Looming before the visitor entering the recent Gustave Courbet exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was an enlargement of the artist’s striking The Desperate Man (1844–45), an image effectively representative of the artist’s intense effort to secure artistic fame without sacrificing his personal vision. Once inside the exhibition, the paintings themselves provided the chief drama in a curatorial endeavor that “sought to relocate Courbet’s work in the context of his time” instead of “attempting to formulate new hypotheses” (15). Organized thematically in roughly chronological order, Gustave Courbet began with the early role-playing self-portraits and ended with works produced during the artist’s imprisonment and exile. In between, galleries were devoted to Ornans subjects, the “Realist Manifesto” paintings, portraits and other images of “modern life,” nudes, landscapes, and hunting scenes.

One surprise was the significant role photography played in the exhibition. While scholars have long believed Courbet used photographic studies, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue argued that photography was not simply a tool but instead a significant contributor to the painter’s revolutionary vision, particularly in his nudes and landscapes. Photographs by Jacques-Antoine Moulin and others in the “Modern Nude” gallery demonstrated the importance of erotic images and figure studies for Courbet’s conception of the female nude. One of two galleries devoted to the painter’s innovative land- and seascapes included photographs that made a compelling case for the similarity of vision between Courbet and photographers like Gustave Le Gray. Affinities between Courbet’s canvases and photographs were not lost on contemporaries, who we learn complained that the painter’s early works shared the brutality and banality of daguerreotypes.

The inclusion of these photographs was the primary visual means of situating Courbet in his mid-nineteenth-century milieu. Curators also gave frequent voice to the artist’s contemporaries, in keeping with the formers’ concern that modern Courbet scholarship “often reflects the era in which it was written and the personal agenda of the author,” at times “mask[ing] the singular place of his oeuvre in the nineteenth century” (15). For example, the wall text for the “Self Reflections” section aptly ended with critic Maxime du Camp’s complaint about the artist’s 1855 Pavilion of Realism: “Courbet waving, Courbet walking . . . Courbet everywhere, Courbet forever.” Frequent references to younger artists’ relationship with his oeuvre, including the anecdote that Paul Cézanne carried a photograph of Woman with a Parrot (1866) in his wallet, emphasized Courbet’s key role in the trajectory of modernism.

The exhibition brought together The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair (1850–55), The Quarry (1857), and other important works—some, like The Desperate Man, not previously exhibited in the United States. One challenge given the scope of the exhibition was that the massive A Burial at Ornans (1849–50) and The Painter’s Studio (1855), arguably the artist’s most critical manifesto paintings, could not be safely shipped to New York. While the Burial was a ghostly presence mentioned in several labels, the curators tried a more creative solution for The Studio. They hung Bruyas in Profile (1854) and several other portraits Courbet used for his depictions of the “people who serve me, support me” over a large grisaille reproduction of the painting. Also included was Julien Vallou de Villeneuve’s nude study of Henriette Bonnion, which Courbet likely used for the figure of the model. Two photographs of anonymous laborers by Adalbert Cuvelier stood in for the social types on the left of The Studio, although these images appear to have more in common, as the catalogue implies, with the figures in less allegorical paintings, such as The Peasants of Flagey. A small key nearby identified the figures according to the artist’s description in his letter to Champfleury (Jules Husson) and recent art-historical interpretations. Unfortunately, the installation seemed to work best for those already quite familiar with The Studio, as it was difficult to get a sense of the work as a whole. A full-color reproduction that hung at the exhibition’s exit would have been useful within the gallery, but one can understand the hesitancy to dedicate too much wall space to reproductions.

Another challenge, perhaps inherent, in organizing a Courbet retrospective is that viewing the artist’s paintings in isolation makes it easy to overlook their revolutionary qualities. The installation of The Origin of the World (1866) best conveyed the sense of shock that his works could produce. The infamous painting was tucked away behind a partial wall separating it from The Bathers (1853) and other nudes. It was easy to miss a small notice warning of images of explicit nudity, and thus to come upon the painting unawares. The relative isolation, narrowness, and darkness of the space worked well to convey the sense of secrecy long associated with an image that numerous owners have felt compelled to veil. The decoy landscape that onetime owner Jacques Lacan commissioned from his brother-in-law André Masson to conceal The Origin hung beside it, and a stereopticon viewer with an obscene photograph by Auguste Belloc of the type that likely inspired Courbet’s framing and cropping of his image was installed nearby. A less salacious reminder of Courbet’s challenge to contemporary tastes could be found in the Ornans gallery, where Courbet’s Three Sisters: The Stories of Grandmother Salvan (ca. 1846–47) hung near Young Ladies of the Village (1851–52). After viewing the picturesque and timeless Three Sisters, which surely would have pleased critics had it been exhibited during the artist’s lifetime, it was easy to see why many were flummoxed by the more radical Young Ladies, with its larger scale, unidealized faces, and clearly contemporary clothing that raised the issue of class and geographic divisions.

The accompanying catalogue, hefty and richly illustrated, makes a significant contribution to the field. Lengthy entries for individual works—including The Studio, The Burial, and other paintings exhibited at the Grand Palais in Paris though not in New York—contain reproductions of old master and contemporary paintings, prints, and photographs that effectively demonstrate the artist’s full immersion in mid-nineteenth-century European visual culture, positioning him as “a devourer of images of every kind” (40). While Petra ten-Doesschate Chu recently explored his relation with Parisian literary culture, the catalogue reminds us that a deep engagement with the visual and literary are not mutually exclusive (Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007 [click here for review]). The catalogue also includes a useful anthology of translated period documents, including exhibition reviews and the artist’s aforementioned 1854 letter to Champfleury.

The catalogue essays further contextualize the artist and reassess aspects of his work rather than promote controversial new theories or methodologies. This approach stands in contrast to the 1988 Courbet Reconsidered exhibition, at the Brooklyn Museum and Minneapolis Institute of Arts, for which Linda Nochlin and Michael Fried produced innovative interpretations of Courbet’s relationship with the feminine, about which they debated in the catalogue (Sarah Faunce and Linda Nochin, eds., Courbet Reconsidered, Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 1988). In the first essay of the current catalogue, Bertrand Tillier revisits the links between Courbet’s art and politics, arguing that the artist considered “his painting as a kind of utopian regime that would transform the world and which could not be reduced to the espousal of one political view or another” (23). Dominique de Font-Réaulx reexamines the question of Courbet’s “realism,” paying particular attention to how his paintings differed from earlier realist works and shared visual similarities with contemporary photographs. She continues her exploration of Courbet and photography in a second essay about Swiss photographer Balthasar Burkhard, for whom the painter has been a conscious and critical inspiration. Burkhard was in fact invited to exhibit his photographs while the exhibition was on view at the Grand Palais. Bruno Mottin explains technical and stylistic information obtained via the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France’s X-radiographs of over fifty paintings, including evidence of frequent compositional changes in spite of Courbet’s boasts to the contrary. When Courbet’s The Meeting (1854) was originally displayed in Paris, Alfred Bruyas’s role in the painting, and by implication his role as a patron of the arts, was overshadowed by critics’ emphasis on the artist’s apparent narcissism. Michel Hilaire rights the balance with an examination of Courbet’s and Bruyas’s friendship, which although “lasting and sincere” was “based on a significant degree of mutual incomprehension,” and also, it seems, a shared love of seeing themselves on canvas (48). Laurence des Cars explores the relationship between Courbet and the younger generation of artists, particularly Édouard Manet and Cézanne, arguing that although Courbet “belonged resolutely to another world,” “the understanding of his painting” was “a necessary rite of passage for a whole generation as a means to rid oneself of the fallacies of academic thinking and find an original path” (64, 68).

The catalogue essays highlight several trends in recent Courbet scholarship. One is an interest in Courbet as the patriarch of modernism and postmodernism. For example, Charlotte Eyerman recently explored “Courbet’s Legacy in the Twentieth Century” (in Mary Morton and Charlotte Eyerman, Courbet and the Modern Landscape, Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006), while Linda Nochlin has expressed interest in Courbet’s “fascinating and problematic relationship to twentieth-century and contemporary art” (“Introduction,” Courbet, New York: Thames and Hudson, 2007, 15). Scholars are also examining anew the question of how to define Courbet’s realism, with Klaus Herding questioning the continued usefulness of the term (“‘The more you approach nature, the more you must leave it’: Another Look at Courbet’s Landscape Painting,” Looking at the Landscapes: Courbet and Modernism: Papers from a Symposium Held at the J. Paul Getty Museum on March 18, 2006 (http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/courbet/publications_online.html). There appears to be less overt interest in Courbet’s politics, Tillier’s essay being an exception, than in previous decades. These trends coincide with a renewed interest in the landscapes—works that are less political, at least overtly so, and more concerned, it can be argued, with the act of painting itself. Many would take issue these days with T. J. Clark’s contention that landscape is “the weakest part of Courbet’s art” (T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982, 132).

Seeing such a large body of Courbet’s work together raised the question of what directions future scholarly inquiry will take. The hunting scenes, with their “hidden, abstruse meaning,” animal poses borrowed from history painting, and at times grand scale, certainly call out for interpretive mining (391). I suspect we have not seen the last word on the question of Courbet’s relationship with the feminine. The sheer variety of his representations of the female sex in the “Modern Life” section—from his unsettling erasure of Madame Proudhon in the memorial Portrait of P.-J. Proudhon in 1853 (1865–67) to the seductively present Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (1856–57) to his haunting portrait of Madame de Brayer (1858)—suggests that there is still interesting work to be done on the question. Petra Chu (The Most Arrogant Man in France, 146–48) has argued that Courbet varied the style of his landscapes according to locale and clientele, and stylistic differences between the Proudhon and de Brayer portraits raise the question of whether similar classifications can be identified in his portraits. In terms of Courbet’s enduring influence, the most interesting question is perhaps how it has shifted over time. What might John Currin, for example, see in Courbet that Manet did not? As I left the exhibition, I also wondered who might be brave enough to weave together the various strands of Courbet’s life and art with the scholarly interpretations of the past few decades and attempt a comprehensive new biography.