ART HISTORY ESSAY (no reference)

ppt/notesSlides/notesSlide30.xml

Courbet is relatively unknown in 1851 when the Paris Salon presents his 22-foot-long painting, A Burial at Ornans . It is his first monumentally sized works. This portrayal of somber working-class citizens at a graveside in Courbet's home province generates an explosive reaction among the painter's audience and critics. With Burial at Ornans, many viewers reacted to the work as an assault on the very idea of what a painting should be. To sophisticated Parisians, rural people are considered a subject matter for small genre (scenes of everyday life) pieces; it's unprecedented to give them the kind of scope of French history paintings. With worker uprisings of 1848 a recent memory, Courbet's use of the common people as a grand subject is deemed a radical act. It is not only in the choice of subject that people took offense, but in the way he chose to present them. Courbet has intentionally painted these people in a manner that does not idealize their suffering. For one thing, there is no hierarchy in the composition; what I mean by that is that there are no people more important than others). It is an extremely democratic portrayal. They read Courbet's grieving figures as vulgar and ugly. One critic wrote, "He paints pictures as you black your boots." In this painting, we have mourners who attend a funeral from their province. They are shown very traditionally where men and women are separated. Many faces in the crowd are of Courbet’s friends and family. The church officials act disinterested while members of the deceased’s family grieve. The figures move past the open grave to pay their last respects; only a few people pause. Courbet’s work seems ordinary and that is precisely why it is so extraordinary. Courbet's choice of contemporary subject matter and his breaking of artistic convention was interpreted by some as an anti-authoritarian political threat. To achieve an honest and straightforward depiction of rural life, Courbet disposed of the idealized academic technique and employed a deliberately simple style, rooted in popular imagery, which seemed crude to many critics of the day. The exhibition makes Courbet famous, and he describes A Burial at Ornans as the "debut of my principles." Within a few years, he embraces Realism, a term originally used negatively by his critics. He writes that his purpose is to use art as a way toward self-knowledge, to "translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch according to my own estimation; in a word, to create living art, that is my goal."