Gustave Courbet and the origins of modern painting 1862--1870

This is a close study of the enigmatic series of landscapes that Courbet produced in the 1860s. Unconvinced by readings of this work as a simple retreat from modernity---or, on the contrary, as a full blown embrace of kitsch---I interpret it as an aggressive, dialectical response to the Baudelairian "painting of modern life" then emerging most notably in the art of Edouard Manet.;Courbet's landscapes propose an alternative to both the flaneur's fleeting impressions of crowd and street and the celebration of rural life made popular by over a decade of realist art and literature. Instead, Courbet seeks to awaken consciousness by transforming the romantic landscape of voyage into a direct, visceral confrontation with the material world, thus challenging the tendency within the Western aesthetic tradition to privilege form over matter. In my view, Courbet is the century's first truly materialist painter, thus aligning him with contemporaneous developments in geology, history, and comparative linguistics, while providing a foil to his own simultaneous investigations of the female nude. In his search for a pictorial tactility independent of the image of the human body, he set an extraordinary precedent for generations of artists well into the next century, from Paul Cezanne and Camille Pissarro to Richard Serra and Brice Marden.