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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"I painted the picture so that it would be refused. I have succeeded. That way it will bring me some money," Gustave Courbet remarked of a large painting of drunken clerics, "The Return from the Conference," which he had sent to the Paris Salon of 1863. At forty-four years old, the most renowned artist of his generation in Europe, he had long been included automatically in the annual Salon, without jury review, so having a work barred took special doing. "The Return" was one of three grand provocations that Courbet conceived in the late eighteen-fifties and early sixties as assaults on as many pillars of French society: the Church, the Army, and the academy. Second thoughts seem to have stopped him from proceeding beyond a verbal description of "The Cemetery of Solferino," a response to the Franco-Austrian war of 1859 which would have shown two exotic French auxiliaries--a turbaned Zouave and a fez-wearing African "Turco"--brandishing Austrian heads on the points of their bayonets. The academy-razzing double nude "Venus and Psyche"--in which a masculine-looking brunette leans with an equivocal expression (hatred? lust?) over a sumptuous, sleeping blonde--was submitted to the Salon of 1864 and, though in a close call, was also rejected, for indecency.
Courbet relished scandal as a shortcut to prominence at a time when, for artists, official honors and patronage were losing cachet to notoriety in the popular press and success in the commercial markets. His calculated affronts flaunted his impunity as a bona-fide hero of French culture. In 1870, he was duly awarded the Legion of Honor and delightedly spurned it, calling the offer an impertinent "usurping of the public's taste" (the many-headed new god) by artistically incompetent, hidebound authorities. Controversy also drew attention to the artist's huge anodyne stock-in-trade, chiefly landscapes, which catered to many tastes--as he instructed an agent, "highly colored, serious paintings for Vienna, pleasant subjects for London." Sideline specialties included virile hunting pictures and such outright pornography as the legs-spread closeup "The Origin of the World" (1866), which he painted for a Turkish collector with particular appetites. (It was owned for a time by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who kept it behind a little wooden door that he would slide open for visitors.) What couldn't Courbet get away with? He found out in 1871, when, having served as an official of the short-lived revolutionary Commune, he was held responsible for the Commune's toppling of the Napoleonic Column, in the Place Vendome. Under the Presidency of Adolphe Thiers, an indulgent acquaintance, he got off rather easily at first, with six months in jail (painting still-lifes) and a modest fine. In 1874, the less clement regime of Marshall Patrice de Mac-Mahon billed him for the full, staggering cost of the column's reerection. He fled to Switzerland, where he churned out sentimental landscapes for the tourist market and effectively drank himself to death, expiring at the age of fifty-eight, in 1877....
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