ARTT 1105

Week 3
Tutorial 2
Modern Art: Realism and Contemporaneity
Tutorial Questions:

• With reference to TJ Clark’s essay “Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848
Revolution” discuss how the politics of 1848, in particular across Ornans and Besanco,
influenced the imagery of Courbet’s paintings Burial at Ornans (1849-1850) and The
Stonebreakers (1849).

• Comment on Kevin Chua’s notion of “unresolved temporalities” in Seabad Sindudarsono

Sudjojono’s paintings Historic Meeting in Tjikampek (Pertemuan Di Tjikampek yang
Bersedjarah, 1964) and Rest (Ngaso, 1964). Discuss how this term relates to the realism
and contemporaneity of these paintings.
 Revolution and Social Realism
The Realist movement in French art flourished from about 1840 until the late nineteenth
century, and sought to convey a truthful and objective vision of contemporary life. Realism
emerged in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1848 that overturned the monarchy of
Louis-Philippe and developed during the period of the Second Empire under Napoleon III.
As French society fought for democratic reform, the Realists democratized art by depicting
modern subjects drawn from the everyday lives of the working class. Rejecting the idealized
classicism of academic art and the exotic themes of Romanticism, Realism was based on
direct observation of the modern world. In keeping with Gustave Courbet’s statement in 1861
that “painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist in the representation of real
and existing things,” Realists recorded in often gritty detail the present-day existence of
humble people, paralleling related trends in the naturalist literature of Émile Zola, Honoré de
Balzac, and Gustave Flaubert. The elevation of the working class into the realms of high art
and literature coincided with Pierre Proudhon’s socialist philosophies and Karl
Marx’s Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, which urged a proletarian uprising. The
Met Museum of Art
Realism and Contemporaneity
When two of Courbet’s major works (A Burial at Ornans and The Painter’s
Studio) were rejected by the jury of the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris,
he withdrew his eleven accepted submissions and displayed his paintings
privately in his Pavillon du Réalisme, not far from the official international
exhibition. For the introduction to the catalogue of this independent, one-man
show, Courbet wrote a Realist manifesto, echoing the tone of the period’s
political manifestos, in which he asserts his goal as an artist “to translate the
customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch according to my own
estimation.” In his autobiographical Painter’s Studio (Musée d’Orsay),
Courbet is surrounded by groups of his friends, patrons, and even his models,
documenting his artistic and political experiences since the Revolution of
1848.
The Met Museum, New York
Courbet’s Manifesto
An epoch can only be reproduced by its own artists, I mean by the artists who lived in it. I hold the artists of one
century basically incapable of reproducing the aspect of a past or future century-in other words, of painting the past
or the future. It is in this sense that I deny the possibility of historical art applied to the past. Historical art is by
nature contemporary. Each epoch must have its artists who express it and reproduce it for the future. An age which
has not been capable of expressing itself through its own artists has no right to be represented by subsequent artists.
This would be a falsification of history.

The history of an era is finished with that era itself and with those of its representatives who have expressed it. It is
not the task of modern times to add anything to the expression of former times to ennoble or embellish the past.
What has been, has been. The human spirit must always begin work afresh in the present, starting off from acquired
results. One must never start out from foregone conclusions proceeding from synthesis to synthesis, from
conclusion to conclusion. The real artists are those who pick up their age exactly at the point to which it has been
carried by preceding times. To go backward is to do nothing; it is pure loss; it means that one has neither understood
nor profited by the lessons of the past. This explains why the archaic schools of all kinds are brought down to the
most barren compilations.

I maintain, in addition, that painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real
and existing things It is a completely physical language, the words of which consist of all visible objects; an object
which is abstract, not visible, non-existent, is not within the realm of painting. Imagination in art consists in
knowing how to find the most complete expression of an existing thing, but never in inventing or creating that thing
itself.
Gustave Courbet,
Dinner at Ornans,
1849-1850, Oil on
Canvas
Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans, 1849-1850, Oil on Canvas, Musée d’Orsay
Gustave
Courbet, The
Stonebreakers,
1849, Oil on
Canvas
Gustave Courbet, The
Peasants of Flagey,
1849-1850, Oil on
Canvas
Coubet’s Manifesto (continued)
The beautiful exists in nature and may be encountered in the midst of reality under the most diverse aspects. As
soon as it is found there, it belongs to art, or rather, to the artist who knows how to see it there. As soon as
beauty is real and visible, it has its artistic expression from these very qualities. Artifice has no right to amplify
this expression; by meddling with it, one only runs the risk of perverting and, consequently, of weakening it. The
beauty provided by nature is superior to all the inventions of the artist.

Beauty, like truth, is a thing which is relative to the time in which one lives and to the individual capable of
understanding it. The expression of the beautiful bears a precise relation to the power of perception acquired by
the artist. Here are my basic ideas about art. With such ideas, to think of the possibility of opening a school for
the teaching of conventional principles would be going back to the incomplete, received notions which have
everywhere directed modern art up to this point. . . .

It is not possible to have schools for painting; there are only painters. Schools have no use except for discerning
the analytic procedures of art. No school is capable of pressing on to a synthesis in isolation. Painting cannot,
without falling into abstraction, let a partial aspect of art dominate, whether it be drawing, colour, composition,
or any other one of the extraordinary multiplicity of means the totality of which alone constitutes this art.
Jean-François
Millet, The
Gleaners, 1857,
Oil on Canvas
During the same period, Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) executed scenes of rural life
that monumentalize peasants at work, such as Sheep Shearing Beneath a Tree). While a
large portion of the French population was migrating from rural areas to the
industrialized cities, Millet left Paris in 1849 and settled in Barbizon, where he lived the
rest of his life, close to the rustic subjects he painted throughout his career. The
Gleaners (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), exhibited at the Salon of 1857, created a scandal
because of its honest depiction of rural poverty. The bent postures of Millet’s gleaners,
as well as his heavy application of paint, emphasize the physical hardship of their task.
Like Courbet’s portrayal of stonebreakers, Millet’s choice of subject was considered
politically subversive, even though his style was more conservative than that of Courbet,
reflecting his academic training. Millet endows his subjects with a sculptural presence
that recalls the art of Michelangelo and Nicolas Poussin, as seen in his Woman with a
Rake. His tendency to generalize his figures gives many of his works a sentimental
quality that distinguishes them from Courbet’s unidealized paintings. Vincent van
Gogh greatly admired Millet and made copies of his compositions, including First Steps,
after Millet.
Jean-François Millet, The
Angelus, 1857-59, Oil on
Canvas
Honoré Daumier,
Third Class
Carriage, 1862-64,
Oil on Canvas, The
Met Museum
Seabad Sindudarsono Sudjojono, Historic
Meeting in Tjikampek (Pertemuan Di Tjikampek
yang Bersedjarah, 1964)
Seabad Sindudarsono Sudjojono Rest (Ngaso, 1964)
Sudjojono, Seko (Perintis
Gerilja), 1949. Oil on canvas,
173.5 × 194 cm. Yogyakarta,
Indonesia: Collection of
the Republic of Indonesia
Presidential Palace.