Gustave Courbet (portrait by Nadar)
“I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of ‘art for art’s sake.’ No! I have simply wanted to draw from a thorough knowledge of tradition the reasoned and free sense of my own individuality. To know in order to do: such has been my thought. To be able to translate the customs, ideas, and appearance of my time as I see them — in a word, to create a living art — this has been my aim.” Gustave Courbet, preface to World’s Fair catalogue, 1855.
The Stone Breakers (1850) – Gustave Courbet
Courbet depicted the harshness in life, and in so doing, challenged contemporary academic ideas of art, which brought him criticism that he deliberately adopted a cult of ugliness. [Apr 2006]
Anarchism had a large influence on French Symbolism of the late 19th century, such as that of Stéphane Mallarmé, who was quoting as saying “Je ne sais pas d’autre bombe, qu’un livre.” (I know of no bomb other than the book.) Its ideas infiltrated the cafes and cabarets of turn of the century Paris.
Related: avant-garde – anarchism – government – French theory
Proudhon and his children (1865) Gustave Courbet
The painter Gustave Courbet was friends with Proudhon and supported the latter’s views on societal change. Proudhon was avant-garde in politics, Courbet in the visual arts. One of Proudhon’s most poetic and prophetic exposés was “To be GOVERNED is …” which is reproduced on this page.
“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place[d] under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.” (P.-J. Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, translated by John Beverly Robinson (London: Freedom Press, 1923), pp. 293-294.)
Courbet must have been like a bucket of cold water dumped on the viewing public of his time, and yet look at how his influence was resisted by the bourgeois purchasers of art products even up to our time.
Very nice one, thanks. I didn’t think, so far, about Mallarmé as an anarchist, although now that you mentioned it – it’s evident. But isn’t Art an anarchic estate in the first place? (with Baudelaire claiming that Art is the only place for anarchism.
About Mallarmé book: Mallarmé had a magickal relations with the “book”. I forgot where I read it, and probably it’s only my imagination, but he wrote the book of potentials and then swallowed it. Again, probably just a symbolic reverie.
I was intrigued by your Mallarmé book of potentials which he supposedly swallowed. However, I was unable to find reference to this. Maybe we should take the Borgesian approach and write a review for it?
There is of course also The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution, an unpublished text (1967) by Timothy Clark, Christopher Gray, Donald Nicholson-Smith & Charles Radcliffe
Jan
Suburban,
What intrigues me the most – and I haven’t touched upon it in my post because it strikes as the most difficult problem – is the issue of art sponsorship. Who paid for paintings such as The Stone Breakers and Millet’s Gleaners? Who paid for Brueghel’s peasant paintings? Who pays for social realism if not the state (and why would they if the painting attacks the state). Did Brueghel, Courbet and Millet invest by themselves in canvas and paint, which are still expensive media, even to this day. And I keep wondering how these social realist paintings came to being and how they survived in pre-Guernica days. Guernica being the most famous work of social realism of the 20th century.
There is an interesting article in Art Bulletin, Dec 2003, by Bradley Fratello, “France Embraces Millet: the intertwined fates of the Gleaners and the Angelus”. The article peripherally mentions Courbet, but posits that Millet’s “Angelus” was commissioned in the 1850s by an American tourist, who did not end up claiming it or paying for it, and that it was sold after the salon to a buyer at a lower than asking price. So it would seem, Millet did such initially unpopular paintings as a form of speculation.
There is a quote in the article attributed to Peter Burger, ” art as an institution neutralizes the political content of the individual [avant garde] work”. The article outlines the rehabilitation of Millet’s work, through the 1860s to the 1890s.
It would be an interesting study to scratch out the details of provenance of Breughel’s works, and discover some truths about how we view such work, versus their history during the past 400years.
While I did my never finished thesis on Mallarmé I have found these references to the Book: that it contains all potentials of existence, encapsulated in his symbolic words; that he swallowed it. Also there were hints to that by his closest friend, Paul Valéry. Unfortunately, all my efforts, especially in the last year, to restore this fact which I remember so vividly, were to no avail.
I’ll search for it again and let you know. As for your offer – it’s a great idea 🙂
muli
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