Gustave Courbet retrospective at the Met
Posted January 31, 2008 by ryan in Events
Next month the Metropolitan Museum in New York will present the first American retrospective on the art of Gustave Courbet in over 30 years. Courbet was a quintessential 19th century rebel who pioneered Realism in painting. He often made France's poor and working class citizens his subjects, and his frank depictions of sexuality shocked the genteel art world -- the Emperor physically attacked one such painting with his riding crop.
He was also an avid participant in the Paris Commune, helping topple the Place Vendôme Column and its statue of Napoleon, saying:
Inasmuch as the Vendôme column is a monument devoid of all artistic value, tending to perpetuate by its expression the ideas of war and conquest of the past imperial dynasty, which are reproved by a republican nation's sentiment, citizen Courbet expresses the wish that the National Defense government will authorise him to disassemble this column.
Alan Antliff discusses Courbet's revolutionary politics in his book Anarchy and Art. Proudhon called Courbet's The Stone Breakers (pictured above) the world's first socialist painting. A few years before the Commune, Courbet wrote:
I am fifty years old and 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.'
Courbet was arrested shortly after the fall of the Commune, and spent his final years in exile. Anyone interested in the origins of radical art should try to check out the Met's retrospective: it opens February 27, and runs through May 18. See also the New York Review of Books recent review of the exhibition catalog, The Born Rebel Artist.
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