“Courbet and the Modern Landscape”

Curated by Charlotte Eyeman and Mary Morton

Major museum exhibitions of Courbet are rare in the US (the last one was at the Brooklyn Museum almost twenty years ago). And when they do occur, they tend to be large and unwieldy, as if to make up for their infrequency. We should therefore applaud the Getty for its less-is-more approach: About forty landscapes centered around the crucial decade of the 1860s—many rarely seen together and a handful never before exhibited in the US—should focus attention on Courbet’s disturbing and at times erotic brand of naturalism, the kind of work that so impressed later generations of modernist painters. One regrets that LACMA’s Cézanne and Pissarro show closes before Courbet comes to town.

Travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, June 18–Sept. 10; Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Oct. 15, 2006–Jan. 7, 2007.