Courbet Materialism

fredsonsCourbet’s Materialism

Frederique Desbuissons

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Courbet’s Materialism


Gustave Courbet radically challenged the ways in which art and literaturewere perceived as traditionally transcendent forms. Refusing to viewartistic creation as a form of production of something immaterial, heconsidered painting from the perspective of its physical reality.1 Hiscontemporaries fully understood this, coining the pun ‘le materialisme deCourbet’ in the early 1850s. When applied to a painter in themid-nineteenth century, the qualifier ‘materialiste’ carried unwaveringlynegative connotations. It consistently signalled an unfavourable opinionand was always meant as an insult when employed by Courbet’sadversaries; in their writings it was associated with the equallyconnotative terms ‘barbare’ and ‘socialiste’. For these journalists, amaterialiste referred to a painter of the lower genres (landscape,portraiture, still life and genre painting), who represented the mosttrivial aspects of reality without idealisation or elevation, avoidingsymbolic or religious themes. Furthermore, materialiste also related to thecoarse manner in which Courbet executed his paintings, one thendeemed unsophisticated, for he used a thick impasto, overtly applying thepigment in heavy layers where he left visible not only the strokes of thepaintbrush but – even more crudely – the marks of the palette knife.The negative associations with this latter practice endured throughoutCourbet’s career, and were revived after his involvement in the ParisCommune. As late as 1878, Camille Lemonnier, the Belgian art criticand naturalist writer, asserted:

A brush is wielded by intelligence. In contrast, the knife is the dumb instrument of the

manual worker; it is unconscious, irresponsible, mechanical. It leads the hand, it collaborates

[conspires] with chance; even wielded by a virtuoso, it retains its hereditary blemish, which is

to reduce everything it touches to matter.2

The parallel between Courbet and materialism had indeed previously beendrawn in the specific political context following the 1848 Revolution. Theaftermath of the uprising cast a shadow on the Salon of 1850–1851,determining the political atmosphere which fuelled the raging bataillerealiste over the exhibition of Courbet’s monumental canvases: Burial atOrnans, The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair and The Stonebreakers.While one critic described the painter as a ‘a dreadful materialiste’ (‘unterrible materialiste’),3 another compared his partisans to a sect which‘energetically proclaimed the cult of material truth’, viewing it as a‘barbaric invasion which equates spiritual matters with the town’ [‘leschoses de la cıte’, i.e. res publica].4

Such journalists – and indeed others who need not all be mentionedby name – shared a generally conservative political outlook and afundamentally traditional conception of art. They did not hesitate tocontrast the body of painting (its material elements) with its soul (ormeaning), just as they distinguished the (material) imitation of reality from

1. An earlier version of this article waspresented at the Premier Congres internationalde la Societe des etudes romantiques etdix-neuviemistes, held in Lyon from 14 to 16May 2003. I would like to thank the organisersof this conference, M.M. Jean-Yves Mollier,Philippe Regnier and Alain Vaillant.

2. See Camille Lemonnier, Gustave Courbet et sonœuvre (Lemerre: Paris, 1878), p. 62: ‘unpinceau, c’est de la cervelle./Au contraire, lecouteau est l’instrument bete du manouvrier: ilest inconscient, irresponsable, mecanique. Ildirige la main, il collabore avec le hasard; mememanie par un virtuose, il garde sa souillurehereditaire, qui est de materialiser tout ce qu’iltouche’. For the English translation, see J.M.Przyblyski, ‘Courbet, the Commune, and theMeanings of Still Life in 1871’, Art Journal, vol.55, 1996.

3. Alfred Dauger, ‘Salon de 1851’, Le Pays, no.40, 9 February 1851. I would like to thank mycolleague, Michel Bouvet, for having drawn myattention to this article.

4. See Edouard Thierry, ‘Salon de 1850’,L’Assemblee nationale, no. 365, 31 December1850: ‘Il n’y a plus d’ecoles, il y a mille ecoles.L’esprit de protestation qui s’est eleve contrel’autorite des anciennes doctrines a multiplie lesinterpretations individuelles. Plus d’orthodoxiedans l’art et une infinite de sectes. Les sectes lesplus actives proclament energiquement le cultede la realite materielle. . . . Est-ce l’ideerevolutionnaire qui passe de la politique dans lecercle de l’art? Est-ce la democratie qui formuleson expression par le dessin et par la couleur?Est-ce l’invasion des barbares qui se fait a traversles choses de l’esprit comme a travers les chosesde la cite?’.

# The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. OXFORD ART JOURNAL 31.2 2008 251–260doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcn011 Advance Access Publication 30 May 2008

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its (ideal) re-creation. Thus, Leclerc, for example, opened his review of the1850–1851 Salon in La Republique, declaring that:

Painting is composed of two essentially inseparable practices: imitation and creation. With

respect to the former, it succeeds in reproducing exactly – even slavishly – the outward

appearance of objects, but this is merely an exhibition of more or less skilled craftsmanship,

for which the function of the camera obscura or daguerreotype would suffice. This body lacks

a soul – comprised of movement, inspiration, thought, animation, life – from which derives

the act of creation.5

This metaphysical philosophy of art became common ground for criticssuch as Louis Peisse, who considered Realism to be a ‘theoriematerialiste’ where ‘art is merely the imitation of nature’,6 or LouisEnault, who in 1852 underscored the ‘materialisme’ of the landscapepainting Young Women from the Village, emphasising as much its ‘slavish’imitation of reality, untainted by ideal corrections, as the opacity of itsexecution.7 By 1851, political metaphors which had been habitual in theaftermath of the 1848 Revolution were slowly transformed into pictorialones – or, rather, the latter started to eclipse the former, given thatthe two forms of critical idiom had until then always coexisted. This isdemonstrated by the critic of the Revue des deux mondes, who already in1851 took against the ‘new age of chorus leaders [‘coryphees’] whocruelly leave us lying face down in the muddy ground’.8 Notsurprisingly, it was Theophile Gautier who paid the greatest attention toCourbet’s formal materialism, noting that ‘the slight flaw of the painting[The Stonebreakers] is revealed in its uniform execution – flesh, rags,stones – all portrayed as equally solid’.9 The allusions which have so farpointed to fange or ‘mire’ as a determining factor of the 1848Revolution would in due course make way for the associations of thetriad materialisme–matiere–terre. In 1855, when the Goncourt brothersdeclared the realists to be ‘dreadful children of materialism’, theyhenceforth related the term ‘realism’ to the rejection of imagination,the imitation of nature, and to the invention of photography.10

Subsequently, neither Courbet nor the materialist metaphor faded,though the young provocateur, who had become an essential figure inthe Paris art scene, began increasingly to transform himself into a modelfor the younger modernist painters. Jules Castagnary thus recalled that in1861, when Courbet opened his communal atelier on the rueNotre-Dame-des-Champs, ‘materialisme’ was still the catchword thatsummarised the anxieties of his contemporaries.11 On the other hand,while criticism of the artist in his early years had long been dominatedby the accusation that his pictures and figures were dirty, it practicallydisappeared after 1855, making way for the topos of the sensual,hedonist painter.12 The materialist metaphor in particular brought to lifethe rapport between artist and beer. In a previous article on thebrasserie Andler, I drew attention to the recurring commentariesinvolving not only Courbet’s preference for this drink, but also theensemble of its corporeal manifestations, whether dietary, sexual orexcremental.13 The insistence on bodily necessities was one of the mostprominent features of Gustave Courbet’s reception in the 1860s,although it was already discernable in the previous decade, whenTheophile Gautier described one of the figures in the 1852 painting,Young Women from the Village, as a ‘cook dressed in her Sunday best[whose outfit] is the colour of wine dregs’.14 Indeed, there are very few

5. See A. Leclerc, ‘Salon de 1851–1852 [sic]’,La Republique, no. 87, 28 March 1851: ‘Lapeinture se compose de deux operationsessentielles et inseparables: l’imitation et lacreation. Par l’imitation, elle arrive areproduire exactement et servilement les objetsexterieurs, mais ce n’est la qu’une œuvre plusou moins habile de metier et d’industrie, et alaquelle pourrait au besoin suffire la besogne dela chambre obscure ou du daguerreotype. A cecorps il manque une ame, c’est-a-dire lemouvement, l’inspiration, la pensee,l’animation, la vie: c’est la le fait de la creation’.

6. Louis Peisse, ‘Salon de 1850’, LeConstitutionnel, 8 January 1851.

7. Louis Enault, ‘Le Salon de 1852’, LaChronique de Paris, vol. 4, 1 May 1852, p. 234.

8. See Louis de Geffroy, ‘Le Salon de 1850–51’, Revue des deux mondes, 1 March 1851,p. 930: ‘Voici venir les coryphees de l’erenouvelle qui nous rejettent brutalement la facecontre cette terre fangeuse, udam humum, d’ounous enlevait l’aile de la poesie’.

9. See Theophile Gautier, ‘Salon de 1850–51. M. Courbet’, La Presse, 15 February 1851:‘C’est un peu le defaut du tableau [Les Casseurs depierres] d’etre fait partout de la meme maniere;chairs, haillons, cailloux, tout est egalementsolide’.

10. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, La Peinture al’exposition de 1855 (Paris, 1855), in Etudes d’art(Librairie des bibliophiles: Paris, 1893), p. 10:‘Halte-la! crie la bande des enfants terribles dumaterialisme; – et que diable disputez-vous,Raphael et Jordaens que vous etes? Votre casusbelli est une question d’empatement. Paix donc!Sachez: je suis le monde nouveau! Je ne suis ni uneecole, ni une eglise, ni une idee, ni une foi: je suisla Verite! J’ai defendu l’imagination a mes yeux, ames crayons, a mes pinceaux: la Nature, c’estmoi! Vous lui pretiez, vous la pariez: je ladeshabille. Vous cherchiez: je rencontre. Vousaviez des dedains, vous, et vous autres desdegouts: tout est, tout a le droit d’etre. Je ne faispas de tableaux: je les ramasse. La creation estresponsable de mes toiles. Vous etiez peintre:gloire a moi! je suis chambre noire’.

11. Jules Castagnary, ‘Courbet, son atelier, sestheories’, in Les Libres propos (Librairieinternationale: Paris, 1864), p. 177: ‘C’en estfait du beau ! hurlait un fruit sec de l’Ecole deRome, que le malheur des temps avait rendueclectique; c’en est fait de l’ideal ! Lematerialisme entre dans l’art par la porte toutegrande ouverte de l’enseignement. Lematerialisme est le cancer du dix-neuviemesiecle. Apres avoir ronge nos ames et corrompunos mœurs, deprave notre philosophie et avili


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artists about whom we are so fully informed as to their overall physicalstate, whether dietary or sexual, including haemorrhoidal problems. It isas if his contemporaries looked beyond the physical functions of thesecorporeal needs, considering them as so many signs of the desublimationof art, which was central to the realist project.Far from vindicating himself or responding to attacks from the press,

Courbet always endeavoured to turn any reproach to his advantage,transforming every criticism into a reassertion of his identity. Thus,when reading the famous quotation of 1861 which interprets his Burial atOrnans as the ‘burial of romanticism’,15 it is impossible not to recognisea distant echo of the association between his painting and the soil. Atthe opening of his atelier several months later, Courbet made adeclaration of faith through his writer-friend Jules Castagnary, where hedefined painting as ‘an essentially concrete art form. . .consist[ing] only ofthe representation of real and existing things’. He further explained it as‘an entirely physical language that is composed, by way of words, of allvisible objects. An abstract object, not visible, nonexistent, is notwithin the domain of painting’.16 Given that nothing was less a cosamentale than Realism, Courbet’s art was thus not mentally conceived, butrather physically constructed. In this sense, the painter did not intendto destroy the Vendome Column, but rather ‘to dismantle it’(deboulonner), an expression which elevates iconoclasm to the level ofcraftsmanship, a form of well-executed manual labour, and to that extentrespectable.17

Materialism may, then, be viewed as the central characteristic whichunifies the public figure of Gustave Courbet: the image that he wanted toproject was not one of an ethereal intellect but rather of a physical mancompletely absorbed with concrete matters, and engaged in prosaicactivities. These took the form of painting the most trivial reality in arustic manner with earthy materials, employing as a tool what was initiallythe palette knife, and which later became the painter’s knife, associatedwith the world of handicraft and farming. Moreover, Courbet did notconsider himself to be an artist but a ‘maıtre peintre’,18 using a term withvery different connotations from the pejorative ‘ouvrier-peintre’, whichwas applied to him by several critics.19 We can quickly deduce that he wasnot referring as such to a pre-academic position (remembering that in1648, academicians had abandoned the title of ‘maıtre’, already in use byartistic corporations, in favour of ‘professeur’). This would not have beenin keeping with Courbet’s generally liberal artistic views, for he did notclaim the primacy of the craft practice of the ars – in the sense ofworking by hand – without resisting the pleasure of having a passing dig atacademic institutions.It would be a mistake, however, to limit materialism to these intentionally

verbal declarations, for its most important manifestations were, on thecontrary, extremely concrete. The particular nature of Courbet’s attitudewas that he not only maintained a discourse on art, but also, through hisbody and its mise-en-scene, was inextricably identified with its practice andrepresentation, as was manifest by his spectacularisation in the press and inpublic places where his work was on show. He liked to think of himself asthe representation of his art or, to employ his own terminology, his ‘realallegory’. This personification not only existed on paper, constituted bytexts and images, but also depended upon physical manifestations, inparticular corporeal ones, which for Courbet were essential. We should

notre litterature, il devait, pour consommer sonœuvre, s’attaquer a notre art’.

12. This, of course, does not exclude theevocation of scatological pleasures, demonstratedby the late and unverifiable anecdote from PedroRioux de Maillou in Souvenirs des autres (GeorgesCres et Cie: Paris, 1917), pp. 218–19, whichdescribes the painting lesson given by Courbet in1869 to his disciples from Munich: ‘Vous etes tresgentils, tres aimables, aussi, je veux vous apprendrea vous servir des couleurs . . . Car vous ne savez pasce que c’est que de toucher une palette . . . Vousmaniez ca comme s’il s’agissait d’une jeune fille!Pour peindre, il ne faut pas craindre de s’attaquer ala pate, de faire de la bonne . . . (Courbet avait laplaisanterie grasse, et le mot de Cambronne luivenait facilement sur les levres.)’.

13. Frederique Desbuissons, ‘Des moos et desmots: Courbet a la brasserie Andler’, in BrunoGirveau (ed.), A Table au XIXe siecle(Flammarion/Editions de la Reunion des museesnationaux: Paris, 2001), pp. 198–208.

14. Theophile Gautier, ‘Salon de 1852’, LaPresse, 11 May 1852: ‘la femme habillee en rose al’air d’une cuisiniere endimanchee; ses chairssont d’un rouge briquete avec des ombres desuie, et le rose de sa robe tourne a la lie de vin’.

15. Gustave Courbet, letter published in lePrecurseur d’Anvers, 22 August 1861 and LeCourrier du dimanche, 1 September 1861, alsoreproduced in Pierre Courthion, Courbet racontepar lui-meme et par ses amis, vol. 1 (Pierre Cailler:Geneva, 1948), p. 160: ‘Le fond du realisme,dit-il en substance, c’est la negation de l’ideal, alaquelle j’ai ete amene depuis quinze ans parmes etudes, et qu’aucun artiste n’avait jamais,jusqu’a ce jour, ose affirmercategoriquement . . . L’Enterrement a Ornans aete, en realite, l’enterrement du romantisme’.

16. Gustave Courbet [and Jules Castagnary],‘Lettre de M. Courbet’, le Courrier du dimanche,29 December 1861, reproduced inJ. Castagnary, ‘Courbet, son atelier, sestheories’, pp. 179–84 and in Petraten-Doesschate Chu (ed.), Correspondance deCourbet (Flammarion: Paris, 1996), p. 184. Forthe English translation, see Petra ten-DoesschateChu (ed.), Letters of Gustave Courbet (TheUniversity of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL,1992), p. 204.

17. When interviewed at the magistrate’s courtof Millau (Aveyron, France) on 30 June 2000(broadcast the same day on the televisionchannel France 2), the French union activist andspokesman for the Confederation paysanne, JoseBove, used a similar distinction to justify thedemonstration against McDonald’s in Millau on12 August 1999: ‘Un batiment en prefabriquede ce type-la pouvait etre demonte en moins de


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therefore distinguish the real person from his persona, in other words fromhis representation, in order to understand how the artist was able to crafthis image by playing with his appearance, attitudes and habits, as so manysignificant features. Without this process corresponding to what MichelFoucault called the ‘techniques de soi’,20 he found himself actively aidedby the press. It would be wrong to underestimate the spectacularmanifestations which constituted an essential part of Courbet’s career,whose development was greatly affected by the public image of theartist. As a result of these dramatic displays, Courbet inhabited the Parisart scene throughout twenty years, and not merely at the time ofexhibitions. His contemporaries often reproached his behaviour for beingself-promoting – from his repetitive scandals, his regular recourse tosympathetic critics and caricaturists, to his outspoken public posture.His manipulation of the signs of his identity did not deceive otherseither: Theophile Gautier described him very early on as a ‘gruff fake’,‘brutal . . . in large part false’ and criticised him for exaggerating hisrustic character by ‘the application of heavy layers of pigment intendedto give a crude appearance to his painting’.21 This was the significanceof his comparison to Alcibiades which recurred throughout the artcriticism of the 1850s: Plutarch’s ‘chameleon’ not only enshrinedrevolt, provocation and eccentricity, but also ambiguity, duplicity andvenality.A detail such as the palette knife clearly illustrates how Courbet’s artistic

identity became established. When taken at face value, the knife was only asimple tool chosen for its qualities – different from those of the paintbrushand for being better suited to the use for which the artist intended it.22

However, if the instrument had a particular impact on the imagination ofParisians during the Second Empire, it was because it was hardly commonto see a painter employ it for a task other than the blending of pigmentson the palette, or possibly the application of an underlayer of paint whichwould eventually disappear. Curiously, there seems to have been nocontinuity between Gustave Courbet and John Constable, whose handlingof the palette-knife in his landscape images of the Stour had greatly struckvisitors at the 1824 Salon.23 If several critics were found to havereproached Champmartin for having copied this method of ‘gathering paintwith the knife, scraping the residue of spattered hues from the palette,and instead of leaving it in the watercan [pincelier], [spreading it] boldlywithout resorting to the brush’,24 apparently no-one remembered thisthirty years later. In 1855, Edmond About saw the palette-knife as apractice of French invention.25 Like Constable, Courbet did not restricthis use of the instrument so that it remained undetected, but ratheremployed it to paint the final layer of the picture and to obtain innovativepictorial effects. These include the shavings of pigment which give the cliffof Ornans its dry and chalky aspect, imitating in an almost indexicalmanner the mineral structure so characteristic of the Jura relief, or, in TheWave, the solid tactility of pigment evoking the sea’s mousse-like foamwhich mingles with the dense, fleshy form of the overhanging cloud.There is no point of union between the ‘snow’ of Constable and the‘masonry’ of Courbet other than the instrument responsible for creatingthese two different effects. Courbet’s invention of a new practice inpainting was coupled with that of the means by which the image wasproduced. The artist expanded his territory to include his accessories, andthe knife became so renowned as his instrument that in 1869, the young

temps qu’il n’en faut pour le dire. Nous, nousavons mene une action symbolique a visagedecouvert. On assume la totalite des actes quenous avons commis: sans aucune violence,personne n’etait sur le chantier, nous l’avonsfait a visage decouvert, avec des outils comme caa ete demontre et de maniere tout a fait calme etpacifique’.

18. According to Champfleury (‘Mouvementdes arts’, L’Ordre, 21 September 1850), theexpression appeared on the poster for theexhibition of Burial at Ornans and TheStonebreakers in Dijon in July 1850. The successof the name once again attests to Courbet’s skillin inventing words.

19. These include notably Elisa de Mirbel in1851 and even Jules Castagnary in 1857.Regarding this expression, see James HenryRubin, ‘Introduction: Courbet as aWorker-Painter’, in Realism and Social Vision inCourbet and Proudhon (Princeton UniversityPress: Princeton, NJ, 1980).

20. When employing this expression, MichelFoucault refers to the techniques which‘permettent [aux hommes] d’effectuer, seuls ouavec l’aide d’autres, un certain nombred’operations sur leur corps et leur ame, leurspensees, leurs conduits, leur mode d’etre; de setransformer afin d’atteindre un certain etat debonheur, de purete, de sagesse, de perfection oud’immortalite’. See ‘Les techniques de soi’(1982) in Dits et ecrits, vol. 4 (Gallimard: Paris,1994), p. 785.

21. Theophile Gautier, ‘Salon de 1852’, LaPresse, 11 May 1852.

22. For an excellent description of the effectsproduced by the knife, see ChristopherB. Campbell, ‘Pissarro and the Palette Knife:two Pictures of 1867’, Apollo, vol. 136, no.369, November 1992, pp. 311–14.

23. A photograph of one of the flat knives madeby E. Rhodes which John Constable employed canbe found in James Ayres, The Artist’s Craft. AHistory of Tools, Techniques and Materials (Phaidon:London, 1985), p. 122. For a study of its usage,see Sarah Cove, ‘Constable’s Oil Paintings,Materials and Techniques’, in Leslie Parris and IanFleming-Williams (eds), Constable (Tate GalleryUnknown Author: London, 1991), p. 513.

24. “Unknown Author, ‘Beaux-Arts. Expositionde mil huit cent vingt-quatre’,” Le Drapeau blanc,17 January 1825, p. 4: ‘relev[ant] avec le couteaupliant le residu des teintes eparses sur la palette,et au lieu de les deposer dans le pincelier, [lesetendant] avec hardiesse sans avoir recours a labrosse’. Regarding the impact of the workssubmitted by Constable to the 1824 Salon, seeConstable to Delacroix. British Art and the FrenchRomantics (Tate Britain: London, 2003).



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realists from Munich called it ‘das Courbetmesser’, the ‘Courbet-knife’.26 Itwas not enough for the accessory to be valued as an attribute (it was enoughto refer to its owner of whom it became the synecdoche), but rather it tookon an even more emblematic importance. It concentrated an ensemble ofdecisive, though heterogeneous, traits, allowing for the union of domainsas disparate as pictorial technique, social imagination and bodily functions.The blade which the caricaturist Stock placed at the centre of his parodyon Courbet’s landscape painting exhibited at the 1870 Salon27 (Fig. 1) wasnot only the painter’s instrument, detached from the freshly executedpicture, but also the table or serving knife, as highlighted by the culinaryflavour of the caption: ‘Allow me to offer you a slice of lightweightpainting’.28 Remembering his meeting with the artist in his studio atEtretat, Guy de Maupassant later described Courbet as ‘a fat man, greasyand dirty, [who] with a kitchen knife stuck patches of white colour onto alarge bare canvas’.29 In the caricaturist’s vignette, as in the writer’saccount, the knife allowed the association of both pictorial and culinarydomains so as to underscore the materiality of the work of art, comprisingits weight, thickness and consistency.The palette knife was only one of the concrete signs which contributed to

the formation of the figure whom his contemporaries named ‘M. Courbet’.The most important of these signs was the artist’s body and its manifestations,both in his general behaviour and physical comportment, which include hisways of eating, laughing and singing. From the late 1850s, thecontemporaneous bloatedness of Courbet and the thick impasto of hispainting largely contributed to the widespread currency of the image ofthe fat painter. The lean young man depicted in the early self-portraitsprogressively transformed himself into a beer-bellied forty-year-old, whosephotographic portraits of the 1860s clearly reveal his rotundity. Increasingprogressively in size from the middle of the century, his corpulencereached its climax the day before his death, when the disease from whichhe suffered, cirrhotic ascites – then called dropsy – manifested asoedema, his entire body and in particular his abdomen having swelledexcessively.30 The sociologist Claude Fischler has convincingly shown thatan individual’s size is itself far from being an unequivocal sign, and itsinterpretation, like that of any physical feature, requires that it be seen aspart of a more complete picture.31 For us to find this view convincing, weneed only consider the way Proudhon, in his famous passage on The

25. Edmond About, Voyage a travers l’Expositiondes Beaux-Arts (Peinture et Sculpture) (Hachette andCie: Paris, 1855), p. 75: ‘Les peintres francaisont invente un procede qui s’appellel’empatement . . . Il suffit de prendre unmorceau de couleur au bout d’un couteau apalette et de l’appliquer sur le tableau’.

26. Rudolph Hirth du Frenes, in ‘MeineStudienjahre mit Wilhelm Leibl.Erinnerungen’, Zeitschrift fur Bildenden Kunst(Leipzig, 1915), quoted in Wilhelm Leibl (NeuePinakothek: Munich, 1994), p. 21.

27. ‘Le Salon (suite) par Stock’, Stock-Albumno. 4 [1870]. Bibliotheque nationale de France,Cabinet des estampes et de la photographie.

28. ‘Permettez-moi de vous offrir une tranchede cette peinture legere’. Can one also view theknife as a foam-cutter, the spatula-likeinstrument employed to remove excess frothfrom a glass of freshly drawn beer? I have foundno trace of its use in the this period andM. Philippe Voluer, former curator of theMusee europeen de la biere in Stenay, suggests amuch later usage in France (during the secondhalf of the twentieth century). I would like tothank him for his assistance, as well as MmeMichele Bonnard, assistant librarian in charge ofrecueils at the Bibliotheque nationale de France.

29. Guy de Maupassant, ‘La vie d’unpaysagiste’, Gil Blas, 28 September 1886 (in AuSalon. Chroniques sur la peinture [Paris: Balland,1993], p. 137): ‘Dans une vaste piece nue, ungros homme graisseux et sale collait avec uncouteau de cuisine des plaques de couleurblanche sur une grande toile nue’.

30. Cirrhotic ascites is a complication ofcirrhosis, manifested by the accumulation ofserofibrous fluid in the peritoneal cavity.

31. This is why Claude Fischler considers boththe historical and anthropological dimensions ofmasculine obesity. See in particular ‘Lasymbolique du gros’, Communications, no. 46,1987, pp. 255–78 and ‘Obese benin, obesemalin’, in Fabrice Piault (ed.), Le Mangeur.Menus, maux et mots (Editions Autrement: Paris,1993), pp. 84–94.

Fig. 1. Stock, Stock-Album no. 4, 1870 # Bibliotheque nationale de France (Photo: Bibliotheque

nationale de France.)



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Bathers, construes a moral relation between Courbet’s corpulence and that ofthe painting’s principal figure:

Yes, there she is, that fleshy, affluent middle-class woman, deformed by fat and luxury; her

flabby mass suppressing the ideal female form, destined to die from cowardice if not from fat

fondue; there she is, as her silliness, egotism and cuisine have made her. What ampleness!

What opulence! One might say a heifer awaiting sacrifice. . .Does not this thick piece of fat, in

its flaccid materiality, seem to render the mind of the artist a thousand times better than the

most skilful allegory could do?32

Regarding Courbet, his very real size only obtained its metaphoricalsignificance when associated with other traits peculiar to the painterhimself, first and foremost his richly textured painting technique. Thecoincidence of two lexical domains – one describing the forms of thebody ( fat and flesh) and one the craft practice it performs (applying thepigment in heavy, still-visible layers) – structured the public physiognomyof Courbet, which was fixed in the last decade of the Second Empire asthat of a bloated artist, vigorously painting with a thick impasto. Overtime, Courbet became a well-recognised motif in Paris and in the nationalpress. His principal attribute was, indeed, his size, so that the satiricalportraits, in contrast to traditional practices of the genre, often display abody that is larger than the head (Fig. 2),33 frequently accompanied by apalette, a pipe and a beer glass (Fig. 3). We should not be too hasty toread this image as pejorative, for not only did its interpretation remainopen, but also the most effective of its disseminators was a friend of thepainter, the caricaturist Andre Gill. Even though the term ‘empatement’,which signified bloatedness, was normally considered negative whenapplied to the body, this was not the case in the language of art, where itreferred to impasto, and its employment was consequently very widespreadin technical books of the trade. Moreover, Romantic criticism hadpopularised its usage by promoting the materiality of painting as a vehiclefor the expression of subjectivity. From this point of view, theidentification of Courbet with his ‘empatement’ is not only one of themultiple traces of Romanticism which remain embedded within the Realistsphere, but it also reveals how its heirs had assimilated and adopted thetransgressions of the movement. Most often it was his detractors whosubjected Courbet’s stoutness to a moral judgement: while acknowledgingthe necessity of eating for survival, they reproached the artist for hisabsence of discernment and distinction, for leading a gluttonous lifestyleand not showing proof of taste. In these terms, a gourmet was like aclassical painter: far from eating copiously, he had to limit himself anddiscriminate between foods as a painter does motifs. Whence the markedinsistence of his contemporaries on the quantity consumed by Courbet,and on his predilection for beer, hardly a spiritual drink (in contrast towine, an essential component of the Eucharist, where white is preferred inorder to avoid stains), and a flawed sign in society. If the artist had alsodrunk wine (he probably died from it), it would have been less prominentan issue in the accounts of his dietary escapades.Associated with his body mass and food habits, the portrait of the crude

painter is completed by Courbet’s attachment to his Franche-Comteaccent. He apparently never lost his distinctive way of speaking, whichmany rightly interpret as being indicative of him claiming his identitywith, and love for, his homeland. But from a more corporeal perspective,the accent could also be defined as an ‘empatement’ or texturing of the

32. P.-J. Proudhon, Du principe de l’art et de sadestination sociale (reprinted by Les Presses duReel: Dijon, 2002), p. 135. We discover thatProudhon always associates size with negativefemale types: the bluestocking weighed down bywriting, the mother abbess, the all-consumingcourtesan.

33. As several of my colleagues in literarystudies have indicated, Courbet shares thispeculiarity with Balzac. It is found, for example,in two caricatures by Gavarni, reproduced byJean A. Ducourneau, Album Balzac (Gallimard:Paris, 1962), pp. 206–7.

Fig. 2. Andre Gill, ‘Courbet avant la lettre’,

L’Eclipse, 2 July 1870 # Bibliotheque de

l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris

(Photo: Frederique Desbuissons).



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tongue, at once a form of densification and opacification. When Jules Valleswanted to represent Courbet’s spoken language, he turned to anonomatopoeic writing, rendering it almost unreadable: ‘En quarrant-huit ign’iavai qu’deux homes de prraıts: moa et Peurrouddhon’.34 Courbetspoke, we are told, like a countryman from the Jura: the system of thisearthy speech, which bears the stamp of its geographical and social origins,is a necessary signpost to his identity (an index). The accent wascommonly associated with another aural phenomenon, laughter. Describedby Jules Castagnary as an inarticulate noise which manifests itself asdistorted, gesticulatory expressions, his laugh, even more explicitly thanhis accent, is placed on the borderline between the linguistic andcorporeal spheres:35

First it took off like a rocket. We heard a rustling joined by load bursts and we looked at

[Courbet] who seemed to be seized by convulsions; he stirred, stomped the ground with his

foot and bobbed his head up and down, while his abdomen violently wobbled about. As soon

as there was silence and the laugh had apparently finished, he started up again with renewed

vigour and seemed to gargle into his beard. It was like watching certain fireworks which also

spray their sparks. Finally, after a few alternations between silence and sound, the laughter

died away and we saw that he began to retain his composure. The fit lasted two or three

minutes.36

Just as it appears difficult to gather as much information concerning thedietary regime of Ingres or Manet, the search for similar descriptions oftheir laughter would equally be in vain. If Courbet’s laugh caught theattention of his commentators, it was because its manifestation was totallyphysical: it opened the body and revealed to us its interior; loud,inarticulate, it appeared to escape verbalisation, although it shared thesame source as that of the spoken word. By suddenly illuminating thedepths of the body, laughter dislocated the human form both physicallyand syntactically:37 the gesticulations and grimaces that accompanied itdistorted the painter’s body and reduced him to a merely physical state.Lastly, laughter was a kind of entertainment. Since the creation of theAcademy in the middle of the seventeenth century, all of its efforts weredirected at transforming the body of an individual who performed a lowtrade into one who practised a serious and respectable profession;moreover, it strove to accord to a manual craft the status of a respectableactivity, where the fruits of its labour were not only material, but alsointellectual.38 The intrusion of laughter in art, as in other domains, wasdeemed to be threatening; its marginality turned it into a culturallydestablising phenomenon, whose functions were to be contained. Duringthe nineteenth century, the satirical press constituted one of those specificspaces in which the collaboration of art and laughter saw its excesses beinglimited. Le Charivari, Le Journal amusant and Le Journal pour rire were asmuch publications reserved for the derision by and of the image, where thecaricature could be freely deployed. It is via this privileged medium thatthe body of Courbet became transformed into a sensible, reassuring,acceptable – in essence abstract – image of his art.Thus, we should not seek to outdo Courbet’s contemporaries by seeing his

public appearances as pure self-publicity: during the Second Empire andbeyond, there was no cultural sphere other than that governed by what wewould today call the media, and which, in the mid-nineteenth century,consisted of the press. As Petra Chu has recently shown, Courbet’sspecificity is not just to have taken account of this, nor even to have used

34. Jules Valles, ‘Journal d’Arthur Vingtras’,Gil Blas, 9 May 1882. A second version of thisanecdote figures in L’Insurge, chapter 10, inŒuvres, vol. 2 (Gallimard: Paris, Bibliothequede la Pleiade, 1990), p. 930. I thank CorinneSaminadayar-Perrin for having drawn myattention to this second reference.

35. This is why historians situate laughter in thesame capacity as diet – alongside both physicaland mental expression – for it also falls underthe realm of the body in its technical andhistorical domains. See the explanations givennotably by Jacques Le Goff, ‘Enquete sur lerire’, Annales E.S S., no. 3, May–June 1997,pp. 449–55, and Simone Clapier-Valladon,‘L’homme et le rire’, in Jean Poirier (ed.),Histoire des mœurs, vol. 2, Modes et modeles(Gallimard: Paris, 1991), pp. 247–97.

36. J. Castagnary, La peinture de Gustave Courbet,notes and manuscript of a book on Courbetwhich appears in the Papiers Courbet held at theBibliotheque Nationale de France, Cabinet desEstampes et de la photographie. It is alsopartially cited in Pierre Courthion, Courbetraconte, vol. 1, p. 154.

37. Regarding the disruptive dimension oflaughter, from relaxation to loss of control, seethe article by the psychoanalyst FrancoisRoustang, ‘Comment faire rire unparanoıaque?’, Critique, nos 488–489, January–February 1988, pp. 5–15.

38. In this sense, it is not be surprising to findthat its members refrained from feasting

Fig. 3. A. Dupendant, Gustave Courbet in

Les Hommes de la Commune, c.1871,

watercolour, 48 � 33 cm # Bibliotheque

historique de la ville de Paris, Paris (Photo:

Frederique Desbuissons)



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it to his own advantage, but to have inflected the very forms of his art in lightof it. According to Chu, who fashions a portait of the great man master of hisdestiny, he did this heroically, from the centre of a circle of men of lettersand celebrities, constructing a network of his complete work;39 this was evenmore compromising for T.J. Clark, who inclines to abandon the second partof the artist’s career to its mediatised fate.40

It has been important to show that, in so far as we should speak of the‘figure’ of the artist, it is not only in terms of critical reception andtextual and visual representations,41 but rather as a material reality whoseapprehension and understanding – Dewey’s notion of experience fitsperfectly here42 – constitute the very matter of human existence. Equally,this Courbet, neither caricatural puppet nor deus ex-machina, is not a fixed,closed object; his identity, open and subject to evolution, is the reactive,unstable product of a dynamic process. It is because of this that I havetried to insist on the temporal construction of this figure, and on thedetermining role played by material metaphors in this. Above all, I havechosen to take seriously a phenomenon irresistibly compromising in theeyes of the painter’s contemporaries, something dangerous and in need ofbeing disciplined – the artist’s body and its various manifestations. A darkcontinent for Art History, which only seems to become interested when itappears as the object of a medical discourse or becomes thematised incaricature, the artist’s body nevertheless constitutes a precious source ofinformation because it gives us access to the meanings that people of theSecond Empire gave to the material existence of a producer of theimmaterial. Or, to put this differently, because it embodied creation: ifthe artist personifies the art which he produces, his body becomes themost eloquent allegory of this. Courbet’s body had the particular functionof materialising the organic attachment of his works to his native region.This is why Courbet’s Realism was so often understood as an excrescenceof his person, in turn seen as an extension of the material world. Wemight perhaps see these organic links as a final vestige of Romanticism,had not the artist’s presence on the Parisian artistic stage to which hededicated himself been so modern: between 1850 and 1870, young artistswere faced with new conditions in which to aspire to make a name, andan image, employing all the resources of the rapidly expanding mediaculture.43 In this context, part of Courbet’s success consists in his capacityto have assumed a figure which was the equal of the qualities of his painting.

Translated from the French by Edward Payne

together in the Statuts et reglements of 7 June1652: Ludovic Vitet, L’Academie royale dePeinture et de Sculpture, etude historique (CalmannLevy: Paris, 1880), p. 211.

39. Petra ten-doesschate Chu, The Most ArrogantMan in France: Gustave Courbet and theNineteenth-century Media Culture (PrincetonUniversity Press: Princeton, NJ, 2007).

40. Timothy J. Clark, Image of the People:Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Thamesand Hudson: London, 1973).

41. An approach used by Klaus Herding in hisstudy of caricatures of Courbet in his Courbet, toVenture independence (Yale University Press: NewHaven, CT, 1991), chapter 8, ‘Courbet’sModernity as Reflected in Caricature’.

42. As theorised by John Dewey in, Art asExperience (George Allen & Unwin: London,1934).

43. For a proto-history of media culture and itsdistinction from mass culture, see A. Vaillant,‘Invention litteraire et culture mediatique auXIXe siecle’, in J.-Y. Mollier, Jean-FrancoisSirinelli and Francois Vallotton (eds), Culture demasse et culture mediatique en Europe et dans lesAmeriques, 1860–1940 (Presses Universitaires deFrance: Paris, 2006), pp. 11–22.



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Courbet Materialism

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