Victoria Walther

2/7/11
AD 390
Leuthold
Materialist Analysis

Gustave Courbet : A real example

Gustave Courbet was a French painter who sought for means to “connect” to

the people. He chose to represent unwanted subjects and situations. Most of the

middle class disagreed and was unappreciative of his art. He established himself as a

major proponent of Realism and shocked the public with the scale of his paintings.

Courbet’s art, mainly the Burial at Ornans, showed his defiance and rejection of the

classic, nineteenth century style of painting.

This movement of realism sought to represent life contemporaneously,

including scenes from the gritty streets of Paris, images of the desperation of the

poor, the rugged nature of certain landscapes, and the hard-working nature of the

peasant. Courbet was strongly opposed to idealization in his art, and he urged other

artists to instead make the commonplace and contemporary the focus of their art as

well.1 He saw Realism as a liberation of human consciousness from false ideology in

order to take control of one's destiny.

In Courbet’s Burial at Ornans (Figure 1), done in 1850, he presents the

world far too rudely. The faces of the people are weary and downright homely.

Courbet portrays death as a literally "down-to-earth" event whose meaning goes

no further than laying the body in the ground2. His rows of mourners seemed

1
Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven: Yale College, 2005), 73.
2
Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1990), 125.
merely additive rather than dramatically coherent, hence related to folk imagery.

The density of the people forces the viewer to concentrate on the figures, with the

open grave only partly in view coming toward the viewer, who would have to be

standing in the grave to get this viewpoint.

The Burial was meant to be an accurate account of the abuse and

deprivation that was a common feature of mid-century French rural life. Lacking

the traditional apparatus of pictorial composition or religious interpretation,

Courbet's picture would normally have been considered a genre painting. These

were lower on the scale of values than academic history painting. Yet the huge

canvas with life-sized figures flaunted Courbet's challenge to the assumptions

about what was worthy of large-scale artistic representation, and how rough

technique evoked a worker's handicraft.

Courbet's brushwork is rough—more so than might be expected during the

mid-nineteenth century. This suggests that the way the artist painted his canvas

was in part a conscious rejection of the highly polished, refined Neoclassicist style

that still dominated French art in 1848. What also offended the sensibilities of the

observers was that this was not the romanticized ideal of peasant life that they

were used to, and in these turbulent times, they did not wish to be reminded of

that reality. The faces of the peasants are worn with a lifetime of hard labor, grim

and lined with grief.

This is realism at its most powerful, turning a commonplace event into a

historical event. He presented the people and the landscape with the crudity and
coarse surface of peasant life itself. Critics called the figures, “too large and

abrupt”3. These were only some of the harsh critiques Courbet had to endure

when entering his painting into the Paris Salon, which they rejected. The Burial

earned Courbet heated criticism, making him a public figure and realism a

powerful force.

He welcomed the intense criticism and hostility his paintings created in the

middle class society. He wanted the artist to no longer paint pictures to match the

vision of others. The artist should take initiative to provoke or start a social change.

Courbet, alone before his easel, places the artist as the seer, not the mere translator

of approved visions.

3
Fred S. Kleiner, Gardner's art through the ages: the Western perspective, (Boston:
Wadsworth, 2006), 630.