Courbet as Avant-Garde

The New School

Visual and Cultural Studies

Argument for Courbet as Avant-Garde [MM, 68-80]

Art in the mid-nineteenth century had gained a certain "political weight" and significance for the viewing public and in the world of established art institutions. It was in this context that Courbet set out to establish an artistic practice as a painter and, at the same time, formulate a political position. These two processes were intertwined and informed one another through his work.

Courbet came from a peasant family of reasonable means. He drew on this experience in his work and represented peasant life "as it was", without the sort of moralistic messages one found in the work of many of the juste milieu painters of the period.

The typical city-dweller continued to view the countryside as the pastoral scene of nature and the eternal truths of life; a place of order sustained by Catholic piety. This sentimental view was inconsistent with the realities of modern life characterized by recurring economic and agricultural crises, class conflict, the decline of Church authority, and shifting social conventions and practices.

Courbet was interested in representing these realities. He understood that "an opposition to bourgeois politics could entail, in certain circumstances, an opposition to bourgeois art -- the art of the juste milieu". It is for this reason that Courbet is characterized as a "realist".

In many of his paintings, Courbet also challenged the traditional artistic conventions of representation and subject matter. So, for example, in After Dinner at Ornans, he took a genre scene, considered of little importance to members the Academy, and treated it as equal in value to the grand historical works exhibited in the Salon.

In a painting entitled Burial at Ornans, Courbet represented death and the Church in an uncharacteristic and disconcerting way, by courting numerous ambiguities. For example, he gives historical status to death not as a universal but as a particular event located in the countryside. This was contrary to bourgeois Parisian expectations. For most Parisians, Ornans was an obscure, relatively unknown location. Given the prevailing traditions in art, the viewer would have expected a serene representation of death in the countryside. But this is not what they saw. Instead the picture embodies a kind of banality in a group linked by social relations, not religion. Viewers of the painting saw members of Courbet's family, political radicals, and the rural bourgeoisie. This disrupted the myth of the peaceful and pastoral countryside.

Many were unable to see it for what it was due to the lack of conventions for representing modern life. This put productive obstacles in the way of the privileged approach to artistic appreciation and understanding. It undermined the myth of the countryside and enabled the peasants relocated in the city to understand Courbet's work better than the urban bourgeoisie.

In this way, Courbet was politically active by "subverting the role and status of art from within". By acting in the forefront of a new artistic style with social and political force, Courbet can be seen as an avant-garde artist.