David and Art - A Desperate Man

I was at a café a couple of weeks ago, and while there were only a few tables occupied for the one main guy working, it was obviously hectic enough. It's not all that busy, he said as he dropped drink off at my table, but it's chaotic. I'm still not exactly sure what he meant by that.

My daughter shared my amusement at his invocation of chaos, and his appearance reminded us of a famous painting by the French realist painter Gustave Courbet. It's from 1845 and is a dramatic self-portrait known as The Desperate Man. If Corbet in the painting had glasses on, he would look a lot like our waiter.

Gustave Corbet was an interesting artist. He's certainly not as well known as painters like Renoir or Monet. He was born in 1819 in Ornan, France, a little village in the east of the country over by the Swiss border. He loved to draw and paint, and the year he turned 20, he moved to Paris and got a job as an assistant in an established studio. But the early 1840s, however, he went out on his own because he wanted to paint with his own choices of style and subject. And it was his choice of subjects that set him radically apart.

He didn't want to paint historical or religious scenes or portraits of the rich and powerful. He wanted to paint life as he saw it, as gritty and arduous as he knew it really was. A curator at the Metropolitan said that Courbet's paintings challenged convention by rendering scenes from daily life on the large scale previously reserved for history paintings. His painting, A Burial at Ornon, shows an ordinary common funeral in Courbet's hometown. Another like it was called the Stonebreakers.

On a visit home in 1848, he came across two men working alongside the road. He later said, It's not often that one encounters so complete an expression of poverty. And so right then and there, I got the idea for a painting. Sadly, that painting was destroyed during World War II. His choice of content was related to his strong sense of egalitarianism. Indeed, he was so politically active that he organized a federation of artists during the Paris Commune. After the Commune's suppression, he was arrested and spent six months in prison.

I like artists who write manifestos, and Corbet wrote one about realism in 1855. To be in a position to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my time, according to my own estimation he said, to not only be a painter, but a man as well, in short, to create living art. This was my goal. Controversy and all, he did just that, and in so doing, helped pave the way for modernism.

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