Gustave Courbet’s rejection of the Art Academy and its established aesthetic ideals, as well as monarch- or church-funded patronage, is well-documented. As just one example, in one of his famous letters he wrote: “...I have always lived in freedom; let me end my life free; when I am dead let this be said of me: 'He belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, least of all to any régime except the régime of liberty.’”
The Conventions of his Day
While Neoclassicists and Romanticists painted highly polished works featuring idealized Classical or contemporary figures, Courbet drew upon the gritty reality of his experiences with his contemporary everyday life. He painted what he saw in the real world rather than in the ideals of the established art world or of the imagination. This type of art that he conceived - emphasizing truth through direct observation - became known as Realism and was a precursor to modern art.
He employed unconventional methods like:
- painting with a palette knife
- applying paint with his finger
- in rough application.
His scenes might feature:
- the gritty streets of Paris,
- images of the plight of the poor,
- the rugged nature of certain landscapes
- the hard-working lifestyle of the peasant.
Courbet painted this way as a conscious rejection of the refined and idealized Neoclassicist and Romantic styles that dominated French art in 1848. While his predecessors may have painted to please a King, Pope, or private patron, Courbet painted by his own standards.
In Realist Manifesto He Declares his Freedom
Courbet used his realistic paintings of peasants to promote his socialist view of the world as influenced by the writings of anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The artist envisioned that painting would take a new direction where the independent artist was free of the restraints of the art academy and any conventional views.
In 1855 he penned the Realist Manifesto in which he proclaims his loyalty to subjects drawn from contemporary everyday life and states: “I simply want to draw forth…the reasoned and independent consciousness of my own individuality… to be in a position to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my time, according to my own estimation...- this is my goal."
Courbet’s Work
In Courbet’s painting The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory (1854-55) in the center his work is being approved of and literally looked up to by a young boy. Courbet uses this symbolism to show that he prefers the critique of an everyday person to that of an educated art critic with high-minded ideas. On the left side Courbet includes a group of what might be a woodsman, merchant, grave digger, village idiot, and laborer to symbolize that his work was about and for all the people, not simply the educated or elite.
His works hang in galleries throughout the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has more than twenty of his works.
Sources:
· Grove Dictionary of Art. Oxford University Press, 2010.
· Courbet, Gustave. Letters of Gustave Courbet. University of Chicago Press, 1992.
· “Courbet Speaks,” Musee d’Orsay website, 2006.
Suzanne Hill - Suzanne Moniea Hill studied art history and studio art and has been passionate about art all her life. She believes that people should ...
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