The Big Fellow

Gustave Courbet was a handsome farmer's boy who grew up to be a beer-swilling, loud-mouthed giant--and one of the great painters of the 19th Century. While he lived, Courbet was generally belittled, and after his death he was eclipsed by the sunny brilliance of Manet. But the retrospective exhibition of Courbet's art staged in a Manhattan gallery last week, the biggest Courbet show ever seen in the U.S., gave ample proof of the big fellow's permanence and power.

When he first turned up in Paris in 1839, the farm boy was a little hard for his art teachers to take. He sat at the back of the life class with a huge paintbox by his side, doing studies three times as big as anyone else's. Instead of pumping his instructors he wandered alone in the Louvre, picked up a lot from looking at Rembrandt and the Spaniards.

Socialistic Plumpness. Because they had none of the sickly romanticism fashionable in his day, Courbet's paintings were laughed at. One critic complained that Courbet must be a socialist: his nudes were so plumply inelegant. Another of Courbet's critics may have been the first, but by no means the last, man to look at a picture and remark that his kids could do it better.

Courbet did see the world with a childlike directness and delight. He painted it, according to one contemporary, "as simply as an apple tree bears apples." He didn't much like being called a realist--it was a term of opprobrium in some circles in those days, too--but he used to pound on the table and insist that painting was a physical language having nothing to do with history, romance or religion. "Show me an angel," he shouted, "and I will paint one."

The Genius. Since no one showed him any angels, he painted gleaming seascapes in which one could almost whiff the salt air, and landscapes like Landscape at Ornans (see cut) that were solid and spacious enough to be mistaken for windows on reality. Well-pleased with himself, he did at least a dozen self-portraits. One, entitled Fortune Saluting Genius, showed him with a wealthy patron.

Courbet's best admirers were realists like himself (men like Novelist Zola), men who also swam against the popular current. To 20th Century eyes, Courbet looks like a rock-solid conservative. Actually, his realistic art not only ran counter to the great traditions of his day, it profoundly influenced Manet, Renoir and Cezanne, the founding fathers of modern art.

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