#franche comté

COURBET AND THE MODERN LANDSCAPE

Courbet’s outsized representation of The Artist’s Studio (1855), subtitled “allégorie réelle déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique et morale,” served as a mid-career reckoning, a theoretical manifesto and a program for future action. At the center of the work, the artist is seen in the act of painting. Although a conspicuously undraped female model stands beside him, she is not represented in the picture, nor are any of the other characters present in the studio. The painting in progress is, in fact, not figural. For this polemical and confessional grande machine, Courbet define himself not as the painter of somber provincials and rough, vigorous peasants, but as painter of landscapes. Over the next 15 years, landscape painting would account for three quarters of Courbet’s artistic production. Lacking the controversy of his figural works, the landscapes were a great success with collectors, making him a considerable fortune.

His landscapes depict the region of the Franche-Comté around Ornans, his place of birth. Associated with deep geological time, Courbet’s rugged, inhospitable landscapes are beyond aesthetic categories like the sublime and the picturesque. Primordial, enduring, and indifferent, they are the antithesis of the evanescent, refinements of civilization, epitomized by the glittering metropolis. The natives of such a land reflect their environment. Therefore, the array of somber, roughhewn inhabitants of Ornans depicted in the act of Enterrement, resembles the distinctive local cliff formations that Courbet would subsequently paint. His own desire to be to be understood as the artistic manifestation of this radically-primal and vital topography is emphasized by the representation of his own body in The Artist’s Studio, which seems literally to merge and emerge from the landscape he paints.

Courbet’s transition from figural to landscape painting might appear to be a calculated retreat from his early, politicized Realist works to a more collector-friendly, saleable landscapes. The latter, however, continue to engage with the avant-garde obliquely, through their heavy, gritty facture. Laid on like cement with a trowel in places, the heavily-built up surfaces that foreground the materiality of the painted medium are diametrically opposed to the self-effacing finish and sheen of salon painting. That this style was clearly perceived to be “modern” is seen in its appeal to the Impressionist avant-garde: Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series, the winter landscapes of Monet, Sisley, and Pissarro and numerous views of L’ Étretat, are all highly-indebted to Courbet’s landscapes.