An Abiding Passion for Reality

By ROBERT HUGHES

Gustave Courbet has been seen for most of this century as the patriarch of the avant-garde ideal, a man both embodying his time and working in defiance of bourgeois taste: in short, a hero. He was born in 1819 the son of a farmer, lived as a socialist, and died in 1877 exiled in Switzerland, his paintings deemed unexhibitable in France on political grounds. In the end, Courbet was financially crushed by a judgment imposed on him by the French government of more than 300 million francs -- precisely the cost of re-erecting the Vendome Column, the imperial symbol for whose toppling, during the Paris Commune of 1871, he was unjustly blamed.

All that, and a painter of unassailable, though uneven, greatness! Courbet has become one of the titans of radical nostalgia. There cannot be a political artist alive who does not dream of having Courbet's sweeping breadth of access to the public. "Courbet Reconsidered," the show of 97 paintings and drawings, organized by the art historians Sarah Faunce and Linda Nochlin, currently at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City (and scheduled to open at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in February), is not, and could not have been, a "complete" show. But it is the first attempt by an American museum to show Courbet whole in nearly 30 years.

Unlike the Courbet exhibition in Paris in 1977, it leaves out several of the most ambitious Second Empire paintings: A Burial at Ornans, The Meeting, The Bathers -- with its "Hottentot Venus," as one hostile critic called her, that waddling wardrobe of a nude that became the scandal of the 1853 Salon. Also missing is Courbet's "real allegory," The Painter's Studio, which hangs at the Musee d'Orsay. Such things can no longer be moved. Without them, can a Courbet retrospective make full sense? Emphatically yes. The character of Courbet the painter is richly distributed through his work, not just in its most famous images; in any case, the curators have secured other magisterial works from French museums, such as his great image of lesbian love, Sleep, 1866, and The Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (Summer), 1856-57.

Every aspect of his work is thoroughly set on view in Brooklyn: landscape, portraiture, animal painting, social commentary, erotica. And from them Courbet rises more vividly and intensely now than ever before in living memory, at least in America. Courbet -- this combative, ambitious, narcissistic and earthy man, crazy about women, convinced of his own historical mission -- thought he was the painter of his time. His egotism still grates. What school did he belong to? "I am Courbetist, that's all. My painting is the only true one. I am the first and unique artist of the century; the others are students or drivelers."

Without this battleship of an ego, Courbet would hardly have survived the attacks of the critics of his day. What was realism to his enemies? Atheism, socialism, materialism, crudity: a denial of all decent control. An audience that doted on the rococo peasant had insuperable difficulties with Courbet's frieze of worn faces and homespun black suits in Burial at Ornans, 1850. He painted, someone gibed, the way one waxed boots. He was seen as a dangerous socialist, a besmircher of the ideal, a bucolic thug from the Franche-Comte trampling all over the classical tradition with his wooden clogs.

What one sees today, especially in Brooklyn, is a different Courbet. He is a painter immersed both in popular art and in the traditions of his medium (Caravaggio, the Le Nains, Corot). He is inventive, yes, but not in a burn- the-Louvre way. He is an empiricist (though not without sentimental moments) for whom the sense of touch preceded that of sight. What the vibration of light would be to Monet, the force of gravity was to Courbet. It is the physical law that insinuates itself into almost every one of his images, confirming their materiality and stressing their essential subject matter -- the weighty body of the world.

His disheveled girls on the banks of the Seine, in the painting that initiated a spate of such images among the impressionists 20 years later, are drawn into the earth, their limbs and puffy faces asserting the heaviness of sleep. His trellised roses are inordinately fleshy; his apples, red and bruised -- no perfect objects of oral desire here -- are solid as stone. He painted hair, especially the thick curly tresses of Whistler's Irish mistress Jo Heffernan, as though he were running his fingers through it.

This predisposition made him a great painter of the nude, though undoubtedly a phallocratic one. One sees him at full stretch in Sleep, the painting of two life-size lesbians entwined on a bed. It proves the impossibility of distinguishing, at a certain level, between pornography and art. The painting has little to do with lesbian perceptions of sex: it is a seraglio scene, an enactment for men's eyes only. But despite the corniness of the flowers and pearls that allegorize Luxury, the creamy rose of those bodies, shadowed with olive and held within the complicated machinery of the pose, is a breathtaking pictorial achievement.

The surprise of the show is Courbet's Origin of the World, 1866, by far the most transgressive image in 19th century painting. Long presumed lost, it turned up appropriately enough in the collection of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. It is a frontal view of a woman's pubes, painted with vast enthusiasm: the symbolic climax, one might say, of the series of dark caverns Courbet painted in his native countryside, The Source of the Loue, 1864. The objectivity of Courbet's work connotes a deep and sensuous love of whatever he painted. Sometimes his portraits of dead birds and animals -- like the brilliant Girl with Seagulls, Trouville, 1865 -- hark back to 18th century prototypes like Oudry, but their pressing reality comes from Courbet's own love of hunting.

Time and again, in this show, one sees proleptic hints of art to come. The limestone crags and ledges of the valleys around his native Flagey, capped with dense dark green and anchored by thick clefts of shadow, have a solidity that young Cezanne would emulate, along with the pasty, almost mortared paint that evokes their surfaces. His rolling waves, marbled with foam as solidly as a steak with fat, reappear on the other side of the Atlantic in Winslow Homer's seapieces at Prout's Neck in Maine. Picasso would do versions of the sleeping girls on the banks of the Seine. In fact, Courbet has always been a painter's painter, because the scope of his appetite could show others how not to be afraid of their own vulgarity. His career reminds us that great and idiotic artists have something in common -- both are shameless.