the next eight months, Courbet painted three colossal picuures that changed the history of art-—The Stoncbreakers (des 206 troyed), A Burial at Ornans, and Peasants of Flagey Returning 209 From the Fair. Ns the art historian T. J. Clark has shown, and 210 as will be summarized here, each work cor ‘upon the technical foundations of bourg quisition upon class and political antagonism of the day. a0 GUSTAVE COURBET The Stnereskers 50. 28 (16s 28)27; FORD MADOXBRORN Hark 1si-bs. 54478 37% 1923) The Stoncbreaters itsauthor said, “is composed of two very Pitiable figures,” taken from life. “One is an old man, an old machine grown stiff with service and age... . The one behind him is a young man about fifteen years old, suffering from scurvy.” Stonebreaking for roads was a rare, though not unprecedented, subject for art, but it had never been treated 0 unflinchingly and so monumentally (the painting was nearly 5} by 8 fect). Two nearly lifesize figures areset against a hillside, in approximate profile. Their gazes are averted from view, their limbs are strained by effort, and their clothes are in tatters. The colors and surface of the picture (such as can be surmised from its prewar photograph and the surviving oil study) are earthen and clotted, and the composition is cated, The predominant impression, as Courbet’s words suggest, is of humans acting a8 machines: hands, elbows, shoulders, backs, thighs, knees, ankles, and feet are all treated as alien appendages that only serve, as Ruskin wrote in The Stones of Venice (1853), to “make a tool of the creature.” For 4 Burial at Ornans, Courbet gathered together some fifly-one men, women, and children on the grounds of the new cemetery, and painted their portraits on a canvas almost 22 fect long. The mourners include the artist’s father and sisters, the town mayor, Courber's late grandfather, and a spotted dog. ‘The coffin, draped in white with black teardrops and crossbones, belongs to one C.-E. Teste, a distant relative af Courbet; the ostentatious pair dressed in red with bulbous noses ate beadles. No one in the picture is paying much attention to cither the coffin or the future resting place of the deceased; indeed, the crowd is composed of at least three discrete groups—women mourners at right, clergy and pall bearers at left, amd a bourgeois and mongrel dog at center right—that are compositionally and emotionally discon- nected from each other ané the funcral ritual, (How different from the postures and expressions of rapt piety among the ‘mourners in Pils’ exactly contemporaneous and acclaimed The Death ofa Sister of Charity!) Adding tothe impression of 204 artifice and distraction in Courbet’s work isthe insistent black ‘and white of the canvas (compare the dog’s coat tothe drapery ‘over the coffin), as well as the odd superimposition of figures above one another. Tonal simplicity, compositional fracture, and emotional COURBET'S TRILOGY OF 1849-50 - 215210 au 208 Gustave Counser The Stadio of th Panter: A Rel Algor Swing Up Seeen Yeas of My Antic Life 54-5. 10% 1980507" 5.8 ‘opacity also characterize the Peasants of Flagey. Like the Burial, sts subject was conventional (for example, Thomas Gainsborough's Road from Market, ca. 1767) butits treatment certainly was not. The Peasants is made up of discrete groupings of figures and animals unified only by a dull repetition of color and tonality: foreground and middle- ground planes awkwardly collide at the cdge of a road extending from lower left to middle right; a boy and two peasant women are oddly insinuated among the inconsistently scaled horses and cattle; « man being led by 2 pig seems to float across the surface ofthe picture. Unlike Rosa Bonheur (1822 09), whose Plowing in the Nivermais: The Dressing of the Vines (1849) records with patriotic specificity the agricultural practises of a particular region, Courbet disregards the cultural and physiognomic particulars of his human and animal subjects in Peasants, (Are those Jersey or Charolais ‘cows under yoke?) Unlike Jules Breton (1827-1906), whose ‘The Gleaners (195%) depicts the poor peasants of Marlote asa facoless herd, Courbet provides his protagonists with indiv- ‘dual and class identity, albeit ambiguous. (Is the man with peasant smock and stovepipe hat the same Régis Courbet who ‘wears a bourgeois greatcoat in the Burial?) In place of the reassuring binary oppositions that will soon dominate official realism—citylcountry, bourgeois{peasant, proletarian/pea- sant—Courbet proposes a countryside that is as awkward, 216 COURBET'S TRILOGY OF 1849-50 indefinite, and contingent asthe immigrant city of Paris. Like the Stonebreakersand the Burial at Ornans, therefore, the Peasants of Flagey Returning Prom the Fairs all about the awkward antagonisms and injuries of social class. In the ‘Stoncbreakers, two peasants, reduced to penury, resort to stonebreaking in order tn survive; in the Barial, a peasant community, got up in its Sunday bourgeois best, celebrates a funeral; in Peasants, a motley group of men, women, and animals, returning from an agricultural fair, meet a rural Dourgeois in waistcoat walking his pig. This was the uungraceful form and subject of Courbet’s much attacked twiology shown in Paris at the Salon of 1850-51. It would be easy to expound further—as the crties and caricaturists of 1851 did—upon the strange formal and thematic disjunctiveness of the Peasants, the Stonebreakers, and the Burial. Yet :o doso would be to risk overlooking a new and provocative coherence in the works, In place of the old academic and political logic based upon Classical mimesis and clear class difference, Courbet has erected an alternative ‘coherence based upon popular culture and social or class ambiguity and opacity. As Meyer Schapiro and T. J. Clark have shown, the Formal touchstone for Courbet’s trilogy was the “naive” artistic tradition—Epinal woodcuts and popular broadshoets, extchpenny prints and almanacs, chapbooks and songsheets—then being revived and contested across Franceas as 4 component of the political and class war of 1848, Especially in the months before the Napoleonic coup d'état of December 2, 1851, popular culture—best defined negatively 1s the unofficial culture ofthe non-elite—was a weapon used by peasants, workers, and their urban, bourgeois allies to help secure the égalizé promised but not delivered by the first French Revolution. Courbet was soldier in this war and the trilogy was his weapon. In its lack of depth, its shadowlessness, stark color contrasts, superimposition of figures, and emotional neut- tality, the Burial especially recalls the style and aspect of popular woodcuts, engravings, and lithographs, such as those used to decorate the many generic souvenirs mortuaire printed to help rural communities broadcast and commen deaths, or the woodcuts that ilustrated the traditional Funeral of Marlborough or other tales and ballads. (Indeed, in a leter to the Weys from 1850, Courbet cites the nonsense refrain ““mironton, mirontasne” from the popular ballad of Marlbor~ ‘ough.) Courbet was fascinated by popular culture during this period; in addition to composing several folk ballads and pantomimes, he illustrated s broadsheet of songs dedicated to the Fourierist apostle Jean Journet in 1850, and 2 decade later executed two drawings for Champfleury’s Les Chansons ‘populaires de France. Further examples of the artist's interests in popular culture are his 1853 depiction of a wrestling match, and his employment, a year later, of an Epinal print of the ‘Wandering Jew as the basis for his autobiographical painting ‘The Meeting (1854), In embracing popular art and culture—its audience, its any GUSTAVE COURRET A Baral at Orman 2845, 1044219 (15663) subjects, and even its ingenuous and anonymous style— Courbet was explicitly rejecting the hierarchism and person ality cult fostered by the regime of President and then Emperor Louis Napoleon, and represented in Flandrin’s Napoleon III (1860-61). Indeed, even as Courbet was exhibiting his works in Paris during the winter of 1850-51, Bonapartists in the rural provinces were clamping down the activities of a legion of colportewr, balladeers and pamphle- teers who they judged were active in the revival of popular culture and the establishment of a radical, peasant solidarity Tn Paris, too, the popular entertainers—clowns, street ‘musicians, mountebanks and salrimbanques—were viewed by the police and the Prefécts as the natural allies of subversives and Socialists; their activities were curtailed after 1849 for being inconsistent with order and social peace. In this feverish political context, when a celebration of the popular was ‘understood as an expression of support for the “democratic and social republic,” it is not surprising that Courber’s works ‘were received with fear and hostility. “Socialist painting,” one tie said of Courber’s Salon entriesin 1851; “democraticand popular,” suid another; “an engine of revolution,” exclaimed a third, ‘What appears to have most disturbed conservative erties about Courbet’s art, and what prompted these and other charges, was its “deliberate ugliness,” which meant its embrace of both « popular (“ugly”) content and a popular (working-class) Salon audience. Artwork and audience waltzed in a strange and morbid syncopation, critics of the Salon suggested, and vainglorious Courbet was dancing- COURBET’S TRILOGY OF 1849-50 » 217 a2| ‘axx ROSABONHEL Planing nthe Nicest The Dening of the Vinee 4p. 6088 (153% 242) 218 COURDET'S TRILOGY OF 1849-50‘master, After surveying the critical response to the artist's trilogy, T. J. Clark summarized Courbet’s historic achieve ment: “He exploited high art—its techniques, its size and something of its sophistication—in order to revive popular art, .. He made an art which claimed, by its scale and its proud title of History Painting’, 2 kind of hegemony over the culture of the dominant clases.” It should be mentioned that the claim was fragile, and turned out to be short-lived, but that tomany at the time it appeared powerful enough to threaten the stability of the public sphere. Courbet's grand and sophisticated popular art could not survive intact the erup Léat and the inevitable dissipation of revolutionary con- seiousness that followed. Nevertheless, his trilogy has sur- vived until the present as a model of artistic activism, ara HirpoLeT®-JEAN FLANDRIN arin spon EL 1860-61. 88438 213 GUSTAVE COURDET The Maetng 154. 5 58 (12198) COURBET'S TRILOGY OF 1849-50 - 219,Indeed, it may be argued that Courbet’s three pantings and the scandal they precipitated proved to be the historical point of origin of avant-gardism as a cultural stance of ideological ‘opposition and political contestation. The goal of the artistic avant-garde, from Courbet to the Surrealists, has been to intervene in the domain of real life by changing the language ‘Fatt sos to turn passive spectators into active interlocutor. Like the many artists who followed—Manet, the Impressio- nists, Van Gogh, Seurat, and the Russian avant-garde— Courbet sought to effect this intervention by recourse to the “popular,” that isto cultural form or tradition from without the fixed canon of cultural legitimacy and ruling-olass authority, Yet like those artists too, Courbet was ultimately ‘unable to pursue his ambition to its promised end—events overtook him and the overwhelming assimilative powers of the dominant culture won out: Thus his trilogy also marks the onset of modernism as 2 formal procedure of esthetic self reference and political abstention. The loss of an active and ‘engaged oppositional public following the consolidation ofthe Second Empire (especially after 1957) led to the abstraction and generalization, 28 Thomas Crow has described it, of the antagonistic pictorial strategies adopted by Courbet in 1850. From this point forward, the interventionist goals of the avant-garde faded before the ultimate aim of modernism ‘which —from Courbet to Frank Stella—was the achievement of artistic autonomy. Indeed, for Courbet, political signif cance always lurked just the other side of popular engagement. In July 1850, while erating his pictures for shipment to Paris, he wrote to the Weys: ‘The people have my sympathy. I must turn to them directly, I must get my knowledge from them, and they must provide me with a living. ‘Therefore I have just ‘embarked on the great wandering and independent life of the bohemian, Don’t be mistaken, Iam not whet you call flimftam- mer. A fimflammer is an idler, he has only the appearance of what he professes to be, like the members of the ‘Academy and like toothdrawers who have their own carriages and handle gold. For Courbet as for ater ambitious French and European artists, avant-garde and modern are the two sides of coin that ‘doesn’t add up to a whole; the one connotes community, the other individuality; the one implies engagement, the other an ivory tower; the one invites bohemianism, the other fimflam— ‘ery. In fact, however, avant-garde and modern possess the same specific gravity since the technical procedures that make possible the first are the very ones that inevitably conjure up the second, My argument in sum is this: the interventionist stance of the avant-garde entailed a rejection of established academic procedures and an embrace of the formal simplicity, 229 - COURBET'S STUDIO OF THE PAINTER clarity, and famess of popular art as found in nineteenth- century broadsheots, chapbooks, Epinat prints, and trades- sens signs, as well as in che performances of salinbangurs, ballads, and café singers. To employ such forms—such a new technique—was to carve out new position for art within the means and relations of production of the day and thereby potentially to turn formerly alienated or passive working-class spoctators into active participants. The cool self-regard of modernism entailed many ofthe same forma strategies, butin the absence of an oppositional public of like mind, the techniques were no more than vestiges of the dreamed interventionism. After 1852, avant-garde and modern smarched in virtual lockstep. Courbet noticed thisand madean allegory on the subject in 1855 COURBET’S THE STUDIO OF THE PAINTER (On May 8, 1853 a decree was published announcing that the Salon of 1854 was canceled, but that 2 colossal art exhibition ‘would be included among the exhibits of a great Universal Exposition to be held in 1853. The idea of the fair was to display to the world the marvelous industrial, cultural, and social progress achieved in France since Napoleon III's assumption of dictatorial powers in 1851. Asa demonstration of his liberalism and magnanimity, the Emperor had his Tntendant des beaus-arts, the Comte de Nicuwerkerke, invite Gustave Courbet to luncheon in order to propose that the artist cooperate with his goveroment’s plans, and submit to the Exposition jury a work of which the Comte and the Emperor would approve. In a letter to his friend and patron Bruyas, Courbet described his indignant response to this naked effort at cooptation: You can imagine into what rage T few after such an overture. firs, because he was tating tome that he wasa governmentand because I did not fel that I wasin any way «a partof that government; and that I too was a government and that I defied his to do anything for mine that T could accept... [went on to tell him that was the sole judge of my painting; that 1 was not only a painter but a human ‘being; that [had practiced painting not in order to make art for arts sake, but rather to win my intellectual freedom, and that by studying tradition I had managed to free myself of it; that L alone, ofall the French artists of my time, had the power to represent and translate in an original way both my personality and my society. Courbet's letter went on to describe the rest of his tense and. abortive luncheon with Nieuwerkerke—additional sparring, dressinge-down, and protestations of sincerity and pride~ and the artist’s intention to press ahead in his artistic project208 210 “with fall knowledge of the Faets”” What is perhaps most salient about the letter, however, is thatitannounces a kind of| program for future work, in particular for the very painting that Courbet would make and then insinuate into the heart of the Exposition grounds, The Studio of the Painter: A Real Allegory Summing Up Scoen Years of My Antistc Life ‘According to his remarks above, Courbet was seeking in his painting to explore the social and cultural position of the artist; to cast off “art for ar’s sake” while nevertheless maintaining independence; and to explore the complesities of reality in order to “represent and translate... my personality and my society.” Courbet’s manifesto in paint was underway by November 1854 and finished six months later, just in time for it to be rejected by the Exposition jury ‘The Studio isa vast (almost 11 by 20 feet) and somewhat Iugubrious depiction of the artist's atelier and its thiety-odd ‘occupants. The composition is divided into two parts with the ‘painter himself in the middle. He is seen painting s landscape and is accompanied (in perfect Oedipal fashion, as Linda ‘Nochlin has said) by a small boy and nude woman who east admiring glances. ‘To the right are the painter’s “share- holders,” as he called them in a letter to Champfleury, that is, his various artistic and bohemian friends. These include Baudelaire (at the far right, reading), Champfieury (seated), and Bruyas (with the beard, in profile). To the left are “the people, misery, poverty, wealth, the exploited and the exploiters, the people who live off death.” The identification of this group is less clear, but it appears to include Louis Napoleon (seated, accompanied by spaniels), the Minister of State Achille Fould (standing with cask, at far left, and described by the artistas a Jew whora I saw in England”), the Inte regicide Lazare Carnot (in white coatand peaked bat), and perhaps the European revolutionaries Garibaldi, Kossuth, and Kosciuszko. ‘The upper half of The Studio, above the heads of all of the figures, consists of an expanse of brown paint (a great blank wall”) that inadequately covers the ghost of The Peasants of Flagy. Denied the chance to display the puzzling Studio alongside is other accepted works, Courbet decided to erect & “Pavilion of Realism,” in the form of circus tent, on land just ‘opposite the entrance to the Exposition, There le would splay his new paintings as well as his most controversial older works, and steal the thunder from the officielly sanctioned Ingres, Delacroix, Vernet, and Descamps, among others. With the financial assistance of Bruyas, the “Pavilion of Realism” was indeed quickly built, but the public response was not what Courbet hoped for and planned attendance was considered response to Courbet's Studio, in fct, is found in the private diaries of Delacroix: Paris, 3 August Went to the Exposition, where I noticed the fountain thet spouts artificial flowers. T think all these machines are very depressing, I hate these contrivances that look as though they were producing remarkable effects entirely on their own volition, Afterwards I went to the Courbet exhibition, He has reduced the price of admission to ten sous, I stayed there alone for nearly an hour and discovered a masterpiece in the picture they rejected .. In [The Studio] the planes are well understood, there is atmosphere, and in some passages the execution is really remarkable, especially the thighs and hips of the nude model and the breasts... he only faule is that the picture, as he has painted it, seems to contain an ambiguity. Tt looks as though there were a real sky in the ‘middle of the painting. They have rejected one of the most remarkable works of our time, but Courbet is not the man to be discouraged by « little thing like that. Delacroix’s chief insights occur at the beginning and near the end ofthis passage. His remark about the “machines... acting entirely on their own volition” constitutes a succinet account of “commodity fetishism,” a term coined and defined a few years later by Marx in Capital (1867) asthe disguising of the “social relation between men... [in] the fantastic form of a relation between things.” The 1855 Exposition, which ‘consisted primarily of the mass display of consumer goods and the machines that produced them, was indeed an early ‘important landmark in the fetishization of commodities, It heralded the beginnings of a world that would increasingly identify progress with the rationalization of production, liberty with the freetiom to consume standardized goods, and ‘human intimacy with the market exchange of sex. Delacroix appears to have understood something of this historic aspect of the Exposition, and found it(with unusual understatement) depressing. Courber's picture was thus judged triumph ia ‘opposition to this sobering exhibition of modernity. Delacroix’s other insights into Courbet’s The Studio ofthe Painter: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic Life ave contained in his comments about the “remarkable” execution of the thighs, hips, and breasts of the rude and the “ambiguity [of] areal sky in the middle of the picture.” In these few lines, the Romantic painter has ‘encapsulated the womanjnature dyad that constituted Cour ber’s personal response to the dispiriting forces of moderniza- tion on display at the Exposition, For Courbet, woman and ature are the “real” touchstones forthe personal and political “allegory” that began in 1848and ended withthe exhibition of 1855, ‘The nude woman in The Studio (as Delacroix and Courbet both wrote) is a model and nothing more: she is not Venus. COURBET'S STUDIO OF THE PAINTER + 25214 GUSTAVE COURIET The Young Lats o the Banks of he Seine 856-7. 68x41 (173. 206) 215 GUSTAVE COURBET Slepers 1865, 51} <7H (15% 20) 22 - COURBET'S STUDIO OF THE PAINTER217 GUSTAVE COURNE Grand Panorama of he Alte With the Des dy Mids v7. 84825151210) COURBET’S STUDIO OF THE PAINTER - 22324 25 216-17 She is not muse or Source, as in Ingres's painting of 1856; she is not the allegory of Liberty, the Republic, Spring, Misery, ‘Tragedy, or War and Peace, as in Pierre Puvis de Chav- annes’s paintings of 1867. At once freed of the allegorical bburdens placed upon her by innumerable academic artists of the Second Empire, and stripped of her only sources of cultural power, she is instead a blank canvas ike the cloth she holds, upon which the moder male painter will figure his authority and independence. In painting after painting until theend of his fe, including The Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (1856-7) and The Slezpers (1866), Courbet re- enacted this dialectic of the feminine, Divested of any but sexual power, Courbet’s women are reduced to mere passive vehicles of painterly dexterity and authority; relieved of the burden ofallegorization, women are for perhaps the fist time in the history of Western art shown actually to possess a sexuality. (The politically incendiary aspect of this later emaneipation would be strikingly exposed in the critial response, a decade after The Studio, to Edouard Manet’s Obmpia.) ‘Just as Courber’s nude model functions as @ cipher of artistic volition, so too does the landscape and “real sky,” in Delacroin’s words, function as an anchor for painterly autonomy. For the Realist, landscape—esptcialy the type of| rugged and inaccessible woodlands represented on the artst’s| constituted the dream space of personal freedom, and alized locus, a6 the art historian Klaus Herding has described it, of social reconciliation. In landscape painting after landscape painting, from the Chateau @’ Ornans (1850) to ‘Seaside (1866) to the Grand Panorama of the Alps With the Dents du Midi (1877), Courbet represented his dreamed 224» COURBET’S STUDIO OF THE PAINTER personal autonomy and social equality (“I too was a government”) by his rejection of the traditional formulas of the genre, His landscapes, like those ofthe Impressionists who followed, tacked compositional focus, internal framing devices, repoussoir elements, atmospheric perspective, and coloristic sobriety and balance. They were instead painterly, skefchy, vibrant in color, bright in tonality, spatially flat (though texturally three-dimensional}, and democratic, meaning that the painter paid nearly equal attention to all parts of the picture—the sides, bottom, top, and corners, as well asthe center of the picture Courbet’s The Studio of the Painter is thus 28 much a foretelling of the painter's future asitis a summary of his past In addition, it is an carly instance of the modernism— represented by the nude, the landscape, and the great swathe of brown paint that constitutes the upper half of the painting—that would fourish in succeeding generations. Modernism is the name for the visual art that would increasingly de-emphasize representation in favor of the integrated material surface; ics theart that would avoid direct engagement in the ongoing battle of classesand interests in the name of individual and pictorial autonomy. Another way to Aescribe the development of modernism simply tosay thatit involved the rejection of allegory and the embrace ofthe realin all its contredictoriness, “The people who want to judge [The Studio of the Painter: A Real Allegory),” Courbet wrote to Champficury, “will have their work eut out for them.” The umerous, conflicting, and often convoluted interpretations of the painting (not excepting this one) bear out the artist’s words, but it may be that Courbet himself supplied the painting's best gloss in its ttle