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Chapter 11 the Rhetoric of Realism: Courbet and the Origins of the Avant-Garde - 261 11.2 Jean-Frangois (1850, P CHAPTER 11 The Rhetoric ofRealism: Courbet and the Origins ofthe Avant-Garde c. 1840-1880 INTRODUCTION The story of Realism is one of the But it did one new and remarkable thing: it made the insur- most perplexing for students of nineteenth-century art. gent classes-the ones addressed by Karl Marx in The Within the domain of culture, we usually take the word Communist Manifesto (1848)-its subject, in some cases "realism" (lowercase) to mean a work of art or literature adopting even their language or argot. In William Holman that represents reality in a faithful way. If a picture bears a Hunt's Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice ... (1848-49), we see close resemblance to some person or thing in the world, a triad of plain Englishmen in the left foreground (modeled or a novel conjures up a plausible likeness, we might say it is "realistic." But in the context of nineteenth-century art, on young members of the PRB themselves) vowing to take Realism is something else entirely. revenge against the patrician warriors who wantonly killed Around the time of the revolutions of 1848, workers and the recumbent boy-figure in front. The composition is clear, the lower middle class in the major European and American the gestures immediately legible, and the detail almost pho- cities began to demand and expect a culture that spoke to tographic. In Millet's much more painterly TheSower(1850), them in a language they could understand. Forced by enclo- we see a rough-hewn peasant enacting the familiar, biblical sure laws, higher rents, impoverished soils, and poor crop parable of Christ as the sower who can plant the seed of faith yields to leave the countryside to find work in urban facto- only in the most favorable soil. The image must have inspired ries, construction trades, retail or domestic service, they former peasants, urban workers, and ardent revolutionaries sought a culture that affirmed them and inspired them in seeking to spread their creed of equality and democracy. their struggles for economic security and political power. If The most sophisticated and accomplished Realist was a picture on view at the Paris Salon or the Royal Academy in Courbet, who veritably invented the term. In his greattrilogy London had an obscure Classical, religious, or mythological of pictures from 1850-The Stonebreakers, The Peasants subject, they would greet it with disdain. If it was painted of F!agey Returning from the Fair, and A Burial at Ornans- in a style that suggested a refinement or elitism foreign to he devised a pictorial apparatus that deployed the scale, them, they would reject that too. What they wanted was an subject, and prestige of history painting, with the style 01 art that was popular in content, legible in form, and famil- genuinely popular art. The near-monochrome palette and iar in style. And sure enough, such an art quickly arose: flta ness of the Bur,a/,· for example, derived. from c hea phand' · Realism. Its chief apostle in France was Gustave Courbet, colored woodcuts that would have been known to peasants and in England the group of young artists who called them- and Workers across the country. For a while, asth ea rdorof I selves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, or PRB (the term revo ut1on. remained hot, it appeared that Cour be t' s Realism.. "Realism" was not generally used in Great Britain, but the m,g. h t overturn the. entire edifice of Academic. an d official artistic culture there, between about 1847 and 185 , was . der that 5 art and help to destroy the bourgeois poht1cal or nevertheless similar to that in France). t SUS ained it. But as it happened, by 1851, the po rfcal11 revd· In fact, the Realism created by Courbet Dau · , mIer, and olution was defeated in France across the continent, an Millet in France, or by the Pre-Raphaelites in En I d · E ' med.An g an ,was in ngland, and Realism was broken, or at leaSt ta I not unalloyed populism. Rathe~ it was every b't " 0 ff' · " fthe rea •cial or conservative Realism took the place O t ticated, complex, and indirect as' any art that c 1 as sophis-b th' I ss wha ame efore. ing, and soon the word came to mean more or e 260 it does today. RHETORICS OF REALIST ART AND POLITICS and across Europe, in its politics, literature, and painting. Gustave Courbet (1819 - 1877) belonged to the post-Romantic The artists and writers mentioned above may not have generation of French artists and writers that included read Marx's Manifesto of th e Communist Party (1848), but Honore Daumier, J.-F. Millet, Gustave Flaubert, and Charles their works shared with it a depiction of epochal anxiety, Baudelaire. They were born at the close of a heroic a I transformation, and desacralization: . ge. n their youth, they witnessed the breakdown of a common language of Classicism, the dissipation of revolutionary The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occu- idealism, and the growing division between artists and pation hitherto honored and looked up to with public. In their maturity, they saw the abandonment of reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the Enlightenment principles and widespread accommodation lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into of authoritarianism. At the end of their lives, they beheld its paid wage-laborers . ... Constant revolutionis- the promise and threat of Communist insurrection and ing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all the complete collapse of a bourgeois public sphere based social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agita- upon the idea of reasoned debate and the achievement of tion distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier consensus. Together, these crises and caesuras combined ones .... All that is solid melts into air, all that is to convince the artists and writers of the mid-century and holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to after that they were living through a cultural rupture of face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. unprecedented dimension: the name given for that broad epoch of change was "modernity;' and the name for that Marx's words are redolent with images from Realist art specific post-Romantic generation was Realist. "I am not and literature. Physician, lawyer, priest, poet, and man of only a socialist;' Courbet wrote provocatively to a newspa- science are veritably the cast of characters in Flaubert's per in 1851, "but a democrat and a Republican as well-in a bitter satire of country life, Madame Bovary (1857); the word, a partisan of all the revolution and above all a Realist depressing results for humankind of the "uninterrupted .. for 'Realist' means a sincere lover of the honest truth." disturbance of all social conditions" are exposed in The rhetoric of Realism, however, is not confined to Daumier's The Third-Class Carriage (c. 1862- 64), Millet's 11.1 artists' manifestos or to France; it is written across the age The Gleaners ( 1857, p. 262 ), and Courbet's The Stonebreakers 11.2, 15 11.1 Honore Daumier The Third-Class Carriage, c. 1862-64. Oil on canvas, 253/4 X 35½" (65.4 X 90.2) Chapter 11 The Rhetoric of Realism: Courbet and the Origins of the Avant-Garde - 261 11.2 Jean-Frangois (1850, p. 274); the poet stripped of his halo is the subject garb of our suffering age, which wears tlie symbol of Millet The Gleaners, of Baudelaire's ironic prose-poem "The Loss of a Halo" 1857. Oil on canvas, a perpetual mourning even upon its thin black shoul- in Paris Spleen (1869). 33 X 44" (83.8 X 111.8) ders? Note, too, that the dress-coat and tlie frock-coat In the art and lit~~~ of Courbet and Flaubert, rev- not only possess their political beauty, which is an erence for the ideal and honor of the Classic have no expression of universal equality, but also their poettC place: the former depicted gross wrestlers, drunken priests, beauty, which is an expression of the public soul- peasants, prostitutes, and hunters; the latter described an immense. cortege, o f und ertak ers , mu tes (mutes common scribes, pharmacists, journalists, students, and in love, political mutes, bourgeois mutes ·· .). We adulterers. In the caricatures of Daumier and the poems are each of us celebrating some funeral. of Baudelaire, there appear no Romans in togas ( except for purposes of satire) or medieval knights in armor: they ,, like those Compared to modern men in "frock-coats, s preferred to honor ragpickers in their shreds and patches, from Balzac's novels, the poet then explams,. "the heroe country bumpkins in their ill-fitting city clothes, and bour- of the Iliad are but pygmies." . r lloW geois men in their black suits. "It is true that the great . dh1s1e tradition has been lost;' wrote Baudelaire at the dawn of In contrast to Baudelaire's irony, Daumier an ) hose caricaturist Grandville (J.-1.-1. Gerard, 1803-1847 .\uf- this new age, in "On the Heroism of Modern Life" (1846), . ,, of their anachronism to satirize the "real cond1twns d bious and that the new one is not yet established .. But fering age." In the 1840s, they highlighted t~_e h:ess of all the same, has not this much abused garb its own heroism of the present by depicting the sty '~th graph · r's h 0 beauty and its native charm? Is it not the necessary figures from the Classical past, as in Daumie ) arid 2 " The Abduction of Helen," from Le Chanva· ri (184 ' 262 - Part 3 Realism and Naturalism \ l;\ 11':q 1, \ \ ~ \ I, 1-.
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