Courbet's Materialism

Gustave Courbet's career coincided with the emergence of new conditions in the practice of a painter under the pressure of a media culture that imposed on artists the task of creating an image as well as a name for themselves. Thus Courbet and his contemporaries classified Realism under the common denominator of materialism. The need to render art legible and consumable largely motivated a 'real allegory', invented to express in the paintings the dietary tastes and physical manifestations of an artist whose work resisted both transparency and transitivity. Expressing "Courbet's materialism" in metaphors of the aesthetic, the political and the corporeal, nineteenth-century caricaturists, journalists and men of letters confined Realism to a protean stereotype, one that facilitated its dissemination as much as it limited its interpretation. Elaborated throughout the 1850s and reaching its peak at the end of the Second Empire, the image of the artist as rustic brute, putting crude impasto on paintings utterly lacking in idealism had such tenacity that, despite its obvious simplicity, it remains the commonplace notion that determines much of the understanding of Courbet's art even today.