At the beginning of the Gustave Courbet show at the Met, once you get past the enormous blow-up of his face in mock passionate agony in “The Desperate Man”, there is a room of self portraits. They run in chronological order, and if you look at the first three, you see the development, very early, of his artistic personae.
The first is a very small painting, of a fresh-faced Courbet in a sparse room, a sleek puppy at his side. There is little indication in either his clothing or his pose of his occupation. Bereft of brush or pipe, his right hand sits on the table in front of him. Courbet was known for his vanity, and one could imagine that he took great joy at depicting his youthful beauty: dark, langorous eyes peering out through the heavy shadow, a well-formed mouth the corners of which curl up as if imbued with an inherent mockery. It is a portrait of calculated innocence. There are many precedents in the history of art for portraits such as these, from Paramagianino’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror to Rembrandt self-portraits or Titian’s Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman, all of which a young Courbet would have been aware of. Courbet claims to have studied from nature, having rejected the academic teaching of the French Academy, but even a cursory look at this small self-portrait would contradict his claim. Early on, Courbet is staking his specific place as an artist, both innocent and mocking. His modest dark suit does not suggest any specific profession, his right hand does not hold a brush, but his pose and the suggested historical references betray the fact that this seemingly self-taught artist is very aware of who he is, and the tradition that he comes from.
The experience of standing in front of these paintings is an uneasy one, as if the butt of a joke. Take the second painting in the show, Self Portrait with Black Dog, 1842. Once again, it is a portrait of the artist and his black dog, but the setting has changed. Courbet now paints himself on the top of a mountain in his native region of Ornans, as indicated by the limestone cliff behind him. The young man gazes down at the audience through heavy-lidded haughtiness, as if we’ve interrupted him on his sketching trip. A valley spreads out to the left of the figures, and a sketchbook and walking stick are behind him, indicating his purpose for being there.
You can tell that the artist is a little older, and his pictorial language has become more articulate. Compared to the first portrait, his hair is much longer, the beginnings of a beard frame his jawline. His black spaniel is fully grown. Formally, the shape of the master resembles the shape of the dog, both dark forms framed by the limestone behind them. In this self-portrait, Courbet sets up a series of contradictions at first not obvious which I will explain. First, there is his wardrobe. He wears the fancy checked pants and elegant jacket of a Parisian dandy, which would be very out of place in this region. On his head he wears a wide-brimmed hat covering long, thick hair, a characteristic of the bohemian life of Paris that he was privy to at this age, but which also contradicts the elegant clothing that he wears. The long, curved walking stick is typical Savoyard hiking equipment. This, coupled with the geological study of the rocks behind the artist, place him in the area near where he would have grown up.
A bohemian would not wear the wardrobe of a dandy because he could not afford it, a dandy would not dare to don such elegant clothing for a hiking trip, and a native of Ornans would not normally know of either while hiking in their home region. I get the impression that Courbet is showing off, both to his family back home at how urban and fashionable he has become, as well as to the Parisian audience that he exhibited this painting to, by how authentically rural the artist is. By suggesting the many different attributes of these different personae, Courbet is keeping the audience guessing as to what he is up to.
And then there is his gaze. He looks down at us, both literally and figuratively. First his position in the painting, along with the angle that his eyes look down, places him above us if we were to meet him in real life. Imagine that you too are hiking in the Jura mountains, and this is what you encounter. He looks down at you as if you have disturbed him, but snobbishly he’s not sweating it. He seems bored with us. The pipe he holds has gone cold, there is no smoke above it. Has it gone cold in his contemplation of us, or did it go cold in his reverie of nature that we disturbed him from? The dog looks at us with the same blank expression, and I am reminded of Herzog in Grizzly Man describing the bear at the end of the film as “the bored look of someone waiting for their food”. Of course, the dog is not interested in us enough to attack, but it stares at us with a darkly protective air, ready if we were to challenge its master. Of course, it is assumed that this will not happen, that we will be intimidated away from the scene, leaving the artist alone in his land to pursue his genius.
Self Portrait with Black Dog was the first of his paintings to be accepted by the Salon, and in it you can see the emerging themes of Courbets work. First, there is the ambiguity of class, discussed above. Courbet held a unique place in Parisian society, as well as in Ornans. Coming from a land-owning family, he enjoyed a relatively privileged upbringing. He was well educated in Besancon, before moving to Paris to pursue the life of a painter. In Paris at this time, la vie boheme was in full force. It was fashionable, if not always necessary, to present yourself as a starving artist, driven to the point of desperation by your art. Lucky for Courbet, coming from a well-to-do family, he did not have to subject himself to the dire straits of many of his contemporaries, yet he often portrayed himself as such. The other portraits in the show have Courbet playing the role of a wounded lover, a suicide, a somber musician, and a man literally driven to his demise by fevered desperation. Once he became established in Paris, he cultivated friends with the literati, who romanticized him as a rogue artist from the provinces, a role that Courbet was more than happy to exploit to his own means. This somewhat explains the contradictory clues in his painting.
Another emergent theme in this early work is the mixing of genres. Is this a self-portrait or a landscape? Later in his career, he would confound critics by painting genre scenes on a historical scale, prostitutes as bacchantes, and landscapes as rough and impenetrable provocations. Think of Bob Dylan in shades and a leather jacket, plugging in his amp at the folk festival in ’66. What was he thinking behind those blank, dark sunglasses? Indeed, there is something similarly impenetrable in the blank looks given by Courbet and his spaniel, and like the innocence of the first 1842 portrait, it is a calculated impenetrability.
Gustave Courbet, more than any other artist before him, courted controversy. He was the first artist to fully embrace the rising trend of popular press and media. He lent his face to caricature, knowing full well that in so doing, infamous or not, he was increasing his brand-appeal and recognition. At the height of his fame, he refused to sell his work to high-ranking government officials, opting instead to sell it to close friends, he refused the cross of the Legion d’honneur from Napoleon III, a highly-publicized decision that brought him more press than the initial honor of receiving it would have. In short, one could say that Courbet paved the way for the modern artist who makes more a spectacle of himself, whose appeal centers around their personality over the substance of their work.
This is a dubious legacy to leave, however. Especially in the 19th century, where the vicissitudes of French society, from the industrial revolution to France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, the Commune, and the successive governments that followed, engendered the challenges and experimentation that would bring about a modern art that in turn would come to make Courbets innovations seem retrograde. One cannot stay on the avant-garde forever, and the generation that was raised on his innovations would live to use those very advances against him. So that while Courbet thought it a triumph in irony and caustic spite to paint the voluptuous Woman with a Parrot of 1866, he had already been out-done by Manet in his 1963 scandalous Olympia. The truth was, that Courbet had ceased to be scandalous, and was now making art, from floral still lifes to Bob Ross-like palette-knife seascapes, that was to be bought by the very same high-ranking government officials and masters of finance that he claims to have despised.
Things only got worse for him after the 1871 toppling of the Vendome Column, a symbol to the Commune of the previous regimes colonialism and conquest. Unfortunately, the Commune was suppressed in a matter of months, and the government that followed it was more conservative, charging Courbet with the cost of re-building the column after a brief incarceration. All his assets were to be sequestered in France, so Courbet fled to Switzerland. His debt was to be 325,000 francs, and Courbet responded by producing hack-work in bulk for quick sale. Exiled in Switzerland, he hired a team of un-remarkable assistants, aiding his dashing off of trite landscapes to be bought by bourgeois tourists. He also began to drink much more heavily, eventually succumbing to alcohol-induced dropsy and dying at the age of 55, shunned by his peers and his country.
Back in the first room of the show, the third portrait of Courbet is the so-called Desperate Man of 1845. This also happens to be the poster for the exhibition, the cover of the catalogue, and blown up way larger than life on the entrance wall. It certainly is a dramatic portrait, but in my opinion only reflects Courbet trying on the guise of a Romantic artist, driven to the depths of oblivion by his all-consuming fiery passion. It also echoes work by Gericault and Rembrandt, and Courbet once again takes obvious pleasure in describing his own features in the strong light and shadow of the Baroque style that he apes. Next to that, is the un-finished Le fou de peur, 1845, in which the exact facial expression is lifted, and put onto a body that seems to be falling off a cliff. The exhibition catalog describes this painting, along with the Desperate Man as follows:
“Courbet aimed to demonstrate how the pursuit of the ideal and the absolute leads only to a dead end, and at the same time he marked the close of a phase of his artistic education petrified by the dogmas of Romanticism and the academy” (p. 105-106)
It is a shame that this same “pursuit of the ideal” that Courbet painted early in his career would come to lead him to such a dead-end at the end of his life. But isn’t that how it always is? Bob Dylan isn’t what he used to be, and Werner Herzog, in many of his publicity stunts that he actively orchestrates, seems to be following suit. What starts out as fresh soon becomes moldy if left to rot. Bereft of the controversial bite of his early work, and pressured by financial obligation, that too a result of his pursuit of controversy, Courbet imploded.
To refer to Narcissus in describing Courbet is to risk redundancy. However, there is something about the parallel to the myth, especially in “Le fou de peur”. Courbet’s studied attention to the beauty of his frenzied face is has echoes in the Greek Myth. Falling in love with his own reflection, and unable to consummate his self-love, Narcissus kills himself. Courbet met a similar end in Switzerland.
Is there any dignity in his end? Death never has any dignity at the time, the idea of dignity is assigned only posthumously by preceding generations. Courbet is no doubt a tremendous painter, and one can certainly enjoy his art without knowing any of the context in which it was made, but once you know, the story is a bit more tragic. Would we like Bob Dylan as much if we only heard what he was doing now? I suspect not. Those that make a career of courting controversy and challenging norms often run the risk of burning out too quickly. That, sadly, is the dubious legacy of Gustave Courbet, and many who followed him.
