Bouguereau's opinion
zi...@interport.net
"naturalist" not Courbet's word, but the word of some negative
bourgeuois art critic, well then Bouguereau didn't havemuch sense.
But, you see, I don;t believe it. He might have disliked Courbet, but
it would be for artistic facture, use of edge, color and forming.
Bouguereau was not an amateur. And there were real distances between
the two artists.
Anyhow, have any of you seen a majorCourbet? The great big one of deer
in the forest ? Or the Funeral at Ornans, or, most important of all,
the Artist's Studio? If you see those things as realism or
naturalism, think about that very seriously. Things in some of those
paintings are so altered, reconstreucted and changed. This is even
true of ordinary landscape paintings. It is most clear when you see a
paintig which is at least in part a "sous bois". I have been under
the foliage in a real forest and I have never seen anything which
looked like a Courbet. Courbet was one of the great geniuses of all
tiem. He never studied art with any master. He spent all of his time
in the Louvre copying the masters of past time. He really was able to
learn how to paint from them. Delcroix and Gericault did something
similar in the Louvre but weren't threy originallystudents ofsomeone
else? I do smell the usefulness of the mseum in Corubet just as I did
in the Delacroix show.
Gabriel
emat...@tomatoweb.com
The Courbet's I've looked at closely show me the beginnings of painting's
self- reference, by calling the viewers attention to the surface of the
painting itself. This seems to me to be a obvious project for French
Naturalism, since part of that philosophy was to grapple with the idea of
what is real as opposed to what is imaginary projections onto nature. I can
understand how the French Academy would react to this negatively, in that the
academic paintings were very focused on illusory picture space, to the point
of hiding the picture's reality as a picture. I can't remember the title of
a particular Courbet seascape I studied, but it was very remarkable, as the
rendering of the ocean became a very patterned texture that was more a
decorated canvas than it was an illusion of the sea, as if the artist was
'carried away' with what he was doing (even to the point of the water losing
it's perspective and moving, visually, on to the paintings surface near the
top of the rectangle.)
French Naturalism may also have been the cause the fuzziness of many
impressionist works, considering that the human eye has a remarkably short
depth of field (with a remarkably rapid focus) and the idea of painting the
'real' frozen in time would lead an artist to render the bulk of the visual
field out of focus -- to simulate the experience of human vision.
My recollection of Delacroix and Gericault was that the former worked as an
assistant to Gericault on 'The Raft of the Medusa,' which was a very
politically motivated Salon piece (and threfore surprising that it was
accepted at all). It was a few years later that Delacroix painted his salon
piece, "Dante and Virgil in Hell." I would have to check the books to
remember who Gericault studied with.
Erik Mattila
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Bob C
>
> The Courbet's I've looked at closely show me the beginnings of painting's
> self- reference, by calling the viewers attention to the surface of the
> painting itself. This seems to me to be a obvious project for French
> Naturalism, since part of that philosophy was to grapple with the idea of
> what is real as opposed to what is imaginary projections onto nature. I can
> understand how the French Academy would react to this negatively, in that the
> academic paintings were very focused on illusory picture space, to the point
> of hiding the picture's reality as a picture. I can't remember the title of
> a particular Courbet seascape I studied, but it was very remarkable, as the
> rendering of the ocean became a very patterned texture that was more a
> decorated canvas than it was an illusion of the sea, as if the artist was
> 'carried away' with what he was doing (even to the point of the water losing
> it's perspective and moving, visually, on to the paintings surface near the
> top of the rectangle.)
>
But was Courbet trying to call attention to the surface of the painting
or was he trying to achieve a greater degree of realism through the
depiction of texture and mood rather than optical accuracy? One of my
favorites at the National Gallery in DC is his painting "The Stream", an
unassuming painting of a stream in the deep shadows of forest foliage.
As Gabriel said earlier, it does not "look like" any forest foliage
we've ever seen, but as far as I'm concerned it achieves the "feel" of
forest foliage to a greater degree than any other painting I can
remember.
- Bob C.
emat...@tomatoweb.com
Well, that's the 64 thousand dollar question. It terms of French Naturalism,
as a philosophical discourse, the depiction of texture and mood, as well as
declaring the paintings presence beyond which is depicted, would be the same.
I've never dug around in Courbet's writings, so it is always conjecture
unless the artist has stated what his intents were.
I would have liked to have made the argument that Delacroix's Salon piece was
politically motivated, but in searching through his several volumes of
letters, he doesn't seem to be political at all. So it's a difficult
argument to make -- I could only make a circumstancial argument. (You can
relate the scene of the Inferno to Dante's wish to place his political
enemies as suffering in Hell, and even argue that Delacroix had it in for
some of the Bourbons because they gossiped that he was a bastard.(I mean
illegitimate child). And two years earlier he helped Gericault paint an
obviously 'anti-Bourbon' painting.)
Erik Mattila
mdeli
>> If Bouguereau really dislike Courbet because Courbet was a
>> "naturalist" not Courbet's word, but the word of some negative
>> bourgeuois art critic, well then Bouguereau didn't havemuch sense.
>> But, you see, I don;t believe it. He might have disliked Courbet, but
>> it would be for artistic facture, use of edge, color and forming.
>> Bouguereau was not an amateur. And there were real distances between
>> the two artists.
Bouguereau didn't like Courbet because C. was a poor draftsman, his
color was brown sauce, and his technique was dull. Not to say that he
thought anything much about C's subject matter.
Mani DeLi
...no skill no art
A Skeptical View of Modern Art was updated Jan.16,99
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zi...@interport.net
Predictably I agree with Bob.
But I will go further. If you are an artist, you risk a good deal if
you accept, uncritically, the words of arft critics of theclast
hundred years or so on artists. I have never met an art critic who
thought that artists could see paintings or understand them as well as
they the critics could. And I have never thought this was true.
There have been a few critics in the U.S. who could see: Meyer
Schapiro, Fairfield Porter, Jed Perl, Larry Campbell, Tom Hess. But as
an artist I am convinced that we see better.
Why I am I saying this? Because Courbet's naturalism has nothing to do
with Courbet. It was label of opprobrium placed on him by conservative
critics. What were they talking about : 1. Subject matter -none of
his paintings had Gods and Goddesses in them. 2. Subject matter -none
of his landscapes looked, at least superficially like Claude and
Poussin. 3. Subject matter None of his nudes looked like Greek
statues. 4. He made major paintings ofpeople of low degree [the
funeral at Ornans for example. -again subject matter.
This is not where the greatness of Courbet lay. He transformed the
art of landscape painting by using compositions which resulted in
wildly dynamic forces acting to propel you through the painting [in
what I call his x paintings]. Or he painted pictures in which it was
difficult to know how deep they were. Or he painted views which looked
as though the space went in forever. Or he painted pictures which
looked like a part of a world which went on and one and behind your
head was still there. If these categories sound as though they are
related to Burke and Kant's Sublime, it is because they were. But
unlike Caspar David Friedrich, who was a weak painter, Courbet was a
very strong one, so these ideas became infused with pictorial life and
don't exactly conform to the compositions listed by Burke. That series
of mysterious paintings about the source of the river Rhone is a part
of this.
Now, please don't be offended, but you said something, well meaningly
which offends me:
"... it was very remarkable, as the rendering of the ocean became a
very patterned texture that was more a decorated canvas than it was
an illusion of the sea, "
If you were looking at a real Courbet when this pictorial event
occurred, then you were not "seeing" his work. I mean, that you were
never trained how to move over the surface and into space, which is a
basic way of understanding the forming of almost any western painting
up to impressionism. I know one person who discovered how to do this
on her own. I saw it in her work and was dumbfounded. I think that she
is a genius. Her name is Karen Wellborn. By the way this woman is a
photographer. I remember seeing her photos of the glass conservatory
building in Bronx Park and being able to read them [they were in color
by the way] and asking her where she had learned to do this. She
answered that she thought it was from studying Atget. He is one of the
great composers. Utrillo painted wonderful paintings merely by copying
some ofvAtget's photos, but in color..
No real Courbet does what you described. But someone who does not know
how to read a painting might do it from a Courbet.
One of the problems of our moment in time is that so few living
artists know how to do this. There are several hundred in New York ,
but you will rarely see their work in the major galleries. A few,
only.
I don't know how you can teach yourself how to do this without a
teacher. But you might try looking at the Venetians, Rubens, the
French and inundate yourself with that stuff and see whether you can't
get through the surface and through perspective and through atmosphere
to read the forms of the works as moving in space within the
rectangle. It would be a shame for a person like you with so much
angin to be stuck outside the picture.
Gabriel
emat...@tomatoweb.com
zi...@interport.net wrote:
> Now, please don't be offended, but you said something, well meaningly
> which offends me:
>
> "... it was very remarkable, as the rendering of the ocean became a
> very patterned texture that was more a decorated canvas than it was
> an illusion of the sea, "
I'm afraid I'm going to have to claim my 'reader's share,' Gabriel --
certainly meaning no offense to you. Courbet drew my attention to the
surface of his painting, and it was a personal discovery, not something that
I got an idea about from art literature. It just struck me like a ligntening
bolt. But please understand that this was not at the expense of the
pictorial space that the artist was defining. It was rather like a
flip-flop, which I thought was remarkable.
There you go -- I'm talking about the democracy of reading a work of art.
Trust me, I really saw that. If you can't see it yourself, it only speaks to
the fact that you and I are not the same person. Each of us are at least
half of the painting, insofar as its meaning is concerned, at any given
moment.
Erik