Gustave Courbet

The bacchante (1844-47)

It has been several days since there was already inaugurated in Paris the exhibition devoted to Gustave Courbet (Ornans, France, 1819-lth Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, 1877) and it is time to dedicate a few lines to this account bird. The profile of the personage gathers very well the Wikipedia (in spite of the frightful writing):

He was born in a people next to Besançon, in the French Jura, which scenery reflects in his pictures. He studied in Besançon and then in Paris (1840). He traveled to Holland (1846) and Germany (1853). He is a Baudelaire friend, and he is related to Corot and Daumier.

It was selected (sic) for the Commune of Paris of 1871. Of him, Proudhon, a proletarian painter wanted to do. He believed that the art might correct the social contradictions.

Of profile between Assyrian and Hungarian, big drinker, exaggerated orator, at any cost, reluctant (sic), boastful and conceited, of a cruelty that was entertaining a society of which Baudelaire was bothered (sic), was not capturing anything of that in his paintings, of subtler and elegant courts, in which it began with the darkest linen, like a classic teacher.

It pushed back the Legion of Honor that Napoleón III wanted to grant to him and during the Commune one entrusted him the administration of the museums of Paris. After the Commune, the government predecessor (sic) made responsible it for the destruction of the column Vendôme. A military tribunal condemned to 6 months of prison and to pay 300.000 francs. After these 6 months it escaped to Switzerland (1873) to prevent the state from forcing him to pay the fine. He died in Tour du Peilz, locality next to Vevey, victim of a cirrhosis produced by his excessive consumption of alcohol.

A charming type that might have been friendly mine if I had lived in that epoch

Him Désespéré, self-portrait (1843-45)

The exhibition presents 120 paintings, an about thirty of graphic works and approximately 60 photos. In his web they say:

This retrospective underlines the complexity of the work of Courbet, of his ties, sometimes paradoxical, with the representation of the real thing and the pictorial tradition. It examines the position of the artist again in his epoch, analyzes his ties with other arts, especially with the photo. Also, the exhibition gives the key to understand a work of multiple facets, the realistic frame of the years 1848-1855 and his consequences for the art history.

Of course, the work of Courbet that more famous has been done in the last years, after decades of ashamed receiving, is now exposed: The origin of the world.

In the web site of the National Galleries of Grand Palais it can a works selection turns in the called mini-place of the exhibition.

More works in City of the painting.

Courbet in The power of the word.

Him château of Loudmouth (1874)

Seemed:
Boatman in Abu Ghraib
The Fuseli nightmare in an exhibition on horror and Gothic sex
The island of the dead persons of Arnold Bocklin
Spanish realism of the XXth century

Category: Painting

Tags: eroticism, France, Paris, realism, Swiss