fréd

Downloaded from oaj.oxfordjournals.org at University of Delhi on October 15, 2010

Frédérique Desbuissons
Courbet’s Materialism

sons
Downloaded from oaj.oxfordjournals.org at University of Delhi on October 15, 2010

1. An earlier version of this article was
presented at the Premier Congrès international
de la Société des études romantiques et
dix-neuviémistes, held in Lyon from 14 to 16
May 2003. I would like to thank the organisers
of this conference, M.M. Jean-Yves Mollier,
Philippe Régnier and Alain Vaillant.
2. See Camille Lemonnier, Gustave Courbet et son
œuvre (Lemerre: Paris, 1878), p. 62: ‘un
pinceau, c’est de la cervelle./Au contraire, le
couteau est l’instrument bête du manouvrier: il
est inconscient, irresponsable, mécanique. Il
dirige la main, il collabore avec le hasard; même
manié par un virtuose, il garde sa souillure
héréditaire, qui est de matérialiser tout ce qu’il
touche’. For the English translation, see J.M.
Przyblyski, ‘Courbet, the Commune, and the
Meanings 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 my
colleague, Michel Bouvet, for having drawn my
attention to this article.
4. See Édouard Thierry, ‘Salon de 1850’,
L’Assemble´e nationale, no. 365, 31 December
1850: ‘Il n’y a plus d’écoles, il y a mille écoles.
L’esprit de protestation qui s’est élevé contre
l’autorité des anciennes doctrines a multiplié les
interprétations individuelles. Plus d’orthodoxie
dans l’art et une infinité de sectes. Les sectes les
plus actives proclament énergiquement le culte
de la réalité matérielle. . . . Est-ce l’idée
révolutionnaire qui passe de la politique dans le
cercle de l’art? Est-ce la démocratie qui formule
son expression par le dessin et par la couleur?
Est-ce l’invasion des barbares qui se fait à travers
les choses de l’esprit comme à travers les choses
de la cité?’.
# The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcn011 Advance Access Publication 30 May 2008
Courbet’s Materialism
Frédérique Desbuissons
Gustave Courbet radically challenged the ways in which art and literature
were perceived as traditionally transcendent forms. Refusing to view
artistic creation as a form of production of something immaterial, he
considered painting from the perspective of its physical reality.1 His
contemporaries fully understood this, coining the pun ‘le mate´rialisme de
Courbet’ in the early 1850s. When applied to a painter in the
Downloaded from oaj.oxfordjournals.org at University of Delhi on October 15, 2010
mid-nineteenth century, the qualifier ‘matérialiste’ carried unwaveringly
negative connotations. It consistently signalled an unfavourable opinion
and was always meant as an insult when employed by Courbet’s
adversaries; in their writings it was associated with the equally
connotative terms ‘barbare’ and ‘socialiste’. For these journalists, a
mate´rialiste referred to a painter of the lower genres (landscape,
portraiture, still life and genre painting), who represented the most
trivial aspects of reality without idealisation or elevation, avoiding
symbolic or religious themes. Furthermore, mate´rialiste also related to the
coarse manner in which Courbet executed his paintings, one then
deemed unsophisticated, for he used a thick impasto, overtly applying the
pigment in heavy layers where he left visible not only the strokes of the
paintbrush but – even more crudely – the marks of the palette knife.
The negative associations with this latter practice endured throughout
Courbet’s career, and were revived after his involvement in the Paris
Commune. As late as 1878, Camille Lemonnier, the Belgian art critic
and 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 been
drawn in the specific political context following the 1848 Revolution. The
aftermath of the uprising cast a shadow on the Salon of 1850 – 1851,
determining the political atmosphere which fuelled the raging bataille
re´aliste over the exhibition of Courbet’s monumental canvases: Burial at
Ornans, The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair and The Stonebreakers.
While one critic described the painter as a ‘a dreadful materialiste’ (‘un
terrible matérialiste’),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’ [‘les
choses de la cıˆte´’, i.e. res publica].4
Such journalists – and indeed others who need not all be mentioned
by name – shared a generally conservative political outlook and a
fundamentally traditional conception of art. They did not hesitate to
contrast the body of painting (its material elements) with its soul (or
meaning), just as they distinguished the (material) imitation of reality from
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 31.2 2008 251–260
Frédérique Desbuissons

its (ideal) re-creation. Thus, Leclerc, for example, opened his review of the
1850– 1851 Salon in La Re´publique, declaring that:
5. See A. Leclerc, ‘Salon de 1851–1852 [sic]’,
Painting is composed of two essentially inseparable practices: imitation and creation. With
La Re´publique, no. 87, 28 March 1851: ‘La
respect to the former, it succeeds in reproducing exactly – even slavishly – the outward
peinture se compose de deux opérations
appearance of objects, but this is merely an exhibition of more or less skilled craftsmanship,
essentielles et inséparables: l’imitation et la
for which the function of the camera obscura or daguerreotype would suffice. This body lacks création. Par l’imitation, elle arrive à
a soul – comprised of movement, inspiration, thought, animation, life – from which derives reproduire exactement et servilement les objets
the act of creation.5 extérieurs, mais ce n’est là qu’une œuvre plus
ou moins habile de métier et d’industrie, et à
This metaphysical philosophy of art became common ground for critics laquelle pourrait au besoin suffire la besogne de
la chambre obscure ou du daguerréotype. A ce
such as Louis Peisse, who considered Realism to be a ‘théorie corps il manque une âme, c’est-à-dire le
matérialiste’ where ‘art is merely the imitation of nature’,6 or Louis mouvement, l’inspiration, la pensée,
Enault, who in 1852 underscored the ‘matérialisme’ of the landscape l’animation, la vie: c’est là le fait de la création’.
painting Young Women from the Village, emphasising as much its ‘slavish’ 6. Louis Peisse, ‘Salon de 1850’, Le

Downloaded from oaj.oxfordjournals.org at University of Delhi on October 15, 2010

imitation of reality, untainted by ideal corrections, as the opacity of its Constitutionnel, 8 January 1851.
execution.7 By 1851, political metaphors which had been habitual in the 7. Louis Enault, ‘Le Salon de 1852’, La
aftermath of the 1848 Revolution were slowly transformed into pictorial Chronique de Paris, vol. 4, 1 May 1852, p. 234.
ones – or, rather, the latter started to eclipse the former, given that 8. See Louis de Geffroy, ‘Le Salon de 1850–
the two forms of critical idiom had until then always coexisted. This is 51’, Revue des deux mondes, 1 March 1851,
demonstrated by the critic of the Revue des deux mondes, who already in p. 930: ‘Voici venir les coryphées de l’ère
1851 took against the ‘new age of chorus leaders [‘coryphées’] who nouvelle qui nous rejettent brutalement la face
contre cette terre fangeuse, udam humum, d’où
cruelly leave us lying face down in the muddy ground’.8 Not nous enlevait l’aile de la poésie’.
surprisingly, it was Théophile Gautier who paid the greatest attention to
Courbet’s formal materialism, noting that ‘the slight flaw of the painting 9. See Théophile Gautier, ‘Salon de 1850–
51. M. Courbet’, La Presse, 15 February 1851:
[The Stonebreakers] is revealed in its uniform execution – flesh, rags, ‘C’est un peu le défaut du tableau [Les Casseurs de
stones – all portrayed as equally solid’.9 The allusions which have so far pierres] d’être fait partout de la même manière;
pointed to fange or ‘mire’ as a determining factor of the 1848 chairs, haillons, cailloux, tout est également
solide’.
Revolution would in due course make way for the associations of the
triad mate´rialisme– matie`re –terre. In 1855, when the Goncourt brothers 10. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, La Peinture à
declared the realists to be ‘dreadful children of materialism’, they l’exposition de 1855 (Paris, 1855), in E´tudes d’art
(Librairie des bibliophiles: Paris, 1893), p. 10:
henceforth related the term ‘realism’ to the rejection of imagination, ‘Halte-là! crie la bande des enfants terribles du
the imitation of nature, and to the invention of photography.10 matérialisme; – et que diable disputez-vous,
Subsequently, neither Courbet nor the materialist metaphor faded, Raphaël et Jordaëns que vous êtes? Votre casus
though the young provocateur, who had become an essential figure in belli est une question d’empâtement. Paix donc!
Sachez: je suis le monde nouveau! Je ne suis ni une
the Paris art scene, began increasingly to transform himself into a model école, ni une église, ni une idée, ni une foi: je suis
for the younger modernist painters. Jules Castagnary thus recalled that in la Vérité! J’ai défendu l’imagination à mes yeux, à
1861, when Courbet opened his communal atelier on the rue mes crayons, à mes pinceaux: la Nature, c’est
moi! Vous lui prêtiez, vous la pariez: je la
Notre-Dame-des-Champs, ‘matérialisme’ was still the catchword that déshabille. Vous cherchiez: je rencontre. Vous
summarised the anxieties of his contemporaries.11 On the other hand, aviez des dédains, vous, et vous autres des
while criticism of the artist in his early years had long been dominated dégoûts: tout est, tout a le droit d’être. Je ne fais
by the accusation that his pictures and figures were dirty, it practically pas de tableaux: je les ramasse. La création est
responsable de mes toiles. Vous étiez peintre:
disappeared after 1855, making way for the topos of the sensual, gloire à moi! je suis chambre noire’.
hedonist painter.12 The materialist metaphor in particular brought to life
the rapport between artist and beer. In a previous article on the 11. Jules Castagnary, ‘Courbet, son atelier, ses
théories’, in Les Libres propos (Librairie
brasserie Andler, I drew attention to the recurring commentaries internationale: Paris, 1864), p. 177: ‘C’en est
involving not only Courbet’s preference for this drink, but also the fait du beau ! hurlait un fruit sec de l’École de
ensemble of its corporeal manifestations, whether dietary, sexual or Rome, que le malheur des temps avait rendu
excremental.13 The insistence on bodily necessities was one of the most éclectique; c’en est fait de l’idéal ! Le
matérialisme entre dans l’art par la porte toute
prominent features of Gustave Courbet’s reception in the 1860s, grande ouverte de l’enseignement. Le
although it was already discernable in the previous decade, when matérialisme est le cancer du dix-neuvième
Théophile Gautier described one of the figures in the 1852 painting, siècle. Après avoir rongé nos âmes et corrompu
nos mœurs, dépravé notre philosophie et avili
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

254 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 31.2 2008


notre littérature, il devait, pour consommer son
œuvre, s’attaquer à notre art’.
12. This, of course, does not exclude the
evocation of scatological pleasures, demonstrated
by the late and unverifiable anecdote from Pedro
Rioux de Maillou in Souvenirs des autres (Georges
Crès et Cie: Paris, 1917), pp. 218–19, which
describes the painting lesson given by Courbet in
1869 to his disciples from Munich: ‘Vous êtes très
gentils, très aimables, aussi, je veux vous apprendre
à vous servir des couleurs . . . Car vous ne savez pas
ce que c’est que de toucher une palette . . . Vous
maniez ça comme s’il s’agissait d’une jeune fille!
Pour peindre, il ne faut pas craindre de s’attaquer à
la pâte, de faire de la bonne . . . (Courbet avait la
plaisanterie grasse, et le mot de Cambronne lui
venait facilement sur les lèvres.)’.
13. Frédérique Desbuissons, ‘Des moos et des
mots: Courbet à la brasserie Andler’, in Bruno
Girveau (ed.), A` Table au XIXe sie`cle
(Flammarion/Éditions de la Réunion des musées
nationaux: Paris, 2001), pp. 198–208.
14. Théophile Gautier, ‘Salon de 1852’, La
Presse, 11 May 1852: ‘la femme habillée en rose a
l’air d’une cuisinière endimanchée; ses chairs
sont d’un rouge briqueté avec des ombres de
suie, et le rose de sa robe tourne à la lie de vin’.
15. Gustave Courbet, letter published in le
Pre´curseur d’Anvers, 22 August 1861 and Le
Courrier du dimanche, 1 September 1861, also
reproduced in Pierre Courthion, Courbet raconte´
par lui-meˆme et par ses amis, vol. 1 (Pierre Cailler:
Geneva, 1948), p. 160: ‘Le fond du réalisme,
dit-il en substance, c’est la négation de l’idéal, à
laquelle j’ai été amené depuis quinze ans par
mes études, et qu’aucun artiste n’avait jamais,
jusqu’à ce jour, osé affirmer
catégoriquement . . . L’Enterrement à Ornans a
été, en réalité, l’enterrement du romantisme’.
16. Gustave Courbet [and Jules Castagnary],
‘Lettre de M. Courbet’, le Courrier du dimanche,
29 December 1861, reproduced in
J. Castagnary, ‘Courbet, son atelier, ses
théories’, pp. 179– 84 and in Petra
ten-Doesschate Chu (ed.), Correspondance de
Courbet (Flammarion: Paris, 1996), p. 184. For
the English translation, see Petra ten-Doesschate
Chu (ed.), Letters of Gustave Courbet (The
University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL,
1992), p. 204.
17. When interviewed at the magistrate’s court
of Millau (Aveyron, France) on 30 June 2000
(broadcast the same day on the television
channel France 2), the French union activist and
spokesman for the Confédération paysanne, José
Bové, used a similar distinction to justify the
demonstration against McDonald’s in Millau on
12 August 1999: ‘Un bâtiment en préfabriqué
de ce type-là pouvait être démonté en moins de
Courbet’s Materialism
artists about whom we are so fully informed as to their overall physical
state, whether dietary or sexual, including haemorrhoidal problems. It is
as if his contemporaries looked beyond the physical functions of these
corporeal needs, considering them as so many signs of the desublimation
of 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 at
Ornans as the ‘burial of romanticism’,15 it is impossible not to recognise
a distant echo of the association between his painting and the soil. At
the opening of his atelier several months later, Courbet made a
declaration of faith through his writer-friend Jules Castagnary, where he
defined painting as ‘an essentially concrete art form. . .consist[ing] only of
Downloaded from oaj.oxfordjournals.org at University of Delhi on October 15, 2010
the representation of real and existing things’. He further explained it as
‘an entirely physical language that is composed, by way of words, of all
visible objects. An abstract object, not visible, nonexistent, is not
within the domain of painting’.16 Given that nothing was less a cosa
mentale than Realism, Courbet’s art was thus not mentally conceived, but
rather physically constructed. In this sense, the painter did not intend
to destroy the Vendôme Column, but rather ‘to dismantle it’
(déboulonner), an expression which elevates iconoclasm to the level of
craftsmanship, a form of well-executed manual labour, and to that extent
respectable.17
Materialism may, then, be viewed as the central characteristic which
unifies the public figure of Gustave Courbet: the image that he wanted to
project was not one of an ethereal intellect but rather of a physical man
completely absorbed with concrete matters, and engaged in prosaic
activities. These took the form of painting the most trivial reality in a
rustic manner with earthy materials, employing as a tool what was initially
the palette knife, and which later became the painter’s knife, associated
with the world of handicraft and farming. Moreover, Courbet did not
consider himself to be an artist but a ‘maı̂tre peintre’,18 using a term with
very different connotations from the pejorative ‘ouvrier-peintre’, which
was applied to him by several critics.19 We can quickly deduce that he was
not referring as such to a pre-academic position (remembering that in
1648, academicians had abandoned the title of ‘maı̂tre’, already in use by
artistic corporations, in favour of ‘professeur’). This would not have been
in keeping with Courbet’s generally liberal artistic views, for he did not
claim the primacy of the craft practice of the ars – in the sense of
working by hand – without resisting the pleasure of having a passing dig at
academic institutions.
It would be a mistake, however, to limit materialism to these intentionally
verbal declarations, for its most important manifestations were, on the
contrary, extremely concrete. The particular nature of Courbet’s attitude
was that he not only maintained a discourse on art, but also, through his
body and its mise-en-sce`ne, was inextricably identified with its practice and
representation, as was manifest by his spectacularisation in the press and in
public places where his work was on show. He liked to think of himself as
the representation of his art or, to employ his own terminology, his ‘real
allegory’. This personification not only existed on paper, constituted by
texts and images, but also depended upon physical manifestations, in
particular corporeal ones, which for Courbet were essential. We should
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 31.2 2008 255
Frédérique Desbuissons
therefore distinguish the real person from his persona, in other words from
his representation, in order to understand how the artist was able to craft
his image by playing with his appearance, attitudes and habits, as so many
significant features. Without this process corresponding to what Michel
Foucault called the ‘techniques de soi’,20 he found himself actively aided
by the press. It would be wrong to underestimate the spectacular
manifestations which constituted an essential part of Courbet’s career,
whose development was greatly affected by the public image of the
artist. As a result of these dramatic displays, Courbet inhabited the Paris
art scene throughout twenty years, and not merely at the time of
exhibitions. His contemporaries often reproached his behaviour for being
self-promoting – from his repetitive scandals, his regular recourse to
sympathetic critics and caricaturists, to his outspoken public posture.
His manipulation of the signs of his identity did not deceive others
either: Théophile Gautier described him very early on as a ‘gruff fake’,
‘brutal . . . in large part false’ and criticised him for exaggerating his
rustic character by ‘the application of heavy layers of pigment intended
to give a crude appearance to his painting’.21 This was the significance
of his comparison to Alcibiades which recurred throughout the art
criticism of the 1850s: Plutarch’s ‘chameleon’ not only enshrined
revolt, provocation and eccentricity, but also ambiguity, duplicity and
venality.
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 a
simple tool chosen for its qualities – different from those of the paintbrush
and 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 of
Parisians during the Second Empire, it was because it was hardly common
to see a painter employ it for a task other than the blending of pigments
on the palette, or possibly the application of an underlayer of paint which
would eventually disappear. Curiously, there seems to have been no
continuity between Gustave Courbet and John Constable, whose handling
of the palette-knife in his landscape images of the Stour had greatly struck
visitors at the 1824 Salon.23 If several critics were found to have
reproached Champmartin for having copied this method of ‘gathering paint
with the knife, scraping the residue of spattered hues from the palette,
and instead of leaving it in the watercan [pincelier], [spreading it] boldly
without resorting to the brush’,24 apparently no-one remembered this
thirty years later. In 1855, Edmond About saw the palette-knife as a
practice of French invention.25 Like Constable, Courbet did not restrict
his use of the instrument so that it remained undetected, but rather
employed it to paint the final layer of the picture and to obtain innovative
pictorial effects. These include the shavings of pigment which give the cliff
of Ornans its dry and chalky aspect, imitating in an almost indexical
manner the mineral structure so characteristic of the Jura relief, or, in The
Wave, the solid tactility of pigment evoking the sea’s mousse-like foam
which 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 creating
these two different effects. Courbet’s invention of a new practice in
painting was coupled with that of the means by which the image was
produced. The artist expanded his territory to include his accessories, and
the knife became so renowned as his instrument that in 1869, the young
256 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 31.2 2008
temps qu’il n’en faut pour le dire. Nous, nous
avons mené une action symbolique à visage
découvert. On assume la totalité des actes que
nous avons commis: sans aucune violence,
personne n’était sur le chantier, nous l’avons
fait à visage découvert, avec des outils comme ça
a été démontré et de manière tout à fait calme et
pacifique’.
18. According to Champfleury (‘Mouvement
des arts’, L’Ordre, 21 September 1850), the
expression appeared on the poster for the
exhibition of Burial at Ornans and The
Stonebreakers in Dijon in July 1850. The success
of the name once again attests to Courbet’s skill
Downloaded from oaj.oxfordjournals.org at University of Delhi on October 15, 2010
in inventing words.
19. These include notably Elisa de Mirbel in
1851 and even Jules Castagnary in 1857.
Regarding this expression, see James Henry
Rubin, ‘Introduction: Courbet as a
Worker-Painter’, in Realism and Social Vision in
Courbet and Proudhon (Princeton University
Press: Princeton, NJ, 1980).
20. When employing this expression, Michel
Foucault refers to the techniques which
‘permettent [aux hommes] d’effectuer, seuls ou
avec l’aide d’autres, un certain nombre
d’opérations sur leur corps et leur âme, leurs
pensées, leurs conduits, leur mode d’être; de se
transformer afin d’atteindre un certain état de
bonheur, de pureté, de sagesse, de perfection ou
d’immortalité’. See ‘Les techniques de soi’
(1982) in Dits et e´crits, vol. 4 (Gallimard: Paris,
1994), p. 785.
21. Théophile Gautier, ‘Salon de 1852’, La
Presse, 11 May 1852.
22. For an excellent description of the effects
produced by the knife, see Christopher
B. 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 made
by E. Rhodes which John Constable employed can
be found in James Ayres, The Artist’s Craft. A
History 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 Ian
Fleming-Williams (eds), Constable (Tate Gallery
Unknown Author: London, 1991), p. 513.
24. “Unknown Author, ‘Beaux-Arts. Exposition
de mil huit cent vingt-quatre’,” Le Drapeau blanc,
17 January 1825, p. 4: ‘relev[ant] avec le couteau
pliant le résidu des teintes éparses sur la palette,
et au lieu de les déposer dans le pincelier, [les
étendant] avec hardiesse sans avoir recours à la
brosse’. Regarding the impact of the works
submitted by Constable to the 1824 Salon, see
Constable to Delacroix. British Art and the French
Romantics (Tate Britain: London, 2003).

25. Edmond About, Voyage à travers l’Exposition
des Beaux-Arts (Peinture et Sculpture) (Hachette and
Cie: Paris, 1855), p. 75: ‘Les peintres français
ont inventé un procédé qui s’appelle
l’empâtement . . . Il suffit de prendre un
morceau de couleur au bout d’un couteau à
palette et de l’appliquer sur le tableau’.
26. Rudolph Hirth du Frênes, in ‘Meine
Studienjahre mit Wilhelm Leibl.
Erinnerungen’, Zeitschrift für Bildenden Kunst
(Leipzig, 1915), quoted in Wilhelm Leibl (Neue
Pinakothek: Munich, 1994), p. 21.
27. ‘Le Salon (suite) par Stock’, Stock-Album
no. 4 [1870]. Bibliothèque nationale de France,
Cabinet des estampes et de la photographie.
28. ‘Permettez-moi de vous offrir une tranche
de cette peinture légère’. Can one also view the
knife as a foam-cutter, the spatula-like
instrument employed to remove excess froth
from a glass of freshly drawn beer? I have found
no trace of its use in the this period and
M. Philippe Voluer, former curator of the
Musée européen de la bière in Stenay, suggests a
much later usage in France (during the second
half of the twentieth century). I would like to
thank him for his assistance, as well as Mme
Michèle Bonnard, assistant librarian in charge of
recueils at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
29. Guy de Maupassant, ‘La vie d’un
paysagiste’, Gil Blas, 28 September 1886 (in Au
Salon. Chroniques sur la peinture [Paris: Balland,
1993], p. 137): ‘Dans une vaste pièce nue, un
gros homme graisseux et sale collait avec un
couteau de cuisine des plaques de couleur
blanche sur une grande toile nue’.
30. Cirrhotic ascites is a complication of
cirrhosis, manifested by the accumulation of
serofibrous fluid in the peritoneal cavity.
31. This is why Claude Fischler considers both
the historical and anthropological dimensions of
masculine obesity. See in particular ‘La
symbolique du gros’, Communications, no. 46,
1987, pp. 255–78 and ‘Obèse bénin, obese
malin’, in Fabrice Piault (ed.), Le Mangeur.
Menus, maux et mots (Éditions Autrement: Paris,
1993), pp. 84 –94.
Courbet’s Materialism
realists from Munich called it ‘das Courbetmesser’, the ‘Courbet-knife’.26 It
was not enough for the accessory to be valued as an attribute (it was enough
to refer to its owner of whom it became the synecdoche), but rather it took
on an even more emblematic importance. It concentrated an ensemble of
decisive, though heterogeneous, traits, allowing for the union of domains
as disparate as pictorial technique, social imagination and bodily functions.
The blade which the caricaturist Stock placed at the centre of his parody
on Courbet’s landscape painting exhibited at the 1870 Salon27 (Fig. 1) was
not only the painter’s instrument, detached from the freshly executed
picture, but also the table or serving knife, as highlighted by the culinary
flavour of the caption: ‘Allow me to offer you a slice of lightweight
painting’.28 Remembering his meeting with the artist in his studio at
Étretat, Guy de Maupassant later described Courbet as ‘a fat man, greasy
and dirty, [who] with a kitchen knife stuck patches of white colour onto a
large bare canvas’.29 In the caricaturist’s vignette, as in the writer’s
Downloaded from oaj.oxfordjournals.org at University of Delhi on October 15, 2010
account, the knife allowed the association of both pictorial and culinary
domains so as to underscore the materiality of the work of art, comprising
its 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 his
ways of eating, laughing and singing. From the late 1850s, the
contemporaneous bloatedness of Courbet and the thick impasto of his
painting largely contributed to the widespread currency of the image of
the fat painter. The lean young man depicted in the early self-portraits
progressively transformed himself into a beer-bellied forty-year-old, whose
photographic portraits of the 1860s clearly reveal his rotundity. Increasing
progressively in size from the middle of the century, his corpulence
reached its climax the day before his death, when the disease from which
he suffered, cirrhotic ascites – then called dropsy – manifested as
oedema, his entire body and in particular his abdomen having swelled
excessively.30 The sociologist Claude Fischler has convincingly shown that
an individual’s size is itself far from being an unequivocal sign, and its
interpretation, like that of any physical feature, requires that it be seen as
part of a more complete picture.31 For us to find this view convincing, we
need only consider the way Proudhon, in his famous passage on The
Fig. 1. Stock, Stock-Album no. 4, 1870 # Bibliothèque nationale de France (Photo: Bibliothèque
nationale de France.)
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 31.2 2008 257
Frédérique Desbuissons

Bathers, construes a moral relation between Courbet’s corpulence and that of

the 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
32. P.-J. Proudhon, Du principe de l’art et de sa
fondue; there she is, as her silliness, egotism and cuisine have made her. What ampleness! destination sociale (reprinted by Les Presses du
What opulence! One might say a heifer awaiting sacrifice. . .Does not this thick piece of fat, in Réel: Dijon, 2002), p. 135. We discover that
its flaccid materiality, seem to render the mind of the artist a thousand times better than the Proudhon always associates size with negative
most skilful allegory could do?32 female types: the bluestocking weighed down by
writing, the mother abbess, the all-consuming
Regarding Courbet, his very real size only obtained its metaphorical courtesan.
significance when associated with other traits peculiar to the painter 33. As several of my colleagues in literary
himself, first and foremost his richly textured painting technique. The studies have indicated, Courbet shares this
peculiarity with Balzac. It is found, for example,
coincidence of two lexical domains – one describing the forms of the in two caricatures by Gavarni, reproduced by
body ( fat and flesh) and one the craft practice it performs (applying the Jean A. Ducourneau, Album Balzac (Gallimard:

Downloaded from oaj.oxfordjournals.org at University of Delhi on October 15, 2010

pigment in heavy, still-visible layers) – structured the public physiognomy Paris, 1962), pp. 206– 7.
of Courbet, which was fixed in the last decade of the Second Empire as
that of a bloated artist, vigorously painting with a thick impasto. Over
time, Courbet became a well-recognised motif in Paris and in the national
press. His principal attribute was, indeed, his size, so that the satirical
portraits, in contrast to traditional practices of the genre, often display a
body that is larger than the head (Fig. 2),33 frequently accompanied by a
palette, a pipe and a beer glass (Fig. 3). We should not be too hasty to
read this image as pejorative, for not only did its interpretation remain
open, but also the most effective of its disseminators was a friend of the
painter, the caricaturist André Gill. Even though the term ‘empâtement’,
which signified bloatedness, was normally considered negative when
applied to the body, this was not the case in the language of art, where it
referred to impasto, and its employment was consequently very widespread
in technical books of the trade. Moreover, Romantic criticism had
popularised its usage by promoting the materiality of painting as a vehicle
for the expression of subjectivity. From this point of view, the
identification of Courbet with his ‘empâtement’ is not only one of the
multiple traces of Romanticism which remain embedded within the Realist
sphere, but it also reveals how its heirs had assimilated and adopted the
transgressions of the movement. Most often it was his detractors who
subjected Courbet’s stoutness to a moral judgement: while acknowledging
the necessity of eating for survival, they reproached the artist for his
absence of discernment and distinction, for leading a gluttonous lifestyle
and not showing proof of taste. In these terms, a gourmet was like a
classical painter: far from eating copiously, he had to limit himself and
discriminate between foods as a painter does motifs. Whence the marked
insistence of his contemporaries on the quantity consumed by Courbet,
and on his predilection for beer, hardly a spiritual drink (in contrast to
wine, an essential component of the Eucharist, where white is preferred in
order to avoid stains), and a flawed sign in society. If the artist had also
drunk wine (he probably died from it), it would have been less prominent
an 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-Comté
accent. He apparently never lost his distinctive way of speaking, which
Fig. 2. André Gill, ‘Courbet avant la lettre’,
many rightly interpret as being indicative of him claiming his identity L’Éclipse, 2 July 1870 # Bibliothèque de
with, and love for, his homeland. But from a more corporeal perspective, l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris
the accent could also be defined as an ‘empâtement’ or texturing of the (Photo: Frédérique Desbuissons).

258 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 31.2 2008


Fig. 3. A. Dupendant, Gustave Courbet in
Les Hommes de la Commune, c.1871,
watercolour, 48  33 cm # Bibliothèque
historique de la ville de Paris, Paris (Photo:
Frédérique Desbuissons)
34. Jules Vallès, ‘Journal d’Arthur Vingtras’,
Gil Blas, 9 May 1882. A second version of this
anecdote figures in L’Insurge´, chapter 10, in
Œuvres, vol. 2 (Gallimard: Paris, Bibliothèque
de la Pléiade, 1990), p. 930. I thank Corinne
Saminadayar-Perrin for having drawn my
attention to this second reference.
35. This is why historians situate laughter in the
same capacity as diet – alongside both physical
and mental expression – for it also falls under
the realm of the body in its technical and
historical domains. See the explanations given
notably by Jacques Le Goff, ‘Enquête sur le
rire’, 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 mode`les
(Gallimard: Paris, 1991), pp. 247–97.
36. J. Castagnary, La peinture de Gustave Courbet,
notes and manuscript of a book on Courbet
which appears in the Papiers Courbet held at the
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Cabinet des
Estampes et de la photographie. It is also
partially cited in Pierre Courthion, Courbet
raconte´, vol. 1, p. 154.
37. Regarding the disruptive dimension of
laughter, from relaxation to loss of control, see
the article by the psychoanalyst François
Roustang, ‘Comment faire rire un
paranoı̈aque?’, Critique, nos 488–489, January–
February 1988, pp. 5–15.
38. In this sense, it is not be surprising to find
that its members refrained from feasting
Courbet’s Materialism
tongue, at once a form of densification and opacification. When Jules Vallès
wanted to represent Courbet’s spoken language, he turned to an
onomatopoeic writing, rendering it almost unreadable: ‘En quârrant-huit i
gn’iâvai qu’deux homes de prraı̂ts: moâ et Peurrouddhon’.34 Courbet
spoke, we are told, like a countryman from the Jura: the system of this
earthy speech, which bears the stamp of its geographical and social origins,
is a necessary signpost to his identity (an index). The accent was
commonly associated with another aural phenomenon, laughter. Described
by Jules Castagnary as an inarticulate noise which manifests itself as
distorted, gesticulatory expressions, his laugh, even more explicitly than
his accent, is placed on the borderline between the linguistic and
corporeal spheres:35
First it took off like a rocket. We heard a rustling joined by load bursts and we looked at
Downloaded from oaj.oxfordjournals.org at University of Delhi on October 15, 2010
[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 the
dietary regime of Ingres or Manet, the search for similar descriptions of
their laughter would equally be in vain. If Courbet’s laugh caught the
attention of his commentators, it was because its manifestation was totally
physical: it opened the body and revealed to us its interior; loud,
inarticulate, it appeared to escape verbalisation, although it shared the
same source as that of the spoken word. By suddenly illuminating the
depths of the body, laughter dislocated the human form both physically
and syntactically:37 the gesticulations and grimaces that accompanied it
distorted the painter’s body and reduced him to a merely physical state.
Lastly, laughter was a kind of entertainment. Since the creation of the
Academy in the middle of the seventeenth century, all of its efforts were
directed at transforming the body of an individual who performed a low
trade into one who practised a serious and respectable profession;
moreover, it strove to accord to a manual craft the status of a respectable
activity, where the fruits of its labour were not only material, but also
intellectual.38 The intrusion of laughter in art, as in other domains, was
deemed to be threatening; its marginality turned it into a culturally
destablising phenomenon, whose functions were to be contained. During
the nineteenth century, the satirical press constituted one of those specific
spaces in which the collaboration of art and laughter saw its excesses being
limited. Le Charivari, Le Journal amusant and Le Journal pour rire were as
much publications reserved for the derision by and of the image, where the
caricature could be freely deployed. It is via this privileged medium that
the 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 and
beyond, there was no cultural sphere other than that governed by what we
would today call the media, and which, in the mid-nineteenth century,
consisted of the press. As Petra Chu has recently shown, Courbet’s
specificity is not just to have taken account of this, nor even to have used
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 31.2 2008 259
Frédérique Desbuissons

it to his own advantage, but to have inflected the very forms of his art in light
of it. According to Chu, who fashions a portait of the great man master of his
destiny, he did this heroically, from the centre of a circle of men of letters
and celebrities, constructing a network of his complete work;39 this was even
more compromising for T.J. Clark, who inclines to abandon the second part
of 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 and
textual and visual representations,41 but rather as a material reality whose
apprehension and understanding – Dewey’s notion of experience fits
perfectly 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 have
together in the Statuts et règlements of 7 June
1652: Ludovic Vitet, L’Acade´mie royale de
Peinture et de Sculpture, e´tude historique (Calmann
Lévy: Paris, 1880), p. 211.
39. Petra ten-doesschate Chu, The Most Arrogant
Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the
Nineteenth-century Media Culture (Princeton
University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2007).
40. Timothy J. Clark, Image of the People:
Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Thames
and Hudson: London, 1973).
41. An approach used by Klaus Herding in his
study of caricatures of Courbet in his Courbet, to

Downloaded from oaj.oxfordjournals.org at University of Delhi on October 15, 2010

tried to insist on the temporal construction of this figure, and on the Venture independence (Yale University Press: New
determining role played by material metaphors in this. Above all, I have Haven, CT, 1991), chapter 8, ‘Courbet’s
chosen to take seriously a phenomenon irresistibly compromising in the Modernity as Reflected in Caricature’.
eyes of the painter’s contemporaries, something dangerous and in need of 42. As theorised by John Dewey in, Art as
being disciplined – the artist’s body and its various manifestations. A dark Experience (George Allen & Unwin: London,
continent for Art History, which only seems to become interested when it 1934).
appears as the object of a medical discourse or becomes thematised in 43. For a proto-history of media culture and its
caricature, the artist’s body nevertheless constitutes a precious source of distinction from mass culture, see A. Vaillant,
‘Invention littéraire et culture médiatique au
information because it gives us access to the meanings that people of the XIXe siècle’, in J.-Y. Mollier, Jean-François
Second Empire gave to the material existence of a producer of the Sirinelli and François Vallotton (eds), Culture de
immaterial. Or, to put this differently, because it embodied creation: if masse et culture me´diatique en Europe et dans les
the artist personifies the art which he produces, his body becomes the Ame´riques, 1860–1940 (Presses Universitaires de
France: Paris, 2006), pp. 11–22.
most eloquent allegory of this. Courbet’s body had the particular function
of materialising the organic attachment of his works to his native region.
This is why Courbet’s Realism was so often understood as an excrescence
of his person, in turn seen as an extension of the material world. We
might perhaps see these organic links as a final vestige of Romanticism,
had not the artist’s presence on the Parisian artistic stage to which he
dedicated himself been so modern: between 1850 and 1870, young artists
were faced with new conditions in which to aspire to make a name, and
an image, employing all the resources of the rapidly expanding media
culture.43 In this context, part of Courbet’s success consists in his capacity
to have assumed a figure which was the equal of the qualities of his painting.

Translated from the French by Edward Payne

260 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 31.2 2008