Allen Fisher, Courbet: The Painter in and of The Studio.
Courbet: The Painter in and of The Studio.
Allen Fisher
What follows is a comparison between four different approaches to the history of art by Werner Hofmann, Alan Bowness, Benedict Nicolson and James Henry Rubin.1 All of the accounts focus on L’atelier du peintre, allégorie réele, determinant une phase de sept annees de ma vie artistique, a painting by Gustave Courbet, exhibited in his 1855 Realism Pavilion in Paris. The title of the painting has been abbreviated to The Studio.
The writers under consideration use Courbet's The Studio to focus their discussions of his "Realism". None of them restrict themselves to the ”"aesthetic boundary”2 of the work, but include extrinsic materials. Courbet's letter (dated winter 1854-553) to his fellow-realist Jules Hussan Champ leury4 is used by all four. They all discuss the signi icance of the irst two phrases of Courbet's title5, and Rubin discusses all three. All of the writers consider precedents for the work: Rubin and Bowness place emphasis in the in luence of Courbet's patron, Alfred Bruyas. They are all interested in identi ication of the various parts of the painting, and this forms Nicolson’s main objective. Rubin and Hofmann's main interests are in the signi icance and context of the work. Whilst all of the writers are concerned with signi ication, Hofmann and Rubin use their particular discovery of the parts to inform their view of what the whole painting signi ies. Rubin does this through elaboration of the work's, and Courbet's context. This leads him from considerations of Courbet and his acquaintances to the "Artist and Society” at large. Bowness, like Rubin, leads his considerations to making statements about the future of art. As a consequence of Rubin's method, he is led to a discussion of "Work and Nature" and the "Solution" of the artist’s dilemma: among these four writers he is unique in this respect. Nevertheless, Rubin's conclusion, which sees Courbet's art resolved in his later work, is one touched upon by all four writers, albeit for different reasons. All four accounts make conjectures based on fragments of evidence, in Nicolson's case this is generally related to signi iers in the painting. In the other three writers it is also the whole of The Studio that is given signi icance by these conjectures. In Rubin this signi icance is elaborated by the other part of his analysis, the work of Pierre- Joseph Proudhon, which leads him to see “no satisfactory comprehensive explanation" of the work to date. "A
1 Werner Hofmann 1961, in Petra ten-Doesschate Chu (ed.) 1977; Alan Bowness 1972, in Chu 1977; Benedict Nicolson 1973; James Henry Rubin 1980.
2 Sergiusz Michalski wrote of “æsthetic boundary” with regard to an imaginary dividing line between the area claimed by the work itself, and the world of "reality" of which the painting is a part. In this sense, all the accounts considered here are heteronomous, rather than autonomous: instead of "the history of form" (exemplified in the work of Heinrich Wölfflin), "the history of ideas" (as used by Max Dvorak).
3 Courbet's letter to Jules Husson Champfleury, printed in Rene Huyghe, Germain Bazin and Helene Adehemar. Courbet: L'Atelier du peintre, allégorie réelle, Louvre Monograph 1944, translated in Gerstle Mack, 1951 and altered slightly by Bowness "The Painter's Studio” 1972 in Chu, 1977. The letter is again printed in Rubin, 1980.
4 Nicolson describes Champfleury as Courbet's "friend and fellow-realist”, 1973: 12. vid. also T.J. Clark, 1973.
5 The three phrases of the full title are: (i) L'atelier du peintre, (ii) allégorie réelle, (iii) determinant une phase de sept annees de ma vie artistique. Rubin’s translation reads “The Painter's Studio, real allegory, resolving a phase of seven years in my artistic life.” Rubin op.cit.2)).
1 Allen Fisher, Courbet: The Painter in and of The Studio. major part of (Rubin's) endeavour will concentrate on discovering its meaning”.6 Nicolson wishes "to begin by deciding on what is there, before going onto consider what it is doing there".7 It is Hofmann and Bowness’ “purpose" to “place" The Studio in the context of nineteenth-century, and modern art respectively.8
Allégorie réelle forms one of the concepts fundamental to Rubin's essay9: his dialectic10. The literary function of allegory enhances the discovery of a moral and historical truth by clothing it in an air of ritual: verbal concepts through pictorial images.11 This phrase from the title occasions controversy because Courbet had denied in theory the possibility of painting without a concrete basis.12 The title becomes a “deliberate juxtaposition, the kind of loaded terminology Courbet had used elsewhere”.13 The isolated igures are only united, for Nicolson, "because they partake in a ritual" ... "they bind ... as ideas in Courbet's own mind”.14 The igures are symbols "of freedom and enslavement, in the shape both of individuals and of types. This is what he means by ... a 'real allegory’.”15 Both Champ leury and Proudhon had objections to Courbet's title.16 For Bowness it is the lack of realism "in the narrow sense” that disconcerted Courbet's friends.17 Hofmann, however, is explicit: "There is no contradiction in the explanatory subtitles; rather it represents the reduction to a formula of the central problem of a whole epoch ...".18 Hofmann sees depicted reality develop allegorical dimensions: "the con lict between the
6 Rubin says, "That even today no satisfactory comprehensive explanation of this formidable and central document has emerged, the major part of my endeavour will concentrate on discovering its meaning.” (1980: 6)
7 Nicolson, 1973: 12.
8 Bowness says, "In a certain sense one can justify the claim that with [The Studio] Courbet invented modern art. The purpose of this lecture is to try to do precisely that.” (Chu 1977: 121). Hofmann's essay "The Painter's Studio: Its Place in Nineteenth-century Art" in Art in the Nineteenth-century, translated by Brian Battershaw, New York 1961, reprinted in Chu, 1977: 2.
9 "Two concepts fundamental to The Studio relate directly to the concerns of this essay ... first, the notion of ‘real allegory’ .” Rubin 1980: 6.
10 "Courbet's stress on the physical nature of the workshop activity as well as moral significance alluded through his shorthand to the dialectic ... between Realism and allegory and the duality of man,” Rubin 1980: 38.
11 The Studio's "presentation of a progression through time toward a singular goal evokes the literary function of allegory as a way of enhancing the discovery of a moral or historical truth by clothing it in an air of ritual ... in the sense that it expresses verbal concepts through pictorial signs,” Rubin 1980: 58.
12 "The Studio is so clearly allegorical that this aspect of Courbet’s title would be far less a controversial issue had the artist not denied in theory the possibility of ever painting what was not concrete, and claimed that his allegory was 'real'," Rubin 1980: 58.
13 "The juxtaposition of terms was deliberate and significant on many levels." "Courbet's play on words and use of loaded terminology, for instance in (using) tableau historique for The Burial.” Rubin 1980: 58.
14 Nicolson 1973: 66.
15 Nicolson ibid.
16 Nicolson, for instance, notes Champfleury as saying "Here are two words (real allegory) that clash; they trouble me somewhat ... An Allegory cannot be real, any more than reality can become allegorical”, and Proudhon objected, "I have heard Courbet call his pictures real allegories: an unintelligible expression ... he is a realist, and he is turning back to the ideal through allegory,” Nicolson 1973: 66.
17 Bowness 1972: 134.
18 Hofmann in Chu 1977: 111.
2 Allen Fisher, Courbet: The Painter in and of The Studio. claims of higher truth and idelity to objective fact".19 Nicolson and Rubin agree that "The painter's studio was the equivalent of the carpenter’s tool shed, a place to work in ...".20 Rubin elaborates over six chapters The Studio to be a paradigm of all workshops. He introduces Proudhon’s attack on Blanc's idea of ‘Atelier sociaux'21; the newspaper L’Atelier; and Proudhon's ideas of the role of the atelier in society, which will make government disappear and is "the constitutive element of society".22 This Rubin relates to Courbet's dealings with government as if government were a citizen.23 Rubin, however, restates "No one mistakes Courbet's Studio for a realistic representation of an artist's workshop as it would have looked...".24 The third phrase of the title is analysed by Rubin using letters to Bruyas and Champ leury25: "It is the moral and physical history of my atelier" writes Courbet. Rubin notes the antagonism between these two is resolved in Courbet's The Studio through the process Proudhon called determinant, accounting for Courbet's use of this term in his title. Hofmann notes the last phrase "encouraged ... a tendency to do no more than trace out certain biographical connections"26: a tendency Rubin now supercedes.
Precedents for The Studio are seen to be earlier paintings, such as artist's studios by Géricault and Delacroix27; Velasquez’s Las Meninas28; Craesbeeck's "interior" in the Louvre, or his artist's studio cited by Nicolson29; and
19 Hofmann in Chu 1977: 120.
20 Nicolson, using,as Rubin does, Jules-Antoine Castagnary's description, 1973: 34.
21 Louis Blanc's notion of a centrally organised, government-financed atelier. Rubin 1980: 16 and Note 13 1980: 13.
22 Similar proposals to Blanc's in the newspaper L'Atelier attacked by Proudhon, Rubin 1980: 16, and, from Proudhon, "the atelier will make government disappear" and "the constitutive element of society is the atelier," Rubin 1980: 36. vid. also Rubin 180: 142, Note 20.
23 Rubin 1980: 38 "Proudhon describes the process (antagonism between moral and physical) resolved by Courbet in The Studio" ... "He describes this process as determinant" which is to say determination. Rubin later, when giving a translation of Courbet's letter, usefully translates determinant in the title as resolving, Rubin 1980: 32. "Courbet deals with government as if he were a government or as if government were a citizen. This is an anarchist principle of mutualism,’ Rubin 1980: 2. This relates to Courbet's dealings over lunch with the Intendant des Beaux-Arts, Comte Alfred-Emilien de Nieuwerkerke, vid. Rubin 1980: 14.
24 Rubin 1980: 38.
25 He makes this remark in letters to both Champfleury and Bruyas, as well as in a third letter to Charles Francais in the winter of 1854-55. vid. Rubin 1980: 144, Note 3.
26 Hofmann says that the last phrase "brought about a certain narrowing down in the interpretation of the work ... encouraging ...a tendency to do no more than trace out certain biographical connections.” Chu 1977: 111.
27 Theodore Géricault's An Artist in His Studio, ca. 1818-19 and Eugene Delacroix's Michelangelo in His Studio, 1853, illustrated in Rubin 1980: plates 26
28 Diego Velazquez's Las Meninas, vid. Bowness 1972.
29 Joos van Craesbeeck's The Artist's Studio was in the Institut Néerlandais, Paris, "the setting is as stark as in Courbet's Studio, where the artist and his friends are portrayed in more natural poses than in the Louvre Craesbeeck”. vid. Nicolson 19
3 Allen Fisher, Courbet: The Painter in and of The Studio.
Hofmann introduced Rembrandt's La Petite tombe.30 In addition Shapiro is cited for noting popular prints31, and Nicolson has added Botta's collection of Assyrian art and the book The Nadar Pantheon, a collection of notable writers (photographs and sketches).32 Rubin sees The Studio in the same category as Pepety's The Dream of Happiness.33 These all bring to the fore Courbet's eloquent interest in work available to him in Paris and Amsterdam,34 and as Bowness notes, the taste in the nineteenth-century for enormous pictures.35 None, however, bring as much signi icant interest as Rubin and Bowness' emphasis on the in luence and precedential possibilities of Alfred Bruyas and his gallery. In this gallery Courbet would have seen Ingres’ The Apotheosis of Homer (Hofmann considers The Studio a pendant to this painting)36; the Delacroix already cited; Glaizes' Interieur du cabinet de M. Bruyas37; Tassaert's L'Atelier du Peinture and his Ciel et Enfer.38 So that, whilst Nicolson inds the concept of "unconscious indebtedness to the tradition of artist's studios back to the sixteenth- century" as "bewildering"39, the work actually available to Courbet offered substantial precedents. It is on the in luence of Bruyas that Rubin and Bowness concentrate their evidence. Rubin asserts, ”Bruyas must have believed that Courbet might eventually become the vehicle for his idea”.40 The idea, for instance, of "Solution" shown in Bruyas’ portrait, his arm resting on a copy of his book L'Art moderne. Solution.41 That is, the social solution of "the education and justice of mankind” made available through art,42 a concept in general agreement with Courbet and Proudhon's view.43 The organising principle of Bruyas' gallery was the "resolution of
30 Rembrandt van Rijn's La Petite Tombe (Christ Preaching the Remission of Sins) c.1652. Hofmann notes also Alfred Dumesnil's La foi nouvelle cherchee dans l'art de Rembrandt à Beethoven, Paris 1850 (1961: 111), in which Dumesnil discussed the polarity of the crowd in the etching. Rubin notes the foreground boy's "lack of interest in the teachings of Christ" is given "a positive quality" by Courbet, because of "its antiauthoritarian overtones,” 1981.
31 Meyer Schapiro, 1941.
32 Nadar, Exhibition catalogue, Bibliotheque Nationale, 1965. vid. Nicolson 1973. Paul-Emile Botta's archaelogical work in Northern Mesopotamia. Publication of these finds began in 1849-50 in large fully-illustrated volumes of Monument de Ninive. Theophile Silvestre commented on Courbet's profile and Botta's work in 1856.
33 Dominique Papety's The Dream of Happiness, 1843, in Rubin 1981: plate 29: "Its figures are even similarly, and quite traditionally, arranged in the composition as a whole".
34 Courbet travelled to Amsterdam in 1847 on the invitation of the dealer Van Wisselingh. vid. Mack 1951
35 Bowness 1972, refers to work by David, Ingres, and Couture. In view of his earlier teachers it might also be pertinent to cite Gros and Géricault.
36 Hofmann in Chu 1977: 115.
37 Auguste Glaize's painting was commissioned by Alfred Bruyas in 1848, Bowness 1972.
38 Octave Tassaert had supplied Bruyas with sixteen paintings all made between 1850 and 1853, including the two mentioned, Bowness 1972.
39 Nicolson 1973: 91, Note 45, comments from and on Matthias Winner’s Gemalte Kunsthistories, Berlin 1962.
40 Rubin 1981: 14.
41 Rubin 1981: 23 and illustrated figure 15. The volume was never published.
42 Alfred Bruyas‘ introduction to his Salon de Peinture, 1853, Rubin 1981.
43 vid. Rubin 1981, chapter III regarding the complexity of this relating more to the ideas of Saint-Simon and Fourier, than those of Proudhon and Courbet.
4 Allen Fisher, Courbet: The Painter in and of The Studio. opposition"44 and Bruyas schematic diagram in his 1854 Explication points to a "Solution" that he called "the humble atelier”.45 It becomes no surprise to ind Bowness saying, "Out of (his) relationship (with Bruyas) was to come The Studio ... I believe he planned (the work) with Bruyas" in the summer of 1854.46 Bowness adds that Bruyas‘ commissioned from Jules Laurens a lithograph characterising the important events of Bruyas' life.47 In matters of overall composition, particulars of " igures from life encounters” and precedents from earlier paintings, these writers offer strong evidence for Courbet's wide grounding for his work.
The overall composition engages Hofmann and Rubin in different views of the work. For Hofmann it is "a picture of the ages of man"48. “existence begins with the mother ... giving suck to her child ... in the left of the picture we see the descending steps of age ... the circle of life is rounded off at the point where it began - close to the symbolic igures of motherhood".49 To derive this completeness Hofmann makes conjecture about some of the igures that differ from other writers’ identi ications.50 Rubin notes "the igures on the left as ideological romantics who believed in, or were victimised by political systems …",51 a description concurring with Hofmann's view, that is : "similar to the madhouse scenes of the Romantics".52 The right-side for Rubin is a dialectic opposition using those who had confronted the situation of disarray.53 Rubin goes through the igures showing their ideological relation to Courbet's ideas and this brings him again to concur with Hofmann in seeing The Studio as "stages in human development”.54 But Hofmann's romantic concept of the "ages of man” becomes for Rubin "a Proudhonian history of man".55 The difference in views is in part a consequence of their interpretation of the igures. Rubin uses Courbet's letter, Nicolson's ‘map’, Bowness' suggestions and later researchers.56 This
44 On one of the title pages to Bruyas‘ Explication des ouvrages de peinture du Cabinet de M. Alfred Bruyas, 1854 illustrated in Rubin 1981: plate 23.
45 Bruyas in Rubin 1981.
46 Bowness 1972: 128.
47 Bowness 1972: 133.
48 Hofmann in Chu 1977: 111.
49 Hofmann in Chu 1977: 111ff.
50 For Hofmann the model is 'Truth', after the work of Silvestre, the pedlar is a merchant, the labourer's wife is a prostitute, the undertaker's mute is a gravedigger, which, especially in the case of the labourer's wife, diagrees with the Courbet letter he uses. They are ideas which were disagreed with as early as 1944, vid. Huyghe, Bazin & Adhemar (Chu 1977). See table and 'map' after these notes. In addition, for Hofmann, the women become: harlot, mother, ‘Truth', and femme fatale (this Duval), and the art collectors become “a worldly couple". Hofmann 1961.
51 "...believed in or were victimised by political systems, political solutions, or political actions," Rubin 1981, Chapter V.
52 Hofmann in Chu 1977: 120.
53 Rubin 1981: 43.
54 Rubin ibid.
55 Rubin 1981: 54.
56 Particularly Hélène Toussaint, 1978 and Linda Nochlin, 1968.
5 Allen Fisher, Courbet: The Painter in and of The Studio. leads him to offer triple roles for nine of the igures57 and by implication, all of The Studio. Nicolson's main objective to identify each igure using Courbet's letter and portraits is elaborated by Rubin using historical igures and adding research of his own.58 For Rubin the igures are as the letter, the historical persons they signify, and what they allegoricise. It corroborates his thesis that the studio is simultaneously real and allegorical. What for Nicolson is the huntsman (not mentioned by Courbet's letter) is after Silvestre a poacher.59 For Rubin, after Toussaint, the poacher is also Napoleon and allegorises political theft.60 Such extrapolation is Rubin's methodology from given “evidence" of research over thirty years.61 It is the availability of data to each writer that partly determines how they see Courbet's role in The Studio and the grounding for the discovery of the work's signi icance.
The Studio is thus both a self-portrait and a portrait of friendship. Yet "linked with these layers ... there are others which may truly be called allegorical".62 The relationship between Courbet's painting and the social theory of Proudhon "was a crucial subject for those who knew and wrote about Courbet during his lifetime".63 "In the picture ... the artist and the activity of creating art becomes the subject".64 Each part is symbolic "yet held together and dominated by the central apotheosis of the artist and his craft, they interpenetrate ...”.65 Bruyas called Courbet maitre-peintre…66 “… worker-artist was Courbet's answer to utopia's artist-priest”67: "rustic and theoretician”.68 Courbet's one-man exhibition consciously both can "be seen as a Proudhonian effort to address the public directly ... both narcissistic and doctrinaire …”.69 Whilst for Hofmann "in the last resort it is not political
57 The nine figures being those 'mapped' by Nicolson 1973 as “The Jew, the cure: the veteran of 1793, the huntsman, the huntsman Maréhhal, the farm labourer, the reaper, the labourer's wife and the labourer.“ See 'map' on
58 Given in the last two columns in the table after these notes.
59 Theophile Silvestre in Rubin 1981 and Hofmann 1961.
60 "...political theft and deception associated with Louis‘ election, his coup d'état and the establishment of the Second Empire,” Rubin 1981: 41 and 42.
61 From, for instance, Schapiro's essay in 1941, to Toussaint’s work in 1977.
62 Hofmann in Chu 1977: 111.
63 Rubin 1981: 3.
64 Bowness 1972: 138: "With the possible exception of Las Meninas, for the first time in the history of art we have a work in which the artist and the activity of creating art becomes the subject...”
65 Hofmann in Chu 1977: 113.
66 Rubin 1981: 19.
67 Rubin 1981: 20.
68 Clark 1973.
69 Rubin ibid.
6 Allen Fisher, Courbet: The Painter in and of The Studio. convictions that count but mastery of the canvas …”,70 for Rubin political theories71 "enchanted ambitious men like Courbet”.72 Courbet’s "manifesto" asked "who was better equipped than the painter to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance ... of the epoch?”73 The many internal inconsistencies of ... "hasty and additive composition reveal the appropiated nature of Courbet's ideas ...".74 "Many in the 1850's understood ... the artist's intentions as having profound socio-political rami ications ... socialist and working-class".75 Sabatier had remarked, in his defence of modern subjects, that "since the present contained the seeds of the future, it was not only the right but the duty of the arts to investigate the present ...”.76 In 1858 Proudhon wrote “Art is liberty itself"77: "The most noble and the only true role of art was to explore the phenomenality of things".78 "Art, which was itself material object produced by manual labour, could eventually become its own signi icant subject matter".79 "The double signi icance of (Courbet's) painterly surface ... our perceptual fusion of its substance with that of the forms it represents ... and ... as brute pigment laid on by a heavy hand ... signi ies the impertinent physical presence and rustic individuality of the worker-artist... ".80 "Realism for Courbet thus reconciled the apparent contradiction between ... expression of the internal characteristics of art and an other-oriented art of social propaganda”.81
1: 20. Writing to Bruyas, Courbet indicated that by "Solution" he meant a principal of coöperation between artist and patron.82 Bruyas' dialectic83: "Debut" and "Solution", can be shown to underlie Courbet's concepts showing the encounter "between nature... and man's need to work ... occasioning the production of art”.84 Proudhon gave the irst
70 Hofmann in Chu 1977: 112.
71 "The theories of labour, of social development, of egalitarianism, and the call for social leadership of the arts propounded by men such as Louis Blane, Etienne Cabet, Auguste Comte, Victor Considerant, Charles Fourier, Pierre Leroux, Theophile Thore, Henri de Saint-Simon and others in the 1830's and 1840's," Rubin 1981.
72 Rubin 1981: 57.
73 Courbet’s Realist Manifesto, Rubin 198!.
74 Rubin 1981: 20.
75 Rubin 1981: 36: e.g. In 1855 the caricaturist Cham showed Courbet and Proudhon, brushes in hand in front of a huge canvas.
76 François Sabatier quoted by Rubin 1981: 26.
77 Proudhon quoted by Rubin 1981: 66.
78 Proudhon quoted by Rubin ibid.
79 Proudhon quoted by Rubin 1981: 65ff.
80 Proudhon quoted by Rubin 1981: 63.
81 Proudhon quoted by Rubin 1981: 76ff.
82 Proudhon quoted by Rubin 1981: 21.
83 Proudhon quoted by Rubin 1981: 28 and Figure 23.
84 Proudhon quoted by Rubin 1981: 28.
7 Allen Fisher, Courbet: The Painter in and of The Studio. attribute characteristic of humankind as "worker and creator"... "projecting ideas and signs": "a communion between man and nature".85 Proudhon's philosophy links these considerations to a second dialectic argument resolving the "love-work antithesis ... into aesthetic labour"..."bridging culture and society” to "freshly reveal the high moral signi icance of art…".86 The Studio for Rubin is thus the place in which Courbet takes the world as his subject, making art a metaphor for all other occupations.87 As Courbet put it, he and Proudhon were "two men who have synthesised society, one in philosophy, the other in art”.88 For Nicolson and Hofmann it is suf icient to observe Courbet's preoccupation with "the natural" to account for his "realism" exempli ied in his later work.89 Nicolson notes the “uncorrupted knowledge of the Franc-Comtois peasant in The Studio”90: Hofmann sees in Courbet "a deep longing for what is open to the skies, unfettered and natural...".91 Rubin acknowledges this pursuit and sees it embodying the "natural coexistence of individuals as independent equals ... as ... a threat to the political ideologies of Paris”,92 "a naturalism with a purposive aesthetic contrast to history painting".93 Bowness sees Courbet's later work as "pure painting” which "excludes moral and intellectual judgements”.94 But for Rubin this is "the materiality of things": the physical status of painting as a concrete constituent metonymically revealed the concreteness of a real world made up of speci ic and material fragments...".95 “The alternative it proposes to the preoccupation of bourgeois society with the material things of industry".96 Hofmann suggests that Courbet transforms his social environment into a vision of humanity ... what the eye has observed can... be ... recalled at will, a landscape can be painted even in the studio ... perhaps it is this that enables us to understand the 'message' of this picture".97 Thus concurring with Rubin: "the most telling metaphor for Courbet's entire Realist enterprise” is "the dichotomy between painterliness... and naturalism inherent" in his later work.98
85 Proudhon's Systeme des contradictions economiques, ou Philosophie de la misère, Paris 1846, quoted in Rubin 1981: 31 and 113.
86 Proudhon in Rubin 1981: 50ff.
87 Rubin 1981: 77.
88 Courbet speaking about the Return from the Conference painting to his father, in Rubin 1981: 95.
89 Rubin 1981: 65.
90 "The little Franc-Comtois peasant beside him sockless and in sabots, remains uncorrupted by knowledge of what Art is about …" Nicolson 1973: 31.
91 Hofmann in Chu 1977: 119.
92 Rubin 1981: 66.
93 “As Georg Lukgcs theorised the Naturalism of Zola had done, Courbet’s peculiar naturalism embodied a purposive aesthetic contrast to history painting," Rubin 1981: 75.
94 Bowness 1972: 137.
95 Rubin 1981: 72.
96 Theophile Thoré to Rousseau, 1844, Rubin 1981: 157.
97 Hofmann in Chu 1977: 117.
98 Rubin 1981: 75.
8 Allen Fisher, Courbet: The Painter in and of The Studio.
The dichotomy and dialectic offered by Courbet in The Studio is thus emphasised "by the presence of pure landscape in (its) interior”,99 it "embodies [humanity’s] paradoxical and painful duality as both natural and labouring being".100 "Realist art was the key to transcending this condition: through art ... a synthesis could be attained".101 It is a matter relating Courbet directly to a “consciousness of self” where “the artist interposes physically between viewer and object”.102 The artist in the centre is a "Hegelian man ful illing himself through material production and subject to economic forces".103 Whilst Baudelaire may have been "essential for understanding the general... historical dimension to Courbet's autobiography and the all-important historical outcome his painting proposed for the social evolution of mankind",104 it is Rubin that shows that the particulars of The Studio are best understood through a synthesis of its particulars and its rami ications. These are particulars discussed by all four writers, and it is clearly to Rubin's advantage to have had Hofmann, Nicolson and Bowness available to him for his own propositions. It may be said that the eventual opinions derived from their particular methodologies come about in part from their ideological preferences, but it should be noted that so much of what is said depends upon the state of research at the time the accounts were written.105 As Rubin notes, that "even though landscape and The Studio were in some sense a refuge, a place where his ego could transcend the contradictions of the present world, the painter used them to strike out militantly against social and artistic repression”.106 His research and account makes this eloquent statement plausible.
99 Rubin 1981: 75.
100 Rubin ibid.
101 Rubin ibid.
102 Rubin 1981: 49.
103 Rubin 1981: 100.
104 Rubin 1981: 47.
105 e.g.: Schapiro 1941; Mack 1951; Hofmann 1961; Nochlin 1968; Bowness 1972; Clark 1973; Nicolson 1973; and Toussaint 1977.
106 Rubin 1981: 101.
9 Allen Fisher, Courbet: The Painter in and of The Studio.
Bibliography.
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