Mary G. Morton

Gustave Courbet - hunter for deer as well as controversy; enfant terrible, but first of all a painter, and one who used the palette knife as often as the brush on the canvas; the rugged provincial who applied every trick in the book to make a big splash in Paris, and made it to the degree that he died in exile in Switzerland. Courbet is often described as an “artist’s artist” - and the sheer number of painters that have expressed their admiration for him attest to the veracity of this assertion. It is his landscape painting that deserves the most attention, possibly also including his paysages de neige and paysages de mer, so it was with great interest that I came across this catalogue from the 2006 exhibition organized at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

I very much appreciated the opening essay by Mary Morton, “To Create a Living Art: Rethinking Courbet's Landscape Painting.” She notes early on that “despite the fact that landscape constitutes more than two-thirds of his oeuvre, Courbet's landscape painting has yet to achieve a stable position in the scholarly canon,” (p. 1) and adds in a note that “Marxist art historians have devalued Courbet's landscape painting (...) T. J. Clark's seminal 1973 volume on Courbet focuses on the artist's politically engaged painting of the late 1840’s and the 1850’s. He deems the artist's landscape paintings a failure, the weakest part of Courbet's oeuvre...” It was in other words high time that this misconception was corrected, and this is a great contribution in that direction,

She writes further: “Part of the excitement of Courbet's landscapes, and an essential feature of their modernity, is their revelation of process, of the artist's technical exploration. He often painted in large scale, working quickly and applying paint with a range of gestures and a variety of tools: large and small brushes, the palette knife, rags, even his thumb. His completed pictures were often roughly finished, intentionally defiant of the polished fini characteristic of Academic paintings. The self-effacing elimination of all traces of the artist's labor was antithetical to Courbet's project. [And to his personality as well, probably.]
The lack of finish in Courbet's landscapes belies their technical complexity. Critics frequently referred to Courbet's unusual manipulation of dense amounts of pasty pigment, scooped up with the palette knife and smeared onto the canvas. For all of their surface texture, however, Courbet's paintings maintain a surprising smoothness. (...) His technique involved building up layers of transparent glazes, and he scraped away paint as frequently as he applied it. At close range one can see primary, secondary, and tertiary layers laid bare, with regular adjustments made between them inspired by a referent in nature and/or the exigencies of the paint itself. Courbet achieved a range of nuance and drama with the palette knife that was without precedent in the history of painting.” (pp. 6-7)

“(...) "Never before has the work of a painter been a more faithful image of the character of the man," [Théodore] Duret wrote in 1867. So successful was Courbet's campaign of self-promotion that the reception of his paintings was profoundly inflected by his larger-than-life persona. (...) Contemporary writers referred to Courbet's strong instincts, physical vitality, and intense connection to nature. (...) Courbet’s landscapes were perceived as expressions of masculine vitality with undercurrents of violence. Critics consistently referred to the power, force, and dynamism of Courbet’s landscapes. Even Courbet’s signature tool, the palette knife, was labeled a brutal weapon by critics, evoking images of the artist attacking his paint surface. Calling critics who misunderstood Courbet "pale" and "impotent," Champfleury defended him alongside the epic German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883)—a rather striking comparison.” (pp. 8-9)

I didn’t care so much for Charlotte Eyerman’s essay “Courbet’s Legacy in the Twentieth Century,” though I found it interesting to read about the many American painters that admired Courbet, even though I personally don’t admire them so much.
It picks up when she discusses Courbet’s influence on Cézanne: “Courbet, according to Cézanne, was "a builder":
‘He slapped paint on the way a plasterer slaps on stucco. A real color grinder. He built like a Roman mason. But he was also a real painter. There hasn't been another in our century who can beat him.... He is profound, serene, velvety.... He always created compositions in his mind. His vision remained the vision of the old masters. It's like his palette knife, he used it only in landscapes. He is sophisticated, meticulous.... I say that it was force, genius that he put underneath the finish. And then, ask Monet what Whistler owes Courbet, from the time when they were together.... No matter how big, he made things subtle. He belongs in museums.’...” (p. 31)

"Here is Cézanne [again], rhapsodizing:
‘The great Vagues [ Waves], the one in Berlin, is marvelous, one of the important creations of the century, much more exciting, more full blown than the one here [referring to 'Stormy Sea' (The Wave), 1870, Musée d'Orsay]. Its green is much wetter, the orange much dirtier, with its windswept foam, and its tide which appears to come from the depth of the ages, its tattered sky, and its pale bitterness. It hits you right in the stomach. You have to step back. The entire room feels the spray.’...” (p. 32)

Towards the end, she brings in Gerhard Richter, which it is at least an improvement over the likes of Pollock and de Kooning, so I decided to take it as a kind of redeeming gesture: “Surprisingly, perhaps, it [the Getty Museums 'Grotto of Sarrazine'] also evokes the work of the contemporary German painter Gerhard Richter (b. 1932). Like Courbet's work, Richter's cannot be tied down to a singular style or technique, for it defies traditional conventions and art historical categories.” (pp. 33-4) She then moves on to discuss Richter's large November diptych (1989), which is also reproduced in the catalogue.
“Richter's technique of application and removal results in a complex, delicate, and thoroughly mysterious surface. The connections between Courbet's use of the palette knife and Richter's technique of layering, removing, adding, and subtracting to achieve both narrative and visual effects present compelling parallels.” (p. 34)
Indeed, many of Richter's large abstract canvases show a degree of relation to certain aspects of Courbet's paintings, and are similar in technique to the work mentioned here. This relation is also much less tenuous than that to the American expressionsts. Regarding the latter, Eyerman discusses elements like a similar use of diagonals. (!) If someone professes to being inspired by Courbet it doesn't necessarily imply that there are any actual similarities between those two - and statements like Pollock's "I don't paint nature. I am nature" doesn't change that fact. A painter that nevertheless comes closer to Courbet than e.g. Pollock, though of the same generation, is the French-Russian Nicolas de Staël (he gets no mention in Eyerman's essay however.) He said the following (in a letter to Jacques Dubourg, 1955) about Courbet: "C’est un immense bonhomme, on mettra encore quelques siècles à le reconnaître. Je dis immense parce que sans esthétique, sans pompiérisme, sans préambule il descend à jet continu des tableaux uniques, avec la même sûreté qu’un fleuve qui coule vers la mer, dense, radiant à larges sonorités et toujours sobre." - We have a ways to go yet...

The essay by Dominique de Font-Réaulx (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) is titled “Reproducing Reality: Landscape Photography of the 1850s and 1860s in Relation to the Paintings of Gustave Courbet.” She underlines Courbet’s strong connection to the landscapes of his native Franche-Comté:
“As the majority of critics and historians have emphasized, Courbet’s landscapes are the aesthetic declaration of a profound connection that joined the artist to his native land. The painter's landscapes are imprinted with an intimate knowledge of the places represented, with a strong, carnal, loving union between the artist and the valleys where he grew up. The painter was happy to assert, on many occasions, that he painted only what he knew. He protested strongly against "vedutistes," those painters who believed every landscape was worthy of representation:
‘Don't those people have a land of their own?... There [are] a bunch of idiots who take a box of paints and go plant themselves in one place or another. They bring back their paintings and tell you: "that's Venice, that's the Alps." What a joke! To paint a land you have to know it. I know my land and I paint it. That undergrowth — it comes from our land. That river — it's the Loue, that one is the Lison. Those rocks, those are in Ornans and le Puits Noir. Go look, you'll recognize all my paintings.’
Even today, traveling down from the Franche-Comté plateau into Ornans can create the sensation of entering one of Courbet’s paintings. One must be careful, however, not to consider his landscape painting as only the limited unveiling of a familiarity acquired since childhood or the nostalgia of an artist living far from his childhood home.” (p. 39)

While Courbet took an interest in photography – in fact he was one of the first artists to reproduce his works through photography - and while fascinating parallels exists between Courbet’s painting and the developments in the photography of this time, one should not to read too much into this:
“[T]he connection between Courbet's work and the photographic creations of his time should not be seen as one of influence and subordination. In its very materiality — the strength of the knife work, the density of the color — as well as in its dimensions, the painter's work appears quite different from the smooth surface of photographs, their small size, and their inability, until many long years to come, to reproduce the colors of nature.” (p. 41)

The Plates are found in the second half of the catalogue, ordered by type of landscape: Cliffs and Valleys, Forests and Streams, Rocks and Grottoes, Snowscapes, Seascapes, Switzerland. I found the short texts which are included, one for each section and focusing on the paintings themselves, very useful as well.




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