Realism and the Origin of
the Avant-Garde in Paris
Gustave Courbet
and
Edouard Manet
Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877) Self-Portrait, c. 1845
Gustave Courbet, The Cellist, Self-Portrait, 1847, Oil on canvas
46 1/8 x 35 1/2 in (117 x 90 cm) Nationalmuseum, Stockholm
Courbet, Portrait of the Artist (Wounded Man) 1844-54 Oil on canvas
31 7/8 x 38 1/4 in (81 x 7 cm) Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Courbet, Man With a Pipe, 1946
Gustave Courbet, Self-Portrait with Dog, 1842
Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849 (destroyed in WW II)
Gustave Courbet, Portrait of Proudhon, 1853
Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans 1849-1850, oil on canvas, 10' 3’ x 21' 9"
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Thomas Couture, Romans of the Decadence, 1847
Gustave Courbet, Burial at Ornans, 1849 compare with
Thomas Couture, Romans of the Decadence, 1847
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Grace
at Table, 1740 (19"/15") Louvre, Paris
Genre painting like this was a
traditional genre in European
academies of art, which enforced a
strict hierarchy of genres that
determined a painting’s value: first
history, then portrait, genre,
landscape, and still life.
William Bouguereau, (left) Mother and Children, The Rest, 1879
(right) Home From the Harvest, 1878, Cummer Museum of Art, Jacksonville, Florida
William Bouguereau, The Broken Pitcher, 1891, the De Young MA, San
Francisco
Honoré Daumier, Third Class Carriage, o/c, 1862, c. 25“ x 35"
Honoré Daumier, The Uprising, 1849
Gustave Courbet, The Studio: An Allegory of Seven Years of the Artist's Life,
1855, oil on canvas, over 20 feet wide, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
“I have studied, outside of any system and without prejudice, the
art of the ancients and of the Moderns. I no more wanted to
imitate the one than to copy the other; nor, furthermore, was it my
intuition to attain the trivial goal of art for art's sake. No! I simply
wanted to draw forth from a complete acquaintance with tradition
the reasoned and independent consciousness of my own
individuality"
"To know in order to be able to create, that was my idea. To be in
a position to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of
my epoch, according to my own estimation: to be not only a
painter, but a man as well: in short, to create living art - this is my
goal.“
Gustave Courbet, statement for his Pavilion of Realism,
build next to the Paris International Exhibition of 1855
(left) Destruction of Paris following the Franco-Prussian war, siege of
Paris, and (right) the Commune 1871, Communards shot by firing
squad of French soldiers in the streets of Paris
Courbet, the Communard, and the destruction of the Vendome column, symbol of
Napoleonic (French) imperialism
"Inasmuch as the Vendôme column is a monument devoid of all artistic value,
tending to perpetuate by its expression the ideas of war and conquest of the past
imperial dynasty, which are reproved by a republican nation's sentiment, citizen
Courbet expresses the wish that the National Defense government will authorise
him to disassemble this column.“ – Courbet
Gustave Courbet, Self-Portrait at Sainte-Pelagie, 1872
Last self-portrait as prisoner for Communard activities
Henri Fantin-Latour. Portrait of Edouard Manet. 1867, oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Parisian dandy, flaneur, and “Painter of Modern Life”
Edouard Manet, At the Café, lithograph, 1869
Edouard Manet, Concert at the Tuileries, 1862 o/c, c. 46 x 30,” National
Gallery, London. Two portraits of Charles Baudelaire by Manet on left, 1865
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half
of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
- Charles Baudelaire
Edouard Manet, Dejeuner Sur L’Herb (Luncheon on the Grass), 1862
Titian, Concert Champêtre (Italian Renaissance) 1510
compare with Edouard Manet (French Realism), Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe, 1862
Marcantonio Raimondi, Judgment of Paris, (engraving after Raphael), 1520
compare with Edouard Manet, Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe, 1862
Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, 51 x 74¾ in
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Titian or Giorgione, Venus of Urbino, 1510 (Louvre) compared to Olympia
1863
Alexandre Cabanel (French Academic Painter, 1823-1889)
The Birth of Venus, 51 x 88 inches, 1863
Jean Leon Gerome (Academic classicism), Phrynee Before the Judges, 1861
Daumier cartoon: “Venuses Again, Always Venuses”
William Bouguereau, Birth of Venus, 1879 and Paul Baudry, Venus and
Cupid, c. 1857
Edouard Manet, Universal Exposition of 1867, 1867, o/c
Painter of Modern Life
Emperor Napoleon III by Hipolyte Flandrin (Salon of 1863) with Plan of Paris
– radical urban renewal designed by Baron Haussmann, 1853-1869
1867 Paris International Exhibition
Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann urban renewal, Paris:1853-1869
Blvd. Haussman with
Galeries Lafayette, one of
the first department stores:
commodity culture
Edouard Manet, Civil War in Paris (the Commune) 1871, lithograph
Edouard Manet, The Bar at the Folies Bergere, 38 x 51 in, 1881, Courtauld, London