Fédération des artistes

Years of being rejected by the prestigious Salon of paris probably gets to you after a while. After his subject matter shift in the early 1850s he found him self with more rejections from the fabulous Salon. Though his famous Burial at ornans and The Stone Breakers (painted in 1849 but lost in the midst of World War 2) did make it into the gallery, many of his works were rejected for their risky realism. He used artistry as a soapbox to spread his democratic and socialist ideas, and set up a second gallery within sight of the Paris Salon. He later started the federation of artists which included Jean-Baptiste Corot, and Manet.

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The painters studio

This painting is unique among Courbets usual tirade of revolutionary paintings. Rather than a still life or a group of average lower class members of French society, we see a large painting studio, with admirers and well wishers on one side, and the harsh critics on the other. The half finished paintings hung upon the wall fit together to create the illusion of an expansive scenery extending into the background. Although the items depicted are nothing new; landscapes, nudes, still lifes and portraits are all things that occur frequently in his work, but to use symbolism in such a dominant manner is unique to Gustave, and is very rarly exhibited in his other works. The painting was completed in 1855 which may account for why it carries such Romantic characteristics.

Funeral at ornans

Burial at Ornans was one of Gustave Courbet's break out pieces. This massive painting shows a variety of townspeople attending a funeral. The composition is designed to really bring you into the piece, with people standing all around a for the most part off panel grave. You are taken into the funeral for this painting, almost as if you are actually there, with a simple eye level view and basic composition you are greeting the fellow funeral attendees. The painting was inspired by an actual funeral that Courbet witnessed in 1848, he actually got people who he saw at the funeral to model for his painting. This picture was a huge controversy at the time, using a scale and size ussualy reserved for royalty or the devine, it was one of the first paintings of its kind. He considered this painting to be the death of romantisism.

Realism

When you consider realism it's actually no that astounding. What is amazing is the discovery of realism, or rather, the realisation that such art can exist. One would think that drawing from real life or drawing what one encounters in their daily life would be one of the first things to occurs in art, but ironically it is a relatively new phenomenon in the field. Working backwards from ones own imagination and trying to hold every day occurrences in high regards is apparently an innovative concept, and as impressionism and Romanticism were blooming in canopies of artistically conscious Europe, our good friend Gustave was down on the forest bottom depicticting the lower class like kings. Though Gustave was certainly not the first person to think of depicting lower or middle class subjects (Johannes Vermeer for starters was heavily praised for such works), he was the originator of the term, and liked to throw his talents into his appresors faces. After being denied twice to the Paris Salon he quit and made his own gallery, along with his own separate art movement complete with manifesto.

The origins of the world (L'Origine du monde)

Wow, I mean...just wow. This piece is in a way one of the greatest examples of Gustaves rebellion and defiance in the face of the bitter art world. The subject matter is nothing to be impressed with, nude forms were among the first things to be represented in art, but the method of which he attacked this piece is ground breaking. Unlike the thousands of odalisques and formulatic reclining nudes we saw by the handful earlier in the semester(and even Courbet himself painted quite a few, most specificly the Femme nue couch'ee), we are presented with instead a rather in your face depiction of female genitalia. The picture is cropped so that the face, hands, and all but the most essential segments of the leg were left so that the viewer has nothing to look at except the exposed torso. Despite this however the picture is able to avoid any erotic conotation. The painting was completed in 1866, and although it was banned from public veiwing it is an exemplory example of Gustaves ability to recognize and glorify what has been ignored or avoided by anyone else.