Week Two: Post #2 (Realism and the Early Avant-Garde)

Gustave Courbet was working ahead of the bourgeois art society. The world in which Gustave Courbet lived was a cruel and unfair one, dominated by the rich. Art was created only for the rich, depicting only the things that they wanted to see.  Only classical imagery depicting mythological images or images from the past where depicted. If you wanted to see paintings that represented current times it was going to be a portrait of some rich guy or most likely a landscape of something he owned. In light of this Gustave Courbet and some other artists of the period began to paint what they could see. In doing so they did not only see a beautiful world of the supper rich, they saw poor people struggling to survive with almost nothing to help them, and the upper class working against them. 

Gustave Courbet called himself a realist and so when he came across and old man and a boy breaking rocks on the side of the road he just had to paint them in The Stone Breakers. Through this work and The Burial at Ornans Courbet was able to really upset the bourgeoisie. Everything about what he was doing was radically different to what was being depicted at that time in history.

Some things that were different about Courbet’s painting that would have really upset the status quo are first of all the size and scale of these paintings. It was bad enough that he wanted to depict these common poor people at all but he did so, on a grand scale five by eight feet for The Stonebreakers and a massive ten by twenty one feet for A Burial at Ornans. These large sized paintings were reserved for depictions of great historical and mythical characters not the common man. Also the subjects in The Stone Breakers faces are obscured and turned away from the viewer which is very different than the way the academy would paint a picture with the faces being of utmost importance facing straight ahead always. In the depiction of the funeral, this is not the burial of a rich man and it has no illusion of grandeur. It is a sad and awkward moment with common people burying a common man, not some sort of hero or royalty.

While being extremely politically radical Gustave Courbet’s paintings were also technically radical. This is shown in some of the first avant-garde methods of the day with rough application of paint and some disinterest in perspective and illusionistic depth.

Courbet also filled up his canvas with the figures he was depicting and cropped his scenes in a way that appears to be influenced by photography. These things were very different from the landscapes of the day absent of figures or extremely small and of little importance. Courbet also put his figures into motion or awkward yet realistic poses in contrast to the work of the academy that placed every figure perfectly to show them off and display their perfection. In all of these ways and more Gustave Courbet was purposefully trying to uproot the traditions of the day and did so very effectively and pointedly. Eventually being barred from the salon and putting up his own installation near by which eventually led to others breaking off as well.