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Courbet’s Tent/ Summer 2014/

Colin Darke: Studio and Bathers- Allegory Disturbs

Courbet’s Realism

Gustave Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory of a Seven Year Phase in my Artistic and Moral Life of 1855 was greeted with astonished confusion, by friend and enemy alike. The work was shown in his ‘tent’, following its rejection by the Salon that year (in fact, a specially constructed pavilion adjacent to the official Paris Universal Exposition building, built at Courbet’s own expense).† Such responses were par for the course as far as Courbet was concerned, but this time he managed to shock his friends and supporters, as well as his detractors. More of this later. Courbet’s realism began in the first of those seven years, directly following the 1848 revolution and in direct opposition to the romanticism and classicism that had previously served both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary interests. Its first manifestations were straightforward enough, conforming to what would become the standard definition of the genre - real people portrayed with similitude in real situations, in real locations, or, in Freidrich Engels’ summary of Realist literature, “…besides truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances.”1 After Dinner at Ornans (1848), for example, shows a group of peasants (including the artist’s father) enjoying postprandial relaxation as one of the friends plays on his fiddle. Fabric is old and worn, falling loosely around the human forms they clumsily enclose. Wood and stone are broken with age. The central character has his back turned to us, indifferent to our gaze. The painting’s political subversion is enhanced through raising of the

                                                                                                               

† http://faculty.winthrop.edu/stockk/Modernism/mainardi%20courbet.pdf  1  Friedrich Engels, ‘Engels to Margaret Harkness in London, April 1888’, Marx/Engels Collected Works Volume 48, p. 116.

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status of popular art (in this case through music, but later through the use of folk imagery) and through the life-size scale of the figures, formerly reserved for saints and aristocrats. Even the sleeping dog is afforded equal eminence.

Paradoxically, it was his commitment to portraying the labouring classes to this scale which first led to Courbet’s distortions of depicted space. A Burial at Ornans (1849/50) is a massive canvas depicting at human scale a peasant funeral, again in his home town. The painting is a re-enactment of the actual event, with all parts played by those who attended in reality. The canvas barely squeezed into the small studio in which it was made and Courbet by necessity painted each person separately as they posed for him. The result is a montage of discrete individuals who occupy space in very different ways.

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The spatial paradox, which resulted from his montage approach to composition, rapidly became a distinct feature in Courbet’s work; it would impact on future developments in art, from Manet to Cézanne to Cubism (and even Surrealism, via de Chirico). Giving a talk recently, I raised eyebrows when I suggested that each figure in Courbet’s Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair (1850-55) occupied its own autonomous space. The difficulty for our contemporary eyes to see what was then an outlandish spatial contortion is, I think, testimony to the influence Courbet had on both the depiction and perception of space in art.

For Courbet’s contemporaries, without the benefit of acquaintance with his legacy, these paintings were simply wrong. For the Salon traditionalists and for many of Courbet’s proto-modernist contemporaries, these distortions were, on the one hand, ugly mistakes and, on the other, an abandonment of the realist principles of which he was their champion. It is simple to understand why the reactionaries of the time would find the work objectionable - Napoleon III is said to have struck The Bathers (1853) with his whip.2 Courbet’s fellow realists, however, had no reason to worry, as it was grounded in the ideology to which they, on the whole, adhered to. Courbet was a friend and follower of the political and economic theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the left anarchist who famously coined the phrase “property is theft”. As a thinker of the left, Proudhon aspired to base his analyses of historical reality on the principle of dialectics (though, it should be said, not very successfully). The relationships between form and content in Courbet’s practice are solidly dialectical. The manner in which they are

                                                                                                               2 James Henry Rubin, Courbet, Phaidon Press, London, 1997, p.116.

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constructed is a result of the interplay between numerous factors, including: Salonism and folk art; verisimilitude and spatial paradox; past, present and future; immediate reality and allegory. Writing about The Bathers, Proudhon wrote: Let the people, recognising its misery, learn to blush at its cowardice and to despise tyrants; let the aristocracy, exposed in its fat and obscene nudity, receive on each limb the lashes of its parasitism, insolence and corruption. Let the magistrate, the soldier, the merchant, the peasant – all conditions of society – seeing themselves each in turn in the epitome of their dignity and their baseness, learn through both glory and shame to rectify their ideas, to correct their habits, and to perfect their institutions … This is how art must participate in the movement of society, both provoking it and following it.3

This idealist - not very realist - optimism, according to James Rubin, impacted on Courbet to the extent that it inspired one of his most important paintings, Studio of the Painter: A Real Allegory Determining Seven Years of my Life as an Artist (1855). The potential, outlined by Proudhon, for art both to follow and provoke societal developments confirmed Courbet’s desire to

                                                                                                               3 Quoted in: ibid, p. 117

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enhance the impact of realist painting beyond merely depicting the experiences of people, determined by class relations. He could add to this mix the dynamic of the historical movement of the class struggle which create those experiences. The apparent oxymoronic nature of the term “real allegory” is the basis of the confusion alluded to at the beginning of this essay. The extent of this confusion can be seen in the reaction of Champfleury, the writer who, as a close friend of Courbet, wrote the then definitive work on the genre, in both painting and literature, Réalisme. His response to The Studio was, “How can a realist painting be allegorical?” The contradiction between realism and allegory was later discussed by the realist “purist” Georg Lukács, criticising Walter Benjamin’s contribution to the discussion: … in the last analysis, the allegorical mode is based on a disturbance that disrupts the anthropomorphizing response to the world which constitutes the foundation of aesthetic reflection. But since what we see in mimetic art is man’s striving for self-awareness in his relations with his proper sphere of activity in nature and society, it is evident that a concern with allegory must undermine that universal humanity which is always present implicitly in aesthetic reflection. … [Benjamin] ignores the fact that to give things a more imposing form is to fetishize them, in contrast to an anthropomorphizing mimetic art, with its inherent tendency to defetishization and its true knowledge of things as the mediators of human relations.4 The Studio was not, however, Courbet’s first use of allegory. He had earlier used the device in The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair, painted in 1850, but reworked at around the time he produced The Studio. His father, Régis Courbet, is depicted wearing a peasant’s smock and a top hat. This, according to T J Clark, is both a real depiction of his father’s attire and a metaphor for the development of the class of bourgeois farmers growing up in the new rural economy: In the Peasants of Flagey, he is the old man astride the horse, wearing a worn blue smock, leggings, and a stovepipe hat. … Like many other peasants, Régis Courbet had acquired piece by piece a mosaic of arable land and vineyards, scattered for miles on the plateau of Flagey. He became rich; from time to time he was an official of the canton, and, final mark of respectability, he had enough property and paid enough tax to obtain the vote in the July Monarchy. He was, in short, building a bourgeois identity, shuttling between Flagey and Ornans, exchanging his smock for his dress- coat and spats.5

                                                                                                               4 Georg Lukács, ‘On Walter Benjamin’, New Left Review, Volume 1, Number 110, (July/August 1978b), pp. 86.87. 5 T J Clark, Image of the People, Thames and Hudson, 1973, p. 114

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This approach to his portrait of his father, evincing a dialectical approach to history, is developed in The Studio, with Proudhon’s views (along with Courbet’s egotism) acting as the driving motor. Courbet has placed himself at the centre of the painting, surrounded by representatives of the personal and political influences which define his identity. The artist is the centre of the universe and the whole of contemporary French society has assembled at his place of work to watch his creative labour. Where death was centre-stage in his previous multiple portrait, The Burial at Ornans, the focus of the subjects’ attention is art in its historico-political context. Courbet wrote to Champfleury, describing to him the characters appearing in The Studio. The personnel are as follows: Left side: the Jew; the curé; the veteran of 1793; the huntsman; the huntsman Maréchal; the farm labourer; the reaper; the textile pedlar; the strong man; the clown; the undertaker’s mute; the labourer’s wife; the labourer; the Irishwoman and child; the Franc-Comtois peasant boy. Right Side: Gustave Courbet; the model; Alphonse Promayet; Alfred Bruyas; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; Urbain Cuenot; Max Buchon; Champfleury; pair of lovers; art collectors; Jeanne Duval; Charles Baudelaire.6 On the left are those who would soon be historically redundant in Courbet’s classless utopia (including the Emperor, playing the part of the hunter) and, on the right, Courbet’s friends and comrades who represent his idyllic future. This collection of disparate individuals gathered in Courbet’s studio form the basis of the allegory and of his redefining of his Realism. While they surround the painter at work, they seem disinterested in him; even those few who face his direction are not watching him. Only the peasant boy and the model take notice. Indeed, as a symptom of the montaging of discrete images, the entourage take no notice even of each other. The only person who makes any attempt at interaction is the textile pedlar, promoting his goods to the strong man and the clown. Courbet is making a comparison here between the developing capitalist market and the travelling circus. The alienated responses of the characters to each other (another result of his montage - most of the right side is a collage of previous portraits) paradoxically illustrate the dialectical nature of their relationships, exploring social realities. This brings to mind the Gestus of Brecht’s epic theatre, in which disparate elements and personalities conflict to create an object of critical debate. Courbet places himself at the centre of the action; on one side of him, the chaotic immediate past of free trade, shifting forms of exploitation of labour, revolution and monarchy and, on the other, the progressive future, peopled with intellectuals and poets. Placed between these historical moments, the artist acts out his role as the focus for this change, stabbing with his brush the painting-within-a-painting on which he is working. This same creative gesture had been seen two years previously, in a painting which had created just as much surprise and confusion as The Studio.

                                                                                                               6 Benedict Nicolson, Courbet – The Studio of the Painter, Allen Lane, 1973, pp. 14/15

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The Bathers of 1853 marks a significant shift in Courbet’s work and employs a pictorial approach which challenges the form that the realism of his paintings of the previous five years had taken. The painting contains two women, one nude and assumed to be a bourgeoise, signified by her size, the other dressed in clothes which suggest she is a servant. One significant importance of this painting lies in Courbet’s playful distortion of depicted space. Both figures have arms outstretched, as though pressing against indeterminate solidity. Rubin says of this pose: One theory about the painting holds that the standing woman was copied from a photograph of a posed model – possibly one of many made by de Villeneuve at around this time. The woman is using her arms and body to stabilise her pose for the extended exposure, whereas, when transposed into the painting, the gesture no longer has a purpose [in the unrelated photograph that Rubin uses to illustrate his argument].7

In fact, Vallou de Villeneuve was commissioned by Courbet to produce a number of photographs specifically to be used as studies for the painting. Villeneuve’s Nude # 1906 is one of the study photographs8. The arm is lower than in the final painting, but bears out Rubin’s observation that leaning against an object was employed in order to remain still for the duration of the required exposure time. However, one would hardly expect an artist with the visual intelligence of Courbet simply and innocently to reproduce in his painting an unfortunate foible of contemporaneous portrait photography. The strangeness of the pose, where the figure is pressing against what is in effect a

                                                                                                               7 Rubin, pp. 115/116 8 Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/a/ac/20071122234430%21Study_naked_no1935_Villeneuve-163.jpg. Accessed 25 May 2014

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portrayal of air in front of the background landscape is a complex and confusing visual joke, pre-echoing the act of painting in The Studio. Contemporaneous soft-porn photographs made for the saucy postcard market often showed models keeping themselves steady by leaning against backdrops, painted with landscapes. Courbet’s painting reproduces this impossible relationship between the figure and the apparent space within which she is placed. Even the sloping foreground - previously seen in The Burial at Ornans and Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair - suggesting a theatre stage which the audience can seemingly share by walking through the painting’s fourth wall, is employed in both the painted and photographic images. The planes upon which the bather and her servant lean are new invisible walls contained within the depicted space. At the time The Bathers was painted, however, this was a highly unorthodox and confusing image. Delacroix, usually an admirer of Courbet, said of it, “What do these figures mean? A fat bourgeoise … makes a meaningless gesture … No one can comprehend the exchange of thought between these figures.”9 These spatial games, played within, and contradicting, the space portrayed, bring to mind the contradictions and paradoxes which would give René Magritte so much pleasure. Courbet’s manipulation of space, with elements of the image playing off against each other and the picture plane, was an aspect of art neglected since sixteenth-century Italian Baroque. It would become a defining aspect of modernism of the early twentieth century, forming, of course, the basis of cubism and exploited by the surrealists in their formation of alternative spatial realities. The importance of The Bathers lies in its actuation, through playful distortion of reality, of Courbet’s redefinition of the Realism he had formulated over the previous five years. This approach to his art again concurs with the views of his philosophical and political mentor, Proudhon, who in 1849 wrote: Like its sister, Reason, which has no sooner constructed a system than it starts to broaden its scope and reconstruct it, Liberty continually tries to change its previous creations. It tries to free itself from the forms it has adopted and to discover new ones, and then to liberate itself from these exactly as before, regarding them with dislike as being pitiful until it has replaced them by something new.10 Courbet’s attempts to consider reality over this seven-year period changed the way we perceive the world and the impact this project has had on both the construction of art and our reading of images has ironically lessened our appreciation of precisely what he achieved. This, paradoxically, is the measure of his achievement. © The Author and Courbet’s Tent/ locations and contexts for painting/ 2014.

                                                                                                               9 James Henry Rubin, 1997, p. 116 10 Stewart Edwards (Ed), Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Macmillan, London, 1970, p. 263