Gustave Courbet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The best paintings in the extraordinary Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art exude a commanding discombobulation, Roberta Smith writes. They challenge and seduce with their brusqueness of surface, inconsistencies of space or scale, emotional ambiguities and alternately frank and improbable accounts of the female form. Courbet himself was, and remains, a grandly amorphous personality whom even his most loyal supporters often deemed an opportunistic chameleon. He willfully smashed the tidy boundaries separating established painting genres to record life as he saw it.

“The Sleeping Spinner” (1853)


“Self-Portrait with Pipe”

Overbearing and arrogant, Courbet virtually wrote the definition of the modern artist as a bohemian, narcissistic loner and political radical. He shunned the academy and lived by the phrase “epater le bourgeois.” He emerged in Paris in the 1840s, when the modern art market was beginning to take shape, as were the popular press and popular culture. Courbet was quick to grasp the usefulness of all three forces.

“The Shaded Stream at the Puits-Noir” (circa 1860-65)

Courbet only grudgingly accepted the title of Realist. Even in front of his most realistic work, you often find yourself wrestling not so much with reality as it was lived as with the sheer uncanniness of his painting. It is a continually shape-shifting uncanniness that mixes genres and styles, and genders, with subtle visual irony.

“The Desperate Man” (1844-45)

No artist before Picasso put so much of himself on canvas. In one self-portrait, he is long-haired and delicate, a Pontormo prince. In another he tears his hair, wide-eyed and wild, like Johnny Depp’s pirate rendered by Caravaggio. And in “Self-Portrait with Pipe” we see an early version of the disengaged gaze, at once dreaming and sardonic, that would become a trademark.

This look reaches a zenith of some kind in his drowsy masterpiece “Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine” of 1856-57. Here the two subjects lie side by side forming a mass of frothy garments, female flesh, assorted flowers and moral lassitude. The overt, possibly lesbian eroticism that shocked viewers remains palpable. So does the ebullient, taunting hash of traditions, of public park with boudoir, of still life and figure painting, all crowded by a strangely vertical plane of water.

The second gallery contains an astounding work of accidental Modernism: the unfinished “Preparation of the Bride/Dead Girl,” one of the big paintings of village life that Courbet tackled in the early 1850s. Here a roomful of women orbits around a young, limp girl being dressed by three of them. Other women make a bed, lay a tablecloth or straighten up.

Two nudes hanging side by side in the show might almost be by different artists. “Reclining Nude” of 1862 is a kind of joke on Titian: a rather loosely painted figure in a brownish atmosphere surrounded by excesses of red velvet drapes whose kewpie-doll knee socks add to her modern quirkiness.

Next to it, a twofer, the lolling giantesses of “Sleep,” from 1866. It offers a vision of precise forms and Rococo pinks and whites, although what is often referred to as a lesbian embrace seems more like an orbit at very close quarters, slightly above the bed.

More than perhaps any painter of his great painting century, Courbet built elements of rebellion and dissent into the very forms and surfaces of his work. Some were on purpose; others were left for us to discover, to feel in our bones. Even at the end he expressed his defiance in still lifes of fruit that seem impossibly large and overbearing, like him, and in magnificent trout hooked and struggling against the line, even more like him. Since then, generation upon generation of painters have responded to his art and its challenges, but his example of stubborn nonconformity has many uses.

Via N.Y. Times

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