The Artist Becomes Independent

When does modern art begin? At which moment in the great historical progression of art does a flavor of our own time suddenly come into painting, so that we feel we are no longer looking at something that belongs to another age or civilization? Clearly the change took place in France, and in the 19th century; but claims could be made for a number of individual pictures, for it was of course no sharp and distinct break. If we look to the middle of the century, however, there is one painting that suggests a new beginning in more ways than one.

The image above is Courbet's The Painter's Studio first exhibited in Paris in 1855. It is enormous, nearly twenty feet wide, and although not obviously beautiful, has a richness of design and meaning still very evident today. In it Courbet was trying to do something quite original. In order to explain his intentions he provided the picture with a strange sub-title: "real allegory summing up a seven-year period of my artistic life," and described it at length to a friend: "The scene is laid in my studio in Paris. The picture is divided into two parts. I am in the center, painting. On the right are all the active participants - that is, my friends, the workers, the art collectors. On the left are the others - those whose lives are without significance: the common people, the destitute, the poor, the wealthy, the exploited, the exploiters, those who thrive on death." The whole picture is, in Sir Kenneth Clark's words, "a great poem of self-love." Courbet was indeed a notorious egoist. But he was striking a blow for the independence of the artist, who here becomes the subject of his art in no uncertain manner. Since Courbet, everything and anything has been possible for the artist. For better or worse, artists have been free from the demands of society, able, even encouraged, to go their own ways and to trust that public appreciation would follow. Courbet called his new style realism and thought of it as the final form of art. Realism was in the first place a revolution in subject matter. There was to be no more paintings of allegory, nor of events from the Bible or history or literature, for Courbet regarded ordinary people and everyday scenes and things as the only possible subjects for art. He denied the place in art of imagination: an artist, he said, is capable of representing only what he can actually see and touch; he must try to do this as simply and directly as possible. But, as Courbet was to discover, this was easier said than done. In due course it lead him and his successors, particularly Monet and Cezanne, to explore the nature of perception, or how we see things, and of pictorial representation, how we can paint them.

Gustave Courbet

For Courbet realized, as we see from The Painter's Studio, that the picture itself makes certain demands upon the artist. He disliked the careful arrangement of figures in an illusionistic setting that was conventionally regarded as "composition," but he knew that within the four sides of a picture some kind of unity must prevail. The painter's task is to create a convincing space there. This Courbet achieved by means of light and shadow, so that the figures seem indeed to be gathering together in the same room. Colors, tone, and texture all help to unify a rather casual, and even irrational, assemblage of people. Nor did Courbet forget tat a picture is a flat surface; as we shall see, the implications of this reverberate through the painting of the next fifty years.

Courbet never again attempted anything so ambitious as The Painter's Studio. It was his declaration of independence, but one that seems to have come near to exhausting even his considerable energies. He was unable to finish his next sizable figure composition, The Bride's Toilet. And one can understand why. It is the boldest and most radical of all his pictures; in it he appears to distort the forms of the human body, the perspective of the room and the furniture in it. The result is quite unlike a photograph of the subject and may be regarded as "unreal." But the human eye is a much more complex instrument than the camera. He does not see as the camera sees. Thus The Bride's Toilet comes much closer than would a photograph to recording Courbet's visual sensations of the scene. In his later years, Courbet achieved a more complete success only when he painted simple subjects: apples on a dish, a vase of flowers, a trout, a nude woman, a tree in a field, a wave breaking. Here the materiality of the painting, the rich, thick, grainy paint spread over the surface, acts as the equivalent of the thing painted, and sometimes gives it a larger-than-life quality so that the wave seems not one particular wave, but all waves and the whole movement of the sea.

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