Courbet, Realism, and Vulgarity

 

In considering the connection between disgust and reality Courbet came to mind. Courbet was the creator of the realist movement in art. Though the movement is called Realism it is initially a misleading term. Courbet did not paint with anymore visual accuracy than a great many of his predecessors or many of his successors. (Consequently there is a great retrospective of Courbet’s at the Met going on right now that I got to see. However they do not have the Burial of Ornans or the big studio self portrait)

 

Indeed after Courbet the Impressionists thought of themselves as seeing reality freshly, realistically, without the artificial fetters of the past. All that to say an objective view of “reality” is always in question. Yet Courbet is father of the term. So what conditions did Courbet’s art fulfill in order to merit the term “reality?”

 

Perhaps some these are obvious: Courbet refused the sentiment or metaphysical representational motifs popular in his day. Instead Courbet painted his own local populace intending to show them without fetters in all their rags, poverty, and quiet dignity.

 

Through out art history reality (and sometimes revolution) is paired with dirt. Caravaggio hundreds of years before Courbet’s Stone Breakers or Burial at Ornans would paint his Madonna with dirty feet and a bloated body outraging the viewers of his day, Death of the Virgin. Similar complaints were laid against Courbet and his representation of nude women. I’m sure that I am missing a lot of history in between but I’m just trying to make a quick case, Joseph Beuys would materials like dirt and rust and fat. Beuy’s work would smell breaking down common sensory limitations of an artwork and making it confront the audience (an experience of disgust?) More recently Anselm Keifer’s paintings have dirt in them, as well as being representations of  earth.

 

The representation of dirt and the confluence of disgust and reality reveals an interesting tie in the notion of reality as something base, mute, and well, dirty. Might dirt also be a veiled reference to feces too. Think Chris Offeli’s Madonna? Might Offeli be aware of the connection between Caravaggio’s dirty virgin and his own black elphant dung Madonna, the Holy Virgin Mary? 

 

 

Courbet has a famous quip, “Show me an Angel and I’ll paint one.” In his desire for fidelity to reality Courbet refused to paint an angel. (I can’t think of a religious scene Courbet did paint). Courbet is the father of Realism because of his turn to the common, the vulgar, the ugly.