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ÉDOUARD MANET

Baudelaire and the Impressionist Revolution


CLAUDE MONET

 


PHILOSOPHY OF REALISM

The Realist Movement in French art flourished from the 1840's to the 1890's. 
Realists believed that the main purpose of literature, painting and even music,
was to communicate truthful and objective views of modern life.  French Realism
emerged after the Revolution of 1848 that overturned the monarchy of
Louis-Philippe; the movement continued to develop during the Second Empire of
Napoleon III.   The Realists supported democratic reform of the political system
and desired the democratization of art by depicting modern subjects drawn from
the everyday lives of the working class. They rejected the Classicism of
academic art and the unrealistic, exotic themes of Romanticism.  Realism was
supposed to be based on direct sensory observation of the contemporary world. 
Realist painter, Gustave Courbet, asserted that painting was essentially a
concrete art that should only deal with the representation of real and existing
things.  Realist artists recorded in grim detail the frequently unpleasant life
experiences of humble people.  Examples of Realists in literature include Émile
Zola, Honoré de Balzac, and Gustave Flaubert.  At the same time, Realist
philosophers adulated the working classes.  For example consider the socialist
philosophy of Pierre Proudhon and Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, published in
1848, which urged a proletarian uprising.

 


GUSTAVE COURBET (1819-1877)

Gustave Courbet is the principal painter who championed the cause of Realism. 
Prior to his time, most French paintings were composed of attractive pictures
that made life look much better than it really was. Courbet, in spite of intense
opposition, attempted to accurately portray ordinary places and people.

Gustave Courbet was born in 1819 to a prosperous farming family in Ornans,
France. He went to Paris in 1841, supposedly to study law, but soon he decided
to study painting.  In 1844 his self-portrait, Courbet with a Black Dog, was
accepted by the Paris Salon, the  annual public exhibition of art sponsored by
the influential French Academy.

The 1848 political revolution in France brought with it a cultural revolution
and the public became more open to new ideas in the arts. Only a year later, in
1849, Courbet produced one of his greatest realist paintings, The Stone-Breakers
(see below).

In 1855 he completed a huge canvas titled Real Allegory of the Artist's Studio
(see below); when it was refused for inclusion in the Paris Salon for that year,
Courbet boldly displayed this work as part of a personal exhibition located in a
building near the Salon exhibition hall.

By 1859 Courbet was the undisputed leader of the French realist movement. He
painted all varieties of subjects, including admirable portraits and sensuous
female nudes but, most of all, scenes of nature. His series of seascapes with
changing storm clouds wafting overhead, begun in the 1860's, greatly influenced
the young Impressionist painters of the time.

Politically a socialist, during the time of the Paris Commune in 1871, Courbet
took part in certain revolutionary activities for which he was imprisoned for
six months.  He was also assessed a severe fine which was more than he could
pay.  He fled to Switzerland where he remained until his death on 31 December
1877.

 


THE STONEBREAKERS (1849)



Courbet completed The Stonebreakers in 1849.  This oil painting, measuring 63 X
102 inches, was quite unlike the classical and romantic pictures of the time; it
showed poor peasants  from the artist's native region in a realistic setting
instead of rich bourgeoisie in glamorized situations. Painting had previously
been mostly reserved for the depiction of elevating themes from history and
mythology. 

When The Stone Breakers was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1850, it was
attacked by the French establishment as being inartistic, crude, and even
socialistic!

Indeed, the contemporary socialist writer, Pierre Proudhon, approved of the
painting and described the man with the hammer in the following terms:

"His motionless face is heartbreakingly melancholy. His stiff arms rise and fall
with the regularity of a lever. Here indeed is the mechanical or mechanized man
in the state of ruin to which our splendid civilization and our incomparable
industry have reduced him... This modern servitude devours the generations in
their youth: here is the proletariat."

Unfortunately, the work was destroyed during World War II.

 


REAL ALLEGORY OF THE ARTIST'S STUDIO (1855)



Gustave Courbet completed the above painting in 1855 and submitted it and other
paintings to the International Paris Exhibition, but all of his works were
rejected.  Undaunted, he rented a hall just outside of the Paris Exhibition
site, and displayed his work at his own personal exhibition!  The huge oil
painting, measuring almost 12 X 20 feet,  bears the incredibly long title of:
Allégorie réelle: intérieur de mon atelier, déterminant une phase de sept années
de ma vie artistique (The Painter's Studio: A Real Allegory Summing up Seven
Years of My Artistic Life). It now hangs in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.

The painting is organized as a kind of triptych executed in the Realistic
artistic style.   In the center is Courbet himself, the foremost advocate of
Realism.  He is painting a landscape of his own Franche-Comté countryside. Just
behind Courbet is an unidealized nude model. to his front is a peasant boy, who
watches the master at work with admiration while a white cat plays at his feet.

The right side of the triptych is a group of bourgeois individuals who have
influenced and supported Courbet.  Some of them may be identified:  The standing
figure facing to the left is Alfred Bruyas, Courbet's longtime patron. Behind
Bruyas is another friend, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the French socialist
philosopher.  The man seated to the left of Proudhon is the French novelist
Jules Husson (pen name - Champfleury), who was an early advocate of Courbet's
Realism. The figure on the extreme right is the French poet Baudelaire; his
image is based on a portrait that Courbet had painted of the poet in 1848.  Just
to Baudelaire's right is the erased image of Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire's quadroon
mistress. Her erased presence was seen during a recent x-ray cleaning of the
painting.  Courbet painted over her image at the specific request of his friend
Baudelaire.  The identity of the prominently displayed bourgeois lady in the
shawl is uncertain.  Some have contended that she is French novelist George
Sand; however, there is little resemblance to known portraits of that famous
lady. Courbet called this lady and the man standing to her right as "amateurs
mondains."

The left side of the painting contains a group of people, mostly of the lower
classes, that Courbet may have used as models for many of his earlier paintings.
On the ground beside the canvas sits the figure of a starving (probably Irish)
peasant, the Great Irish Famine having taken place only a few years earlier. 
Behind the peasant, are several other figures who appear to include a priest, a
prostitute, a grave digger and a merchant. The standing figure on the extreme
left appears to be a Jewish Rabbi. Seated in front of the Rabbi is a the hunter
with several dogs.





 

 

 



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