Gustave Courbet: The Wave, 1870

Nowadays it is difficult to conceive of the impact that Gustave Courbet's paintings made on French art of the mid-nineteenth century. At once casting himself as revolutionary, bohemian and peasant, Courbet (1819-1877) overturned a deeply-entrenched tradition of academic painting in France, and, eschewing the Romanticism of Delacroix and the NeoClassicism ...more

When Gustave Courbet (1819--1877) began his career in the late 1840s, French painting was dominated by two competing styles: neoclassicism, exemplified by Ingres, and romanticism, exemplified by Delacroix. Courbet, a dynamic and boundlessly self confident man, proud of his rural origins and guided by his strong Republican beliefs, quickly established ...more

"I maintain," stated Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), "that painting is clearly a concrete art whose existence lies only in the representation of real and existing objects..." Courbet, who influenced and advised the fledgling Impressionists, was an outstanding representative of a naturalistic realism that highlights the contradictions and inequities in society. Revolutionary ...more

When Image of the People and its companion volume, The Absolute Bourgeois, appeared in 1973, they signaled a new direction for writing about art. "The book's success is crucial," wrote Michael Rosenthal, "because there are few models for this type of study, and it is of necessity pioneering." New Left ...more

Few artists have been so directly invoved in the events of their time as Gustave Courbert. Amid the social transformations of the mid-19th century, Courberts unconventional and stark paintings came to embody values with radical political implications. Rebuffed by the Parisian art world and attacked as a"Realist", he seized upon ...more

The French Realist painter Gustave Courbet (1819-77), a pivotal figure in the emergence of modern painting, remains an artist whose interests, attitudes, and friendships are little understood. A voluminous correspondent, Courbet himself, through his letters, offers a tantalizing avenue toward a keener assessment of his character and accomplishments. In her ...more

The modern artist strives to be independent of the public's taste--and yet depends on the public for a living. Petra Chu argues that the French Realist Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) understood this dilemma perhaps better than any painter before him. In The Most Arrogant Man in France, the first comprehensive reinterpretation ...more

The product of a lifetime's scholarship: Linda Nochlin's complete writings on Courbet's work. Linda Nochlin is one of the most influential art historians of our time. For more than four decades, she has been at the forefront of the feminist critique of art history, playing a pivotal role in shaping ...more

With its fittingly dramatic design, Courbet and the Modern Landscape accompanies the first major museum exhibition specifically to address Gustave Courbet's extraordinary achievement in landscape painting. Many of these carefully selected works produced from 1855 to 1876--gathered from Asia, Europe, and North America--will be new to readers. The catalogue--which accompanies ...more