“We got to the end of it by hook and by crook.”

August 17th, 2008 · 1 Comment · Art Reviews

To Jules Castagnary [La Tour-de-Peilz, December 1873]
My Dear Castagnary:
[...] We got to the end of it by hook and by crook…

G.Courbet

From Letters of Gustav Courbet.

Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet (10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877) was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. You can consider Courbet as the Damien Hirst of his day, never shying away from controversy; he rendered modern paintings before the groundswell of modernism. Visiting New York in May, I was lucky enough to catch the Courbet exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had the opportunity to survey the iconoclastic painter’s development through 130 of his works, alongside the 19th-century landscape photographs and nudes that influenced him. Courbet caused quite a scandal in Parisian art circles with his paintings of everyday people, brooding landscapes, and frank sexual nudes. “He willfully smashed the tidy boundaries separating established painting genres to record life as he saw it.”

“The Desperate Man” (1844-45) “Self-Portrait with Pipe” (circa 1849)

Art historians assume that Courbet’s “The Desperate Man” was painted after he had been rejected several times by the Salon jury since he was becoming disillusioned with his youthful Romantic ideals. “No artist before Picasso put so much of himself on canvas. In one self-portrait, he is long-haired and delicate, a Pontormo prince. In another he tears his hair, wide-eyed and wild, like Johnny Depp’s pirate rendered by Caravaggio. And in ‘Self-Portrait with Pipe’ we see an early version of the disengaged gaze, at once dreaming and sardonic, that would become a trademark. Overbearing and arrogant, Courbet virtually wrote the definition of the modern artist as a bohemian, narcissistic loner and political radical. He shunned the academy and lived by the phrase epater le bourgeois.”–Arts, New York Times

Portrait of Juliette Courbet as a Sleeping Child
1841, Graphite on paper; Musee d’Orsay