When describing The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life (1855) in a letter to a friend, Gustave Courbet notoriously quipped, “It’s pretty mysterious. Good luck to anyone who can make it out!” Art historians have long grappled with the ambiguities of Courbet’s oeuvre, and recent books by Linda Nochlin and Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu, as well as an online publication by the Getty Museum, demonstrate the ever-present allure of works that in spite of many fine formal, socio-historical, and psychoanalytical analyses continue to exude an aura of mystery. Both Nochlin and Chu are senior scholars who have researched Courbet’s life and works throughout their careers. Author of the groundbreaking 1971 article, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (Art News 69:9 [January 1971]: 22–39, 67–71), Nochlin has published numerous books and essays and organized several exhibitions exploring the work of female artists and representations of women in art, including the Brooklyn Museum’s 2007 Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art exhibition, which she co-curated with Maura Reilly (click here for review). She was also co-curator, with Sarah Faunce, of the museum’s 1988 Courbet Reconsidered exhibition. Founder and managing editor of the online journal Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (www.19thc-artworldwide.org), Chu has published widely on Courbet and nineteenth-century art, including The Letters of Gustave Courbet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) and Nineteenth-Century European Art (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2007, 2nd ed. [click here for review]).

Nochlin’s Courbet is a career-spanning collection of her essays about the “immensely seductive artist,” creating what she describes as an “allegory of almost half a century of my life as an art historian” (6). The essays, most first published between 1965 and 1988, are arranged chronologically, allowing the reader to consider the shifts and continuities in Nochlin’s research interests and methodologies over the course of her long and distinguished career. Nochlin has not edited the essays, believing that “the value of a particular piece of writing lies in the art-historical situation as it appeared at the time it was written” (8). Instead she briefly contextualizes them by discussing the personal and political interests that contributed to her pursuit of various topics.

In her essays from the 1960s and 1970s, she explores how Courbet’s interest in folk art and customs, as well as seventeenth-century Dutch and Spanish art, contributed to the revolutionary quality of his Realism. In these iconological and socio-historical essays, we see Nochlin’s contribution to the popular understanding of Courbet as a republican painter deeply engaged with “the people” and his native region. In the first essay, Nochlin demonstrates that A Burial at Ornans (1850) was revolutionary in style as well as subject matter, arguing that by painting in a simple and awkward manner evocative of Epinal imagery, Courbet announced his democratic ideals. Next, Nochlin reveals that Courbet based the composition of The Meeting (1855) on a specific broadside of the Wandering Jew, and uncovers the rich personal and political resonance of the theme for the artist. In her introduction, she describes “the heady excitement” of finding “the Source” in a dusty Paris archive (9). The third essay argues that Courbet’s puzzling The Preparation of the Bride/Dead Girl (ca. 1858) is, like his other major works of the 1850s, a contemporary history painting of his native Franche-Comté region, in this case depicting specific provincial bridal customs. Nochlin’s essay was first published in 1971, several years before French scholar Hélène Toussaint proposed that the scene represented funeral rather than bridal preparations and was in fact Toilet of a Dead Girl, a work, thought lost, mentioned in several posthumous inventories of Courbet’s paintings (Gustave Courbet, 1819–1877, Paris: Éditions des Musées Nationaux, 1977).

In her introduction, Nochlin notes that although the Smith College Museum of Art, which owns the painting, has re-titled the work Preparation of the Dead Girl, she is “far from convinced, nor are several other scholars” (10). She cites Marie-Hélène Huet’s thoughtful essay, in which Huet convincingly counters Toussaint’s evidence, references Nochlin’s “beautiful analysis” of the painting, and concludes that it represents a bride, but one who calls to mind the specter of death that lurks within all rituals (“Ritual Violence: Courbet and George Sand,” New Literary History 26:4 (1995): 833–55). Given the unfinished state of Courbet’s painting and the fact that x-rays reveal intriguing changes to the surface, including clothing the once nude bride/dead girl, it seems likely that debate will continue about the artist’s intentions. Nochlin’s interpretation remains persuasive, however, and certainly supports those who see before them a bride, however mournful. The essay was published the same year her now canonical “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” appeared in Art News, and in Nochlin’s choice of subject as well as her obvious fascination with the bridal folk songs she uses as source material, we see the first evidence in this volume of her new and pivotal interest in feminist theory.

Not surprisingly, many of Nochlin’s essays from the 1980s are more explicitly feminist in focus, as she explores whether the revolutionary nature of Courbet’s art extends to representations of gender. For example, she contextualizes The Grain Sifters (1855) in relation to other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century images of female peasants. Unlike Jean-François Millet and Jules Breton, whose seemingly atemporal figures supported dominant, oppressive ideologies about peasant women, Nochlin argues that Courbet “reinsert[ed]” his female worker into “the realm of history—a realm in which there can be change and progress” (104). She finds, however, that Courbet’s central figure pales in comparison with the powerfully energized peasant-woman in Käthe Kollwitz’s 1905 Losbruch, from her Peasants’ War series; and Nochlin concludes that Courbet’s “conception of woman, as a motif for art-making, was vastly different from what may be thought of as revolutionary or feminist in any sense of the word” (108). In her catalogue essay for the Courbet Reconsidered exhibition, Nochlin performs a feminist rereading of The Painter’s Studio, discovering in the central group an Oedipal triangle that conveys a clearly patriarchal “lesson about the origin of art itself in male desire” (Sarah Faunce and Linda Nochlin, eds., Courbet Reconsidered, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988, 170). She also explores the function of allegory. Nochlin’s essay, in fact, allegorizes the painting’s structure as she brackets a creative, feminine, and feminist interpretation with the more traditional “neutro- or neutered-masculine” voice of art-historical inquiry (185). She argues against art-historical practice in which “meaning is understood to be finite, the interpretation of meaning restricted for the most part, as in allegory, to deciphering the intentions of the author” (159), and announces her allegiance to the idea of the work of art as a Barthesian text devoid of a unitary meaning. In this essay, as well as a historiography of late nineteenth-century biographies of the artist and a provocative and at times amusing tale, first published in October, of her repeatedly stymied efforts to locate The Origin of the World (1866), Nochlin critiques not only Courbet but the practice of art history itself and reveals the liberating effects of feminist theory, along with other critical approaches, on her scholarship.

While her methodology has shifted over the years, her obvious passion for her subject and her ability to produce richly evocative and insightful descriptions of works of art have not. Nor has her tendency to consider Courbet’s position within the trajectory of modern painting, from her assertion in the initial essay that he was the “first major artist to look toward the primitive in the nineteenth century” (25) to her current interest, discussed in the introduction, in Courbet’s “fascinating and problematic relationship to twentieth-century and contemporary art” in the works of Balthus, John Currin, and other practitioners of “perverse realism” (15). Several of the essays would be particularly good assignments for students. Her article on The Meeting, for example, demonstrates that the most interesting questions about artistic sources relate to questions of why rather than simply what. Her historiographic essay, in which she examines the late nineteenth-century “de-politicization” of the painter, provides a relatively short example of the importance of thinking critically about authors’ viewpoints and intentions.

Other essays in the volume address issues of center and periphery in the work of Puerto Rican artist Francisco Oller, who studied with Courbet, and questions of meaning in The Oak of Flagey (1864) and other landscape paintings. In the latter, Nochlin suggests that previous interpretations of Courbet’s landscapes have been too generalized. The volume is nicely illustrated, although there are occasional gaps. For example, in an essay in which she argues that the most successful imagery relating to the Commune arose from popular media, the intriguing illustrations and photographs she discusses are not reproduced. There are also cases of repetition that are perhaps unavoidable in a collection of this type. Nochlin revisits A Burial later in the volume, in a briefer, more conversational essay than her first. Although her emphasis is somewhat different, the article feels repetitive, particularly as she also addresses some of the same issues about Courbet’s interest in folk art and seventeenth-century Dutch and Spanish art in her essay on The Meeting. For readers dipping in and out of the book over a period of time, this will likely not be an issue. In spite of these small frustrations, Courbet is a rewarding read. It demonstrates the significance of Nochlin’s many contributions to the field and provides an inspiring example of consistently creative and rigorous scholarship.

Like Nochlin, Chu has focused on Courbet throughout her distinguished career. In The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture, she offers an intriguing new interpretive lens through which to view the painter, arguing that his “artistic course of action was modeled on that of contemporary writers.” She believes that Courbet, who was “raised with the notion that money is the paramount measure of success,” found in the literary milieu a model for balancing “artistic independence and financial success” in a new market-based cultural system (2). Courbet realized that in this new system press publicity, whether positive or negative, was crucial for building a reputation. However, Chu believes that the literary world provided far more than a marketing vehicle for the artist, stating, “If he held his finger to the pulse of modern life, it was through the intermediary of the [journalists’] café and newspaper rather than through contemplation of the world around him. A primacy of the verbal over the visual, of text over image, marked his cognition of modern life” (16). She suggests that in spite of an emphasis on visuality in the Courbet literature, dating back at least to Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres’s reported description of him as simply “an eye,” “thinking of Courbet’s paintings in terms of language and rhetoric is a fruitful way to approach his oeuvre” (16). Her fascinating and well-written volume demonstrates that this is indeed the case. In the process, she paints a portrait of Courbet the savvy entrepreneur for our entrepreneurial age.

After describing the expansion and commodification of the daily press in Paris and documenting Courbet’s immersion in this burgeoning writers’ milieu, Chu explores how he responded to contemporary literary genres and practices in works ranging from his earliest Salon submissions to his late landscapes. She begins with the self-portraits Courbet regularly submitted to the Salon between 1843 and 1851, arguing that he clearly recognized the marketing value of “a genre that had the unique advantage of simultaneously acquainting the public with an image of the author and a sample of his work” (18). Chu attributes the theatrical character of The Cellist (ca. 1846–47) and other early self-portraits to his awareness of George Sand’s and other authors’ strategy of courting celebrity by adopting theatrical poses in public and in autobiographical novels. By 1849, however, Courbet abandoned his theatrical poses in response to a new literary genre pioneered by Champfleury (Jules Husson) and other literary friends, who were creating sketches of the “truly eccentric” denizens of bohemia. Chu argues that by 1849 Courbet favored a visual self-representation that if not “authentic” was more in line with the values these friends embraced. Champfleury’s bohemian vignettes were part of a popular journalistic genre of biographies of famous men that Chu calls the “media pantheon.” She goes on to argue that Courbet’s portraits of Champfleury, Charles Baudelaire, and other celebrities were directly inspired by this pantheon. True to his political beliefs, Courbet selected an idiosyncratic group of republican men whom he felt embodied crucial values of the times. Chu argues that just as editors and journalists had recently adopted a livelier, more novelistic style to breathe new life into what had become a rather tired literary genre, Courbet fused genre and portraiture to create a new visual idiom, the “historical portrait,” for his personal pantheon. In this chapter and others, she paints a picture of an artist who deftly manages to balance his quest for publicity with his liberal social ideals.

Chu then moves on to the issue of rhetoric, focusing not on Courbet’s frequently discussed use of allegory, but instead on his embrace of irony. She argues that like contemporary journalists he relied on irony to create a level of ambiguity that fooled government censors while provoking heated, publicity-inspiring discussion about his work. She explores the varying forms of irony Courbet marshaled to level his social critiques, from a subtle Socratic manner in An Afterdinner at Ornans (1848–49) to a more aggressive “Romantic irony” in A Burial at Ornans. Especially interesting is her discussion of The Bathers (1853) as an ironic subversion of traditional academic art practices, in which she offers a satisfying explanation for the seemingly unmotivated poses and the seated figure’s odd facial expression. Chu believes that Courbet even turned to irony in his self-titled allegorical work, The Painter’s Studio, as he tried to bring a well-worn rhetorical mode up to date.

In her fifth chapter, Chu adopts the concept of “bisextuality”—coined by literary scholar Naomi Schor in “Female Fetishism: The Case of George Sand” (in Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986, 363–72)—to explain ambiguities in many of Courbet’s early Salon paintings of women. Chu argues that paintings such as The Bathers and The Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine—Summer (1856–57) “are conceived from an unfixed, or . . . shifting, gender perspective” (118), similar to oscillating viewpoints in texts by Sand, Gustave Flaubert, and others. The resulting ambiguity provoked readings of Courbet’s paintings that varied by gender and sexual experience, with men questioning the moral status of the female figures in a way that women did not and reacting with frustration at their inability to pin down Courbet’s intentions. Of course, much more evidence of male than female viewpoints exists for the period, but to support her contentions Chu does an admirable job of drawing on the sources available, from exhibition reviews in women’s journals to reports of the Empress Eugénie’s reaction to The Bathers. While Chu’s argument has affinities with Michael Fried’s notion of “Courbet’s ‘Femininity’” (in Courbet Reconsidered, 43–53), her Courbet is driven by a savvy recognition of the increasingly important role of women as both subjects and consumers of visual art during the mid-nineteenth century rather than a desire to merge corporeally with the female bodies represented.

In her final chapter, Chu offers an entrepreneurial explanation for the unusually wide range of genres and techniques Courbet explored, particularly in the large body of non-controversial works he produced for the middle-class art market. She believes he was once again influenced by the example of contemporary writers, who found it necessary to treat subjects as different as politics and fashion, varying their narrative styles accordingly, and to balance provocative entries with more mundane fare in order to enhance their reputations and earn a living. Chu devotes most of the chapter to landscape and, like Nochlin, believes that Courbet’s output was more nuanced than previously recognized. She argues that he intentionally created different types of landscapes and varied his style in order to meet the interests of specific segments of the art-buying public. For example, she contrasts the thick palette-knife style he used for scenes of the Franche-Comté aimed at fellow natives interested in the natural history and economic resources of the area with the light, almost sketchy seascapes he produced for tourists who wanted refreshing mementos of vacations by the shore. As in other chapters, Chu, who translated and edited collections of the artist’s letters, makes good use of his correspondence to back up her contention that he designed a clever, and for many years successful, marketing strategy. In a brief epilogue, she discusses his inability to continue walking this “fine line between artistic integrity and commodity production” (173) after being levied a hefty fine for the rebuilding of the Vendôme Column. In this case, it seems, the literary world offered no useful prototypes.

It is hard to find fault with this well-researched, perceptive, and beautifully illustrated text, although Chu might usefully have theorized a bit about the differences between the literary and visual mediums. For example, was there a tendency to see self-portraits as somehow more true to life than biographical novels or vice versa? What effect might the public nature of viewing Courbet’s “bisextual” Salon submissions have had on critics compared with the potentially more private experience of reading a novel by Sand or Flaubert? Nevertheless, Chu’s book is an important new contribution to the field of nineteenth-century art. It will undoubtedly become a key text for scholars grappling with the mysteries and ambiguities at the heart of Courbet’s work.

Were he alive today, Courbet would certainly market his work electronically and would no doubt be delighted to be the subject of the Getty Museum’s first online publication. Looking at the Landscape: Courbet and Modernism is a collection of papers from a symposium held in conjunction with the 2006 Courbet and the Modern Landscape exhibition. Like the exhibition itself, the symposium provided an opportunity to explore a comparatively neglected area of Courbet’s oeuvre. In her preface, Mary Morton briefly describes the exhibition along with the topics of the nine symposium presentations, five of which are included in Looking at the Landscape. In the first essay, David Bomford argues that in Courbet’s landscapes we see his embrace of seventeenth-century Dutch and Spanish art not in terms of composition, as with the artist’s figural works, but instead in his adoption of the “rough manner” of paint application and dark ground used by Rembrandt van Rijn, Diego Velázquez, and others. Chu continues her exploration of Courbet’s entrepreneurial impulses with an analysis of his many paintings of popular tourist sites, created both close to home in the Franche-Comté and farther afield during his frequent travels. She argues that the strong sense of tactility in his paintings was meant to evoke tourists’ physical experiences of the places depicted, as opposed to earlier picturesque illustrations designed to provide armchair travelers with detailed visual descriptions of popular sites.

Dominique de Font-Réaulx explores affinities of subject matter and style between Courbet’s and photographer Gustave Le Gray’s seascapes. Although Font-Réaulx points out that such links were not noted in their day, she demonstrates that the commonalities are quite strong in spite of their different mediums and argues that together the artists created a new subject—non-picturesque representations of sea and sky rather than traditional maritime images of ships and vessels. Paul Galvez, on the other hand, is concerned with the striking difference between Édouard Manet’s and Courbet’s modernism. He argues that Courbet adopts a viewpoint of “downward descent” and a strategy of “antihierarchical mark making” in many of his landscape paintings, thereby producing effects of darkness and deceleration that stand in contrast to the speed and brilliance associated with the work of Manet and the Impressionists. Galvez, in fact, sees “Courbet’s deep investment in the decelerated, lingering gaze” (53) arising from his sense of competitiveness with Manet during the mid-1860s. Klaus Herding, who, like Nochlin and Chu, has focused on Courbet throughout his career, explores questions of meaning in the painter’s landscapes. He argues that we should understand Courbet’s landscapes as sites of personal “introspection” through which he expressed his emotional condition, and provocatively questions the usefulness of the term “Realism,” that bedrock of Courbet studies, in connection with the artist’s works, particularly his landscapes. While Chu argues for the painter’s multi-sensory evocation of specific locales, Herding believes that Courbet “did much to make his compositions not recognizably depict this or that place” in order to better “describe his feelings” (70). In the process, the artist moved away from the materialism we typically associate with him to a more abstract style that situates him “at the core of Modernism” (79).

At the Getty publications website, readers can quickly and easily download individual papers or the entire publication in pdf format. The papers are amply illustrated, mostly in color, although some of the pictures are rather small and lose resolution when zoomed in on, and a few are yet to come. The online publication is a boon for those unable to attend the symposium, and will certainly prompt readers to take another look at the Courbet and the Modern Landscape exhibition catalogue (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006). The varied viewpoints the authors bring to the painter’s landscapes indicate that this will be a fruitful area of inquiry for quite some time.