
The publication of Abbeville’s monumental Courbet volume having coincided neatly with this spring’s Courbet exhibit at the Met, we decided that we owed our readers our expert unsolicited opinions on the man, the art, and the exhibit. To that end, two Arbiters of Style took a field trip to the Met this weekend to mingle with the hoi palloi, browse the show, and jot down our reactions.
The verdict? Gustave Courbet is a man after our own heart. He once cheerfully referred to himself as “the most arrogant man in France,” and the self-portrait gallery with which the exhibit opens does nothing to contradict that claim. In his early pictures of himself, as he fixes the viewer with a cocky glare and dangles his signature pipe from his mouth, Courbet bears a passing resemblance to the young Bob Dylan—an artist equally fond of playing the consummate bohemian:

Image from Abbeville’s Courbet Image copyright C. M. Dudash
Spurning the popular Romanticism of his day, Courbet coined the term “realism” to describe his artistic style and aims, but was unafraid to push the limits even of his self-invented mode. In his 1846 Self-Portrait with Pipe (above), the pipe, a symbol of masculine and artistic potency, looks slightly unreal through its haze of tobacco smoke, evoking the artist’s dreamlike state as he smokes and imagines. (Needless to say, Courbet’s dandyish pipe, not to mention his unbridled arrogance, had a defining influence on the young Blad J. Garamond.)
Courbet’s theatricality and self-absorption were so limitless that they approached, in Keats’s phrase, the egotistical sublime. Even his 1843-45 The Desperate Man, which apparently captured a moment of legitimate crisis in his life, strikes us today as less a terrifying vision of private torment (like those of Van Gogh or Francis Bacon) than a wonderful piece of playacting. Here is the mad genius fully conscious of himself as such, bulging his eyes and tearing his hair out in handsome despair. Of all Courbet’s self-portraits, this is the one in which the artist is most obviously gazing in the mirror. And yet there’s a loneliness to the painting (what audience does he have besides himself?) that makes it genuinely unsettling and justly famous.
After this first self-portrait gallery, which like a hall of mirrors left the viewer somewhat dizzy, the next wing of the exhibit highlighted the artist’s masterful and often affectionate portraits of friends and family. (One woman beside me, exiting the previous wing, asked her friend, “Are these of his sister? Oh good, he’s not selfish anymore.”) Among this group, my personal favorite was the Portrait of Baroness de M…, in which the artist’s sister Juliette smiles as she strikes an awkwardly aristocratic pose under overbearing drapery. This gentle parody of the formal portraits of the era reminds us that Courbet, underneath all the self-aggrandizement, was a pretty funny guy.
Which brings us to The Origin of the World (L’origine du monde), whose title, it should always be remembered, is hilarious. Maxime du Camp called this meticulously rendered close-up of female genitalia “the last word in realism,” and in fact, judging by people’s reactions, it was clearly the alpha and omega of the exhibit despite being featured almost casually midway through. There was nothing casual, however, about the way Origin was actually situated: the curators stashed it in a narrow side space, away from plain sight, under dim, sordid lighting. My fellow Arbiter scoffed at this evidence of Americans’ prudishness relative to Europeans, who of course display the work openly, but the Alley of Shame did at least approximate the wink-wink, hush-hush conditions under which Origin was viewed for over a century. (Even the scandal-loving Courbet never so much as mentioned the work in his letters.) Just outside the Alley were the artist’s other great depictions of female nudes, including The Sleepers, about whose lolling women the Met’s bashful caption remarked, “The implied lesbianism must be considered in relation to the intended male audience.” Presumably that audience included both me, dutifully standing there considering it, and the man who hauled his son to the next room, saying, “You’re seventeen, you should be looking at landscapes,” as both of them grinned.
The rest of the exhibit raised further questions about the easy application of the label “realism” to Courbet’s work. It may be that in Origin, he really did take his style and its principles to their logical extreme, leaving him no choice but to venture down other avenues afterward. In several of his later landscapes, especially The Rock of Hautepierre, the handling of light seems to anticipate Cézanne, a passionate admirer of Courbet. And in his final self-portrait, the great realist takes some (cough) creative liberties, declining to paint the gray hair and paunchy belly his contemporaries describe. But it was another detail that struck me most about this portrait, which depicts the artist’s incarceration as a result of his political views. More even than in the Self-Portrait with Pipe of his younger years, the pipe Courbet is smoking seems faded and unreal. There is a clear visual echo of it in the latch of the barred window by which he sits, yet the latch is rendered much more solidly, as though the potency of his imprisonment were greater than—or had even in some sense stolen—his potency as an artist and a man.
It’s touches like these made Courbet more than just a novelty act or a one-note stylist. If he were just a realist, he might not be remembered today, but instead he was a great and idiosyncratic personality who couldn’t help seeing himself in everything he painted. So many of his subjects—from close friends to stags and trout—are oblique self-representations, and it may be that (bear with us here) in the defiant frankness of its “gaze,” even The Origin of the World is a kind of portrait of the artist. Gustave Courbet may have set out to paint the world as it is, but he ended up painting it grandly in his own image. As Arbiters of Style, that’s the kind of achievement we respect, and we’re only a little sorry that we got to enter the world afterward and remake it in ours.