Exhibition of the week

Exhibition of the week

Gustave Courbet

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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Through May 18

Every artist today knows that a little carefully deployed obscenity can help attract publicity, said Ariella Budick in Newsday. But Gustave Courbet “may have been the first painter to realize how handily shock could be parlayed into triumph.” A political revolutionary with a restless nature and an enormous ego, Courbet was “a mercurial talent who could paint with grace, feeling, subtlety, and eloquence—and just as often buried his gifts beneath muddy coats of pigment.” A painting such as The Bathers (1853) scandalized his contemporaries with its honest portrayal of the “ponderous, dimpled backside and sausage-like legs” of a decidedly unideal female form. But the artist could also produce “a perfect embodiment of the French ideal of feminine beauty,” such as the smooth, polished nude in Woman With a Parrot (1866). In other words, Courbet used ugliness as an attention-getting strategy: He “could paint like an angel when he chose.”

His subjects, though, were far from angelic, said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. Unlike his contemporaries, Courbet didn’t try to pass off the nudes in his paintings as goddesses or mythical beauties. Many are just plain old Parisian courtesans. Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (1856–57) shows two such ladies treating a public park like a boudoir. “The overt, possibly lesbian, eroticism that shocked viewers at the 1857 Salon remains palpable.” More shocking still is Courbet’s most famous—and infamous—painting, Origin of the World, which depicts a woman’s open legs and vulva. Interestingly, far from objectifying the subject, “it identifies woman as proud possessor, revealing the ultimate object of the male gaze with a forthrightness that can stop the gaze in its tracks.”

“But it is not only Courbet’s nudes that are so passionate and erotic,” said Lance Esplund in The New York Sun. All his paintings, no matter the genre, pulse with passion for the textures and tones of the physical world. “Sensuousness is present in everything he touched—the landscapes, seascapes, hunting scenes, portraits, and still lifes.” Courbet proclaimed himself to be a pioneer of realism, who honestly depicted the world around him. Yet the overwhelming fervor with which he rendered that world lends a hallucinatory intensity to many of the paintings. His “flowers and fruit evoke naked breast, buttock, and thigh,” just as “his nudes evoke bunches of flowers and fruit.” We may no longer be scandalized by Courbet’s paintings. But they retain the power to make our blood run hot.