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Image of the People: Gustav Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-1851, T. J. Clark. Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1973, 208 pages, seven colorplates, 43 black-and-white illustrations, bibliography, hardbound.

It is T. J. Clark’s intention, in Image of the People, to write a genuine social history of art. He rejects a prevailing tendency of art-historical monographs, in which, typically, an introductory chapter lays in the historical background with a broad brush, against which the author proceeds to delineate particular works as demonstrations of an artist’s allegedly self-determined iconographical and stylistic evolution. In this method, the works are vaguely illuminated against the historical backdrop, but the author generally underlines the manner in which an artist surmounts his setting, rather as if the artist is the rider and the social and intellectual context is the horse. Clark reverses this strategy, and investigates, instead, the manner in which a particular historical situation bears upon an artist’s social and artistic thinking. Courbet’s paintings at the Salon of 1850–51 comprise the mark, sighted through a screen of critical reactions to the artist’s works and information about the class antagonisms of the period. Along the way, Clark does not hesitate to make value judgments of Courbet’s works, praising some as important, dismissing others as trivial. In all cases, his assessment of artistic merit is closely related to his estimation of the artist’s willingness to confront the social reality of his time, and to mold his political consciousness, and conscience, into artistic form.

Image of the People is far too dense in historical information and art-historical analysis and evaluation to lend itself to comprehensive treatment in a brief review. However, it seems to me that Clark’s interpretation of Courbet’s Burial at Ornans, which the artist labeled Tableau historique, is the fulcrum of his study, and one wants to see how effectively it balances his hook. The most striking result of Clark’s analysis is his reversal of Meyer Schapiro’s famous 1941 study, “Courbet and Popular Imagery” in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute. Schapiro, possessed of an unmatched familiarity with 19th-century political thought and an uncanny intuition of how this thought sifted into artistic consciousness, was able to show that Courbet’s allegedly inept composition, reductive space, and puppetlike figures were an intentional and integral part of his identification with the people, and his corresponding enthusiasm for popular art. This enthusiasm, in turn, was closely allied to, and stimulated by, the esthetic and political thought of his friends, Champfleury, Proudhon, and Max Buchon. Schapiro suggested, in conclusion, that the placid rural setting and ritualistic flavor of Burial indicated that Courbet, soon after the tumult of the Revolutions of 1848, had settled upon the image of society in its peaceable, “inert” aspect.

Clark accepts all of Schapiro’s findings, except his concluding remark. For Clark, Burial was an iconographic provocation, a veritable silent conspiracy against the forces of calm and order. In fashioning this original interpretation, Clark discovers and analyzes many important new sources, such as: Max Buchon’s exhibition notes for Courbet’s out-of-town shows preceding the Salon of 1850–51;1 the critical commentaries on Courbet’s Salon entries for 1850–51, including the most obscure and bizarre; and the political intelligence reports compiled for the Minister of the Interior by the procureur général (an officer equivalent to our Attorney General).

From Buchon’s comments, Clark extracts an intriguing passage in which Buchon refers to the kneeling grave digger in Burial as the “avenger” of the oppressed Stone Breakers—an analogy which suggests that peasants and privileged classes were in mortal enmity, and that peasants, or a leader or symbol of the peasants, might take violent action to redress grievances. His curiosity piqued by this passage, Clark goes on to scrutinize the criticism of the Salon of 1850–51, and finds that a preponderance of commentary is addressed to the subject matter of Burial, and relatively little to the style, reputedly so offensive. It is at this point that Clark deals his trump card: the confidential domestic intelligence reports of the procureur général. Far from containing assurances about a benign, pious, conservative peasantry, these reports bristle with apprehension. Important sections of the French peasantry, it seems, were sharply antagonistic to their bourgeois neighbors, to whom they were heavily indebted, and many were flocking to cafés or even into the depths of the forest to receive political advice and weapons from leaders of revolutionary “secret societies.” “1852 will be our year!,” the peasant battle cry quoted by Clark, announced a final victorious struggle with the privileged classes—a struggle perhaps to be aided and abetted by the liberal use of the guillotine. Under these circumstances, the bourgeois visitor to the Paris Salon would have entered the exhibition halls in 1851 with nerves on edge. Millet’s Sower and Courbet’s Stone Breakers did not rattle him, since these peasants, crumpled and sweaty as they might be, were shown dutifully carrying out their allotted tasks. But in Burial, peasants stood on equal terms with their class enemies, the village bourgeois, and, to some observers, their hulking, ungainly forms smelled of that hated and dreaded specter of 1848, the democratic socialist Republic.

Clark is brilliant and imaginative in his reconstruction of the political setting, and in his analysis of the critical reactions to Courbet’s works at the Salon of 1850–51. His mastery of the historical sources is admirable, as is his determination to worry the critical response to the ground—to get at the underlying reasons for the bafflement, irritation, or outrage which greeted this new and indigestible art. In short, Clark is a highly original mind, and Image of the People is an important, even essential, contribution to Courbet scholarship.

Still, some reservations are in order. To begin with, I am not convinced that the Salon audience was as relatively undisturbed by Courbet’s style as Clark asserts. A reading of the criticism of the 1830s and 1840s suggests to me that observers could be nearly as unhinged by alleged sketchiness, vagueness, carelessness, sloppiness, etc., as by alleged democratic or proletarian flavor in a painting (Courbet, of course, sinned in both respects). Tempers and temperaments vary, but each critic had his or her conception of the minimum standards of organization, logic, precision, and technical sophistication below which it was impermissible to fall. As an example of irritation prompted by an artist’s dismissal of such a standard, I would cite, as Clark does, the critic Haussard on Burial: “The overall effect is either a grey and dirty monotony or a kind of crude illumination (l’enluminure).” Clark’s translations are almost invariably impeccable, but he has erred in this case: “enluminure” is a specific art-historical term, familiar to medievalists, which means “illumination” in the sense of “medieval manuscript illumination.” Clark asserts that Haussard is one of the “exceptions” to the rule that critics are more bilious about Courbet’s subject matter than about his style. But, in missing the reference to manuscript illumination, Clark fails to discern an indication of the historical conditioning of a critic’s judgment of style. If Haussard had said “crudity of popular art,” one might surmise an aristocratic or bourgeois bias. But medieval manuscript illumination! Good heavens! Its subject matter is regularly pious or courtly, and, while the artist may refer to things popular in a marginal way, the style is superbly cultivated. So it is not an antidemocratic phobia, but a generalized Classicist myopia—the plague of the 19th century—from which critic Haussard is suffering. Legions of other critics were equally afflicted by this malady, even if they did not expose all of their symptoms to their reading public in their comments on Courbet.

Another example will bear out the intensity of critical allergy to stylistic deviation. Courbet’s Young Ladies of the Village was sent to the Salon of 1852, and the artist wrote Champfleury that he had “done something charming” for the occasion. Still, this unpolemical, unprovocative subject, this tame, sentimental image of bourgeois charity and class harmony, was the object of a good deal of intemperate criticism and scathing caricature, based upon such things as the disproportionate sizes of the cows and the rigid posture of the figures. Under these circumstances, it seems curious to me that Clark should maintain that style could not have been an important factor in the critical antipathy to Burial in 1851.

I am not persuaded, secondly, that “in official circles Courbet’s exhibit caused embarrassment and distress,” as Clark asserts in noting that the committee in charge of hanging decided to move all of Courbet’s works upstairs, except for Burial, which was placed high up, near the cornice, in the Salon Carré. Clark fails to remark that this decision took place midway through the Salon, and was part of a general reshuffling of paintings—it was not a decision that the hanging committee directed toward Courbet in particular.2 During this reshuffling, a painting by Alaux of The Reading of the Will of Louis XIV was moved from a front room to a rear room, and Horace Vernet’s Portrait of Prince Napoleon, President of the Republic, was moved out of a rear room into the Salon Carré. If I may hazard a guess, I would say that the hanging committee demoted Royalist nostalgia, tolerated peasants and village bourgeois, and conspicuously promoted “the Elect” who had rescued the Republic from anarchy. In any event, what was going on in the wings was far more complicated than a simple disapproval of Courbet by “official circles.”

A general effect of Clark’s analysis is to magnify Courbet’s achievement in Burial and Stone Breakers, somewhat at the expense of his subsequent work. A crucial ingredient in this magnification is the artist’s alleged radicalism at this time, substantiated by such evidence as a letter to a newspaper describing himself as “not only a Socialist but also a democrat and a Republican: in a word, a supporter of the whole Revolution.” But how radical, how politically determined, was Courbet in 1851? The evidence is somewhat contradictory, and

I must confess to a growing skepticism on this question. Let us note, first of all, that Courbet was in no way advised, warned, or reprimanded by the government of the Second Republic, either before or after the coup d’état of December 2, 1851, for any improprieties, immoralities, or subversions allegedly contained either in his works, or in his statements or actions. Indeed, as Clark remarks, the artist’s name does not show up in the police dossiers until 1868—and this during a period when many radical and even moderate writers, printers, publishers, former representatives, and at least one Classicist artist, David d’Angers, had extensive police records, and were subjected to fine, prison, or exile.3 Perhaps we should remind ourselves of the obvious: Courbet did not elect to render, for example, an event such as The Memorial Service for the Martyrs of the February Revolution, a tableau historique which would have called for swift government intervention.

And, if we wish to judge an artist partly on the basis of his keeping of a democratic or revolutionary faith, what on earth are we to say of Courbet’s sale of Young Ladies of the Village before the Salon of 1852 to Count de Morny? Clark mentions the sale in passing, without attaching any particular significance to it. In her unpublished doctoral dissertation on Courbet, Linda Nochlin notes a source which supposed that de Morny’s “protection” was helpful to the artist after the coup d’état. But no art historian that I have encountered has mentioned the compelling fact that de Morny was not just any aristocratic amateur and collector, but, in fact, the chief architect of Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état, and therefore as obdurate an enemy of a Republic, not to mention a democratic socialist Republic, as one could hope to find in all of Europe. Although the full story of de Morny’s key role in the planning of the coup was not known until after his death,4 any poster-reading citizen would have known that de Morny was named Minister of the Interior at the very moment of the coup, and that one of his first public proclamations ordered the effacement of the motto Liberty, Equality, Fraternity from all public buildings.5 Under these circumstances, Courbet’s sale of Young Ladies of the Village to de Morny would seem to reveal something less than fervid revolutionary sentiment. Correspondingly, de Momy’s interest in Courbet’s work following the Salon of 185051 suggests that “official circles” were not as threatened by Courbet in 1851 as Clark suggests.

Was Burial really as provocative and menacing to critics, bourgeois audience, and government as Clark asserts? In the course of reading Image of the People, the painting will surely transform itself in the mind’s eye, and can never again be the stolid, conservative icon that it once seemed to be. It now takes on a decidedly Republican flavor, and one can easily imagine that it would have aggravated an aspiring bourgeois and revolted a Royalist. However, for the men who would be the ruling elite of the Second Empire, its message seems to me that it could have been tolerated, and even regarded as a challenge—something to be assimilated, won over. In emphasizing the apprehensions of the procureur général in 1851, Clark neglects to mention that one of the most ingenious and successful ploys of Second Empire strategy was the cultivation of peasant support as a bulwark against the machinations of Royalists. The latter could count on some of the upper bourgeoisie and upper clergy, but not at all on the uniformly distrustful peasants. In his double-headed campaign against Revolutionaries and Royalists, Louis Napoleon could have regarded Courbet’s peasants and village bourgeois as eminently seducible. And let us not underestimate the government’s skill at seduction, or the readiness of certain former enemies to be seduced: Proudhon, Courbet’s friend and mentor, and the subject of a portrait submitted to the Salon of 1865, published a spirited defense of the coup d’état in July, 1852, which must have brought de Morny’s gloved hands together in a delighted clap.6 In short, if some art historian were to find that Louis Napoleon, either as “Prince President” or as “Emperor of the French,” had submitted a bid for the purchase of Burial, I would not be inordinately surprised.7

Can a painting induce collective paranoia? Certainly, as Daumier learned while serving time behind bars for telling the truth about political personalities and incidents during the reign of Louis Philippe. But Courbet’s Burial at Ornans, while deeply imprinted with a popular spirit, was neither a subversive painting nor the unimpeachable exemplar of a revolutionary temperament. To my palate, the Apples which Courbet heaped up and sent to the Salon of 1872, signed with the name of his prison residence, “Sainte Pélagie,” have a more revolutionary tang than the villagers of Ornans.

—Carl R. Baldwin

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NOTES

1. Clark’s assessment of Buchon’s commentary appeared first in his two-part article, “A bourgeois Dance of Death: Max Buchon on Courbet,” Parts I and II, Burlington Magazine, April and May, 1969, pp. 208–12, 286–90.

2. On the reshuffling, as seen by Fabien Pillet, the art critic for Le Moniteur Universel, the government’s official newspaper, see Moniteur for March 9, 1851, p. 675. Pillet does not seem to think that Courbet is being demoted in the process: “Since the execution of the painting is more rustic than carefully finished, it gains more than it loses by being placed further away.”

3. The artist sent into exile was David d’Angers, a Classicist sculptor whose art was perfectly agreeable but whose political actions were subversive: he had served as Mayor of the 11th arrondissement under the Provisional Government set up after the February Revolution dor a typical activity as Mayor, see Moniteur, February 28, 1848, p. 5171. On the arrest of the sculptor after the coup, see Victor Hugo, Histoire d’un crime, Paris. 1877, Part IV, Chapter 8.

4. De Morny’s grandson published a fragmentary memoir by de Morny on his central role in the planning of the coup in Revue des Deux Mondes in 1925, which the editors aptly printed in the December 1 issue (the coup occurred during the night of December 1–2, 1851, pp. 512–34. Another source is the article by Lord Kerry, “Le comte de Flahault et le coup d’état de 1851,” Revue de Paris, September 15, 1924, pp. 241–73.

5. Moniteur, January 7, 1852, p. 31.

6. On the night of the coup, de Morny casually signed the order to the Police Chief to arrest key members of the National Assembly “without removing his glove“ (F. Loliée, Frère d’Empereur: Le duc de Morny et la société du Second Empire, Paris, 1909, p. 1071. For Proudhon’s conversion essay. one has the valuable collection of contemporary assessments of the coup edited and commented upon by John B. Halsted, December 2, 1851: contemporary writings on the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon, 1972. The fact of Proudhon’s conversion has passed unnoticed in the art-historical literature. Whatever frankness, boldness, not to mention political astringency, the artist may have intended in his portrait must have been severely tempered by the fact that the audience at the Salon of 1865 recollected Proudhon as the first, and most celebrated, former enemy of Louis Napoleon to hail the coup and its perpetrator. Far from being the image of a dangerous radical, Courbet’s Proudhon may have been almost in the nature of an illustration—that is, one of those “portraits of illustrious personages” on which the Second Empire doted. No art historian has yet grappled with the phenomenon of Proudhon’s conversion in relation to Courbet’s portrait.

7. Clark notes that Louis Napoleon, while “Prince President,” attempted to buy Courbet’s Man with Pipe, exhibited along with Stone Breakers and Burial at Ornans at the Salon of 1850-51 (Image of the People, p. 78), and that the artist refused. But the very attempt, followed within a year by de Morny’s purchase of Young Ladies, represents a striking administrative vote of confidence in Courbet, and what I take to be an attempt at assimilation by the forces of order. Since de Morny was Louis Napoleon’s half-brother, one may even remark a virtual interchangeabilify in these feelers to the artist.

Mark Rothko, Light Cloud, Dark Cloud (detail), 1957, o/c, 66¾" x 62¼". (Fort Worth Art Center Museum.)
Mark Rothko, Light Cloud, Dark Cloud (detail), 1957, o/c, 66¾" x 62¼". (Fort Worth Art Center Museum.)
NOVEMBER 1973
VOL. 12, NO. 3
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