Courbet: To Venture Independence
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Courbet: To Venture Independence Details
Language Notes Text: English (translation) Original Language: German Read more
Reviews
Klaus Herding, Professor of Art History at the University of Hamburg, has for several decades been one of the most stimulating contributors to Courbet studies through his many publications and, most recently, through the exhibition "Courbet: A Dream of Modern Art," which he curated and the eponymous catalogue for which he edited (see my review on this website). Whereas his more recent writing has promoted a somewhat revisionist, anti-realistic, view of the artist, the essays gathered in this volume are mainly from the 1970s and 1980s, when his attention was directed to a more traditional reception. The eight collected items, here presented for the first time in English (in an admirably smooth and fluid translation by John William Gabriel) and unrevised are what the author terms "part of a work in progress" (vii); i.e., they are easily read separately and are connected only by a kind of leitmotif of "independence" that appears in various guises throughout the collection. It should be said at the outset that this is a historical and scholarly book that more or less presupposes that the reader is fairly acquainted with Courbet's works; it is not a collection of reproductions, nor does it provide any systematic commentary on his paintings. Some of the essays are on general topics and some are devoted to specific paintings.The piece on "The Wrestlers" exposes why the reaction to this painting, exhibited at the Salon of 1853, was so violently negative. Critics took great offense at the "exaggerated corporeality" of the figures, at the emphasis on partial structures at the expense of the whole, and at the "dirty" grisaille coloration of the figures. Additionally, the "shock of ugliness" was something new in the Salon, and the critics were not ready to accept it. But at the heart of the criticism was the objection to the presentation of the wrestlers as working-class men at work; the audience, for whose ostensible delectation the men are wrestling, is so far removed as to be out of consideration as an object of the painting. It turns out, as Herding informs us, that wrestling matches like the one depicted were common entertainment in Paris at the time, a phenomenon that he sees in the context of the pauperization of rural workers and their migration to the urban centers in search of whatever work was available to them. Thus the painting represents a struggle in a much wider sense than immediately meets the eye.Every Courbet scholar has to have an interpretation of the artist's most enigmatic painting, that huge canvas with the imposing full title "The Painter's Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life," and Herding's is a truly astonishing one. Using previous iconographic investigations which plausibly identified the hitherto unrecognized people making up the left-hand group, and emphasizing that this was no ordinary canvas, but one created specifically for France's biggest mid-century blow-out, the Paris World's Fair, through which Napoleon III sought to legitimize his illegitimate regime, and which was opened by the Emperor himself on May 1, 1855, Herding concludes that it was intended also as a summing up of the seven years of Napoleon III's rule (which began in 1848).In his interpretation the painting is in the tradition of the "exhortation to the ruler" and was an appeal to peace in the face of the Emperor's bellicose foreign policy and in domestic policy an appeal to social reconciliation. The landscape that Courbet is painting in the center of the studio serves as a reminder of the value of unsullied nature at a time of accelerating industrial exploitation of the land and a reference to agriculture as a "fruitful soil of social regeneration" (59). Ultimately the picture is an allegory of the reconciliation of society through art.Following on the previous essay, "Equality and Authority in Courbet's Landscape Painting" rejects the notion that landscape is a politically neutral genre. Courbet and other artists were becoming increasingly aware of their role in the struggle for dominance between social classes and in the antagonism between city and country. Although the period 1845-1857, the time of Courbet's major figure painting, is usually seen as his more politically engaged years, Herding believes that 1857-1871, when the artist was more concentrated on landscape painting, was his period of even more profound and lasting political and social criticism, a period of great longing for equality and independence in universal terms. The year 1857, with its economic and political crises, ushered in a period of great social unrest in France. This, together with Courbet's sense that the rural and agricultural basis of French society was being sold out to the interests of industrial capital, leads the artist to embrace the primitive as a symbol of liberation. Herding believes that Courbet is playing the same counterauthoritarian role as before, only now through a different genre and in a different style of painting, in which the old iconography fixated on objects is giving way to a new semantics of color and light. Of course, his efforts in this new direction were taken by the Salon critics as evidence of his further moral and artistic deterioration, and the essay concludes with a review of the truly vitriolic attacks on his new painting.The essay on Courbet's "Portrait of Proudhon" emphasizes the ambiguities in the relationship of the painter and the philosopher, starting out with the consideration that they may not have been nearly as closely or as warmly connected as Courbet made out and we have usually assumed. Proudhon of course wanted an art appropriate to the industrial era, but he was apparently unable to free himself of the received esthetic idealism of neoclassical theory and unable to accept the new kind of painting that Courbet was doing. This Herding sees as emblematic of other ambiguities in this relationship, such as Proudhon's casting of the basis of society on the family but his inability to be a family man in the usual sense and thus Courbet's repainting of the portrait without Proudhon's wife. What we are left with is the painter's monument to a kind of "counter-authority" figure (110).In "Color and Worldview," Prof. Herding considers Courbet's palette his "true contribution toward the nineteenth-century transformation in the structure of painting" and "his most lasting influence on posterity" (111). Color per se is notoriously difficult to discuss, and it is not surprising that his "new approach to color" is taken together with aspects of the artist's technique. Courbet early on largely rejected the bright, "arty" colors of the Salon painters in favor of more subdued and earthy tones like those in "A Burial at Ornans," and never really adopted any of the standard techniques and methods of application taught by the schools. In fact, it is things like his variation of technique within the same painting and his "discontinuity of technique" that create Courbet's common "atmospheric ambiguity" (114) For example, his manner of pulling swaths of paint along and across the contours of objects tends to place him in an important position between Delacroix and Cezanne, "from the romantic palette of the imagination to positivistic, object-linked color, and from there to abstract color fields" (116). The culmination of Courbet's method is thus in the big seascapes, where the lack of any vantage point for the viewer and the melting of planes into one creates a synthesis surprising for an artist who started out by establishing clearly discrete objects: what object-related color once did is now done by discrete abstract color patches."A Note on the Late Work": The last word in this title is particularly important, as Herding does not believe much in the notion of a late or mature style. Indeed, he states that he hopes his discussion of Courbet's final paintings will permanently put to rest "the fiction of anthropomorphically valid developmental constants in art" (155). This general skepticism is especially pertinent to Courbet, who underwent no really dramatic development as a painter but whose work evidences much the same characteristics from beginning to end: verisimilitude together with a great capacity for abstraction, tension between integration and disintegration, etc. Certainly there was evolution of his style, as we have seen in previous essays, but for Herding probably the most embracing changes are in the direction toward what he calls "dematerialization" or sometimes "desubstantialization" of the object, tending ultimately toward an antirealistic style and the paradox that "abstraction advanced to become the most realistic method of appropriating reality" (155). Here Herding also discusses the difficult question of attribution in the artist's late works. After "Covert of Roe Deer by a Stream" won him a medal and international fame in 1866, Courbet became ever more commercially successful and relied increasingly on assistants in his studio, especially after his escape to Switzerland and the confiscation of all his French assets. Herding examines the independent paintings of the two principle assistants, Cherubino Pata and Marcel Ordinaire, and believes he can assign to them numbers of paintings previously attributed to the master. In fact, he claims that if the same criteria of authenticity that have been common in, say, Rembrandt scholarship were extended to Courbet, then an absolutely certain attribution "could seldom be applied to the work of Courbet's exile years, or even to most of the post-1866 oeuvre" (145).The final essay is a delightful review of "Courbet's Modernity as Reflected in Caricature." Herding looks at some of the vast number of caricatures of Courbet's work printed in the satirical publications of the time. The artist's major oeuvre closely coincided with the heyday of art caricature during these years of the Second Empire, when art criticism served largely as a surrogate for a political criticism which, when not outright forbidden, was subject to severe censorship. The major source of the criticism of Courbet's work, as Herding sees it, was the fact that the artist was creating consciously with the working class and the rural petite bourgeoisie in mind, whereas the critical establishment, both in written form and in caricature, was virtually a function of the ruling elite. Courbet's departures from the expected norms, i.e., his distortion of form, abandonment of atmospheric perspective and size relationships, his replacement of traditional pictorial hierarchy with an equal emphasis across the canvas--all these quite conscious artistic decisions were taken by the caricaturists (either at face value or tongue-in-cheek) as inadvertent errors and proof of a lack of talent. The great historical irony here is alluded to in the essay's title: as it is in the nature of caricature to overemphasize or blow up what it deems defects, and as what here were deemed defects were really emerging features of an evolving aesthetic, what the reactionary critics actually did was to anticipate modern developments: the caricaturists, figuring themselves defenders of established standards, were in reality among the most influential promoters of the very advances they thought to belittle.These are highly informative and thought-provoking essays, a useful compendium of some of Klaus Herding's major writings on Courbet. It presupposes that the reader will have a collection of reproductions to refer to, something especially necessary for the article on color. But since we know that reproductions in books vary widely in color, it would not have been amiss for the Yale press to provide a section of its own. This is a very diverse collection, written over a considerable stretch of time but held together by reference to Courbet's constant quest for independence and by the author's combination of formal analysis with social history. In this, it resembles another excellent collection of essays on the artist, Linda Nochlin's recent "Courbet" (see my review on this website), although Herding usually gives greater attention to formal aspects. This is a very useful volume for all Courbet enthusiasts, and it should be welcomed especially by those who do not have linguistic access to the work of this major contributor to the field.