Chapter One
GUSTAVE COURBET &
Revolutionary Realism
CONTENTS
Introduction
1.1
1.2
Capturing Contemporary History: The Artist as Witness
1.3
Caricature and Social Critique
1.4
Realism and the Democratization of Art
1.5
Radical Realists: The Advent of the Avant-Garde
1.6
Gustave Courbet and the Paris Salon
1.7
Painting Ordinary People: Elevating the Humble Hero
1.8
A Class in Transition: Courbet’s Young Ladies
1.9
Art, Patronage, and the Outsider Artist
1.10
INTRODUCTION
The Realist Movement in France embodied the aspirations of the cultural avant-garde during a period marked by social, political, and economic upheaval. In the mid-nineteenth century, a demand for revolutionary change in art, paralleling the calls for reform in literature, resonated with the broader movement for democratic change in modern Europe. Radical thinkers in France championed sincerity in art and advocated for thematic content that authentically reflected the realities of contemporary life. The Realist Movement, thus, emerged as a response to the prevailing sentiment that art should engage with and depict the genuine experiences of the time.
Realism gained ground during the French Second Empire as a politically motivated art movement. It rejected Romanticism’s irrelevant subjects, all things exotic and imaginary, and a sensorial aesthetic meant to visually entice. Instead, Realist artists sought out the commonplace and contemporary, real people and events painted in shockingly unembellished terms. Just as literary figures like Émile Zola and Honoré de Balzac fictionalized urban workers and the rural poor, painters eschewed history’s grand narratives and personages to make heroes of ordinary women and men.
Gustave Courbet, a painter and provocateur, played a pivotal role in spearheading French Realism. As a self-proclaimed ‘avant-gardist,’ he boldly flouted academic conventions and challenged traditional rules of artistic representation. Aligned with socialist ideology, Courbet fervently advocated for the democratization of art, aiming to make it more inclusive and accessible to the working proletariat.
1.1
| Revolution and Reform
The revolutions of 1848 were a series of widespread republican rebellions throughout Europe. Democratic and liberal in concept, these uprisings were attempts at overthrowing monarchical systems of governance and replacing them with elected nation-states. Beginning in France with the February Revolution of 1848, political upheaval spread rapidly across fifty countries. The dissenting movements generally consisted of temporary coalitions of reformers, labourers and middle-class agitators. Although many revolutions were suppressed and short-lived, they had important political ramifications. Probably the most significant of these was the dismantling of France’s July Monarchy and the proclamation of the Second Republic.
Louis-Philippe I ruled as the “King of the French,” rejecting the pageantry of the Bourbons and introducing broad-based reforms during