Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (17 page)

He was always a great rebuker, a setter-right in both art and life. No, it's not like that, it's like this: the head-on sky-billowed seascape, the cocky self-portrait, the dense female flesh, the dying animal in the snow, all are imbued with a corrective as well as a descriptive zeal. He is an in-your-face realist, aesthetically assertive. “Shout loud and walk straight” was apparently a Courbet family maxim, and throughout his letters, which cover the whole of his adult life, he shouts loud and listens contentedly to the echo. He calls himself “the proudest and most arrogant man in France” (1853). By 1861, “I have the entire artistic youth looking at me and at the moment I am their commander-in-chief.” By 1867, “I have astounded the whole world … I triumph not only over the moderns but over the old masters as well.” “The attention I get is tremendous” (1872). “On my side I have all of democracy, all women of all nations, all foreign painters” (1873). He cannot go stag-hunting in the hills outside Frankfurt without reporting that his exploits “aroused the envy of all Germany.”

Though much of this arrogance seems natural, it was also tailored to the market. Courbet, who was born in Ornans in the Franche-Comté in 1819, came to Paris at the age of twenty, and had his first picture accepted by the Salon five years later, created, or adapted to his use, the persona of the boisterous, belligerent, subversive, shit-kicking provincial; then like a TV pundit of steroidal “personality,” he got stuck with this public image, which became indistinguishable from his true nature. Courbet was a great painter, but also a serious publicity act. He was a pioneer in self-marketing; he sold photographs of his pictures to help spread their fame; he issued press releases when a painting of his sold for a large amount of money; he planned the first permanent exhibition centre devoted to the work of a single artist—himself. In the Franco-Prussian war he even managed to get a cannon named after him; whereupon he wrote to a newspaper caricaturist giving details of the “schedule and route” of “Le Courbet,” asking him to “cover it for one of the newspapers at your disposal.”

For all his Proudhonism and anti-establishment beliefs, his genuine desire to cleanse the mucky stables of French art, there was more than a touch of Yevtushenkoism about him, of the approved rebel calculating how far he could go, and knowing how to turn outrage to his own advantage. When
Return From the Conference
was refused for the Salon of 1863 (by no means his first rejection), Courbet commented with perhaps more complacency than was appropriate, “I painted the picture so it would be refused. I have succeeded. That way it will bring me some money.” He was skilled at, or at least noisily involved in, the politicking which surrounded both the acceptance and the hanging of pictures at the Salon; he wanted to be accepted and to be refused at the same time.

He also wanted to accept and refuse, most notoriously with the
Légion d'honneur.
He needed to be offered the decoration so that he could be publicly and proudly offended. He nearly got his wish in 1861, until Napoleon III irritatingly struck his name from the list, and had to wait until 1870 for the desired insult to arrive. He turned it down—in a letter to the newspapers, naturally—with high Gallic pomp: “Honour is neither in a title nor in a ribbon, it is in actions and the motivations for those actions. Respect for oneself and for one's ideas constitutes the greater part of it. I do myself honour by staying true to my lifelong principles [etc., etc.].” It's worth comparing the case of Daumier, who had been offered the
Légion d'honneur
earlier that year and refused it discreetly. When Courbet upbraided him, Daumier, the quiet republican, replied, “I have done what I thought I ought to do. I am glad I did, but that is no business of the public's.” Courbet shrugged his shoulders and commented, “We'll never make anything of Daumier. He's a dreamer.”
*

The ego and self-belief revealed in the letters are, of course, no more than a confirmation of what the work proclaims. Courbet's self-portraits are painted with an attentive sensuality verging on erotic love, while the pose he arranges himself in is often deliberately Christlike. (Proudhon was not shy of the comparison either; witness his remark, “If I find twelve weavers, I am sure of conquering the world.”) In
The Meeting
Courbet's friend and patron Alfred Bruyas is depicted as only slightly less deferential towards the painter than his own servant. Bruyas has just removed his hat to greet Courbet, whereas Courbet's hat is already in his hand because that is how he as a free artist chooses to walk; Bruyas lowers his eyes in greeting, whereas Courbet cocks his head and points his beard like an implement of interrogation. To make a further point, the artist carries a stick twice as big as that of his patron. There is no doubt at all about what is happening: the artist is auditioning his patron for suitability rather than the other way round. How far we have come from the days when the patron or donor of a painting was depicted kneeling shoulder to shoulder with the saints, while the painter might at best disguise himself among the peasantry on the sidelines.

Or take
L'Atelier
(1854–1855), the “Real Allegory Determining a Phase of Seven Years of My Artistic Life”: friends and patrons to the right, wider and lower world to the left, artist with attendant nude model in the middle. Courbet called it “the moral and physical history of my atelier,” as well as, naturally enough, “the most surprising picture imaginable.” He delighted in its riddling quality: critics would “have their work cut out,” the picture would “keep people guessing.” And it still does. Who are these figures, placed in inert uncommunicating groups, and clearly other than a plausible cross-section of visitors to Courbet's studio? Where does the light come from? Why is there a model present if he is painting a landscape—and why is he painting it in his studio? And so on. But however we try to solve, or over-solve the mystery—is it a political cartoon? does it have Masonic embellishments? (if in doubt, always wheel on the Masons)—there is no disputing the intense focus of the picture: the figure of Courbet himself at work. It seems a relatively small physical area to support the focus of such an enormous picture; but the depiction of the master aiming his brush is clearly thought powerful enough to do the job.

It's helpful to see
L'Atelier
hung in the Musée d'Orsay directly opposite Courbet's earlier great painting
Burial at Ornans.
The latter is in design a grand frieze, tightly framed, with the ripple and dip of the mourners echoed in the distant cliffs above; then the painting is abruptly cut off at the top, with only a low strip of sky allowed, enough just to accommodate and set off the raised crucifix. This severity and close focus point up the comparative sprawl-iness of
L'Atelier,
and especially the fact that two-fifths of the painting lies above the line-up of human figures, occupying a vast area of scumble and mud. Structurally,
L'Atelier
might remind us of a medieval triptych: Heaven and Hell on either side, with the vast empyrean above. And in the middle, what have we got? Christ with Mary? God with Eve? Well, Courbet with a model, at any rate, sitting there, reinventing the world. And perhaps this helps answer the question of why Courbet is painting a landscape in his studio rather than
en plein air:
because he is doing more than reproducing the known, established world, he is creating it himself. From now on, the painting says, it is the artist who creates the world rather than God. (“I paint like
le bon Dieu,”
Courbet once said to Francis Wey.) Read like this,
L'Atelier
is either a colossal blasphemy or a supreme claim for the importance of art, depending on your viewpoint. Or both.

We are dealing not just with an ego and a career, but with a mission. Baudelaire wrote that Courbet's 1855 debut, at the show he organized himself after both
L'Atelier
and the
Burial
had been turned down for the Universal Exhibition, took place “with all the violence of an armed revolt.” And from then on, the painter's life and the future of French art are deemed to be indistinguishable. “I am winning my liberty. I am saving the independence of art,” he writes, as if the second statement were merely an elaboration of the first. After the “dragging-down” from its pedestal of painting based on “ideas and stereotypes,” after the “great burial” of academic and Romantic art (the stock symbols of Romanticism— guitar, dagger, hat with feather—lie discarded in the foreground of
L'Atelier),
Courbet outlined the new art in his open letter of 1861 to the young artists of Paris. His main demands were contemporaneity of theme (artists were not to paint the past or the future), individuality of manner, concreteness, realism (he once praised one of his own stag paintings for being “mathematically precise,” with not “an ounce of idealism” in it), and beauty. This beauty was to be found in nature, and carried “within itself” its own artistic expression, which the painter had no right to alter or amplify: “Beauty provided by nature is superior to all artists' compositions.”

This
profession de foi
is generally believed to have been written by Courbet's friend Jules Castagnary Courbet seems to have fancied himself as a theoretician, but he had a practical rather than abstract cast of mind. In any case, we should always trust the painting rather than the trumpeting manifesto. The call for concrete realism doesn't rule out allegory or suggestiveness, as in
L'Atelier.
Equally, the bellicose public aesthetic doesn't prepare us for either the delicacy or the sheer romping variety of Courbet's work: from the Bellini-esque early portrait of his sister Juliette to those confrontational seascapes which at their best have a power beyond realism, to the complex and torpidly erotic
Demoiselles au bord de la Seine.
Courbet was accused of beating “the tom-tom of publicity” with the latter picture (no doubt he was), but now that its history as provocation has passed, it remains a tensely compelling image. The scene is set in shade, yet gives off oppressive heat; the seemingly languid atmosphere is denied by bright, almost gaudy coloration; while the prone woman's sleepy, half-open eye contrasts with the frank gaze we as spectators are allowed to bring to her and her companion. This gaze of ours is also intrusively close, since the picture is framed with forceful tightness; the lush trees sit preternaturally low over the recumbent figures, and the spray of leaves in the bottom right-hand corner binds in this image of sultry enclosure. There is a further loose structural rope thrown round the picture too. The boatman who has rowed these women down the Seine to this quiet spot has slipped away, leaving his hat abandoned in the boat moored at the back of the painting. Where has he gone? Presumably he has padded out of the frame in a soft semicircle and is now standing where we are, slyly observing his two pouting passengers. If the boatman does not actually merge with the spectator, he certainly stands close by, complicit and greedy-eyed, pressing back into the picture.

Just as there are weighted absences in several of Courbet's greatest pictures—the owner of the hat in
Les Demoiselles,
the out-of-shot corpse beneath the spectator's feet in
Burial at Ornans,
Mme Proudhon in the pellucid homage to her philosopher husband—so there are powerful silences in Courbet's letters. Of course, the survival of correspondence is a haphazard and unrepresentative process, but even so it's hard to think of a major painter who shows less interest in, or appreciation of, the work of others. No thrilled accounts of seeing a great painting for the first time, no encouragement of contemporaries (except to be like Courbet). The world divides into “the ancients,” i.e., those unfortunate enough to have been born before him, and “the moderns,” i.e., himself. He socialized with Boudin, was financially generous to Monet, has a good but brief word to say for Corot. He does cite Titian—but just as a point of comparison for his own work. The only person, or rather persona, before whom Courbet quails is Victor Hugo, the one Frenchman even he would have to admit was more famous, and to whom he writes uneasily ingratiating letters.

Courbet was a socialist (pre-Marxian, admittedly) who dabbled in the stock market and was keenly acquisitive of land. Similarly, for all his millenarian convictions, his attitude to women was pungently that of his time and class: brothels, mistresses, and unreflecting laddishness. “Women should concern themselves only with cabbage soup and housekeeping,” he writes; though he does try to raise their status with a gallant if complacent aphorism: “It is the ladies' task to correct, with their feelings, the speculative rationality of men among themselves.” He intermittently declares that his art leaves him no time for marriage, and just as intermittently tries to get married. In 1872 he settled on a young girl from his native Franche-Comté, grandly declared that he and his family were not bothered by “the social differences” between them, and blithely continued, in his letter to a go-between:

It is impossible that Mlle Léontine, despite the stupid advice she may receive from the peasants, may not accept the brilliant position I am offering her. She will be indisputably the most envied woman in France and she could be reborn another three times without ever coming across a position like this one. Because I could choose a wife from all of French society without ever being refused.

Mysteriously Mlle Léontine declined to become the most envied woman in France, and left Courbet huffing and puffing about the rustic rival he had lost out to, and about “village sweetie pies” in general, who have “an intellectual worth about equal to that of their cows, without being worth the money.”

More ironically revealing is Courbet's exasperated reaction a decade earlier to the news that his mistress—coincidentally another Mlle Léontine—has been deceiving him. As an artist and thinker he believes that “marriage must be free,” a notion he finds compatible with the idea that “woman … must be subject and faithful to man.” And when she isn't, the bohemian comes over all bourgeois, the utopian turns Outraged of Ornans. He rages over rumpled sheets and rebukingly charts his growing suspicions to Mlle Léontine: “Another evening my head was cold. You gave me the nightcap, but it didn't fit anymore, the person who had slept there the night before had a smaller head than mine and had tightened it by five or six holes. With you I was only ever jealous of my personal dignity …” He certainly seems to have lost it here; and perhaps the painter found it especially and historically galling that Mlle Léontine was betraying him in bed with a new kind of realist image-maker—a photographer.