ART
Courbet. (Marlborough.)
PIGEONHOLE an artist and we can all stop thinking. It is all but a century since Courbet, disclaiming the label of " realist," prefaced his one-man show at the Universal Exhibition in Paris (Haydon, Gerieault and others had shown single pictures independently, but this was probably the first of the real blows that were to deflate the power of the academic exhibiting societies) with the words : " Labels have never given a true notion of things ; were it otherwise paintings would be superfluous." They are used again to preface the exhibi- tion at the Marlborough Gallery, mounted with the assistance and in aid of the Societe des Amis de Gustave Courbet, which exists to acquire the artist's birthplace in Ornans and transform it into a museum. It may be doubted, however, whether they will have more effect today than in 1855, for Courbet's reputation is rising again on a current wave of " socialist realism." Contemporary " realists " in their search for respectable antecedents (much as the surrealists laid claim to Bosch and a host of others) seem likely to elevate him, for the second time, into a political figurehead.
The most enduring quality in Courbet's work is surely its subtle romanticism. Overt in his earlier days, in the top-lit ivory pallor of
his portraits, it may be sensed later, not only in paintings like the splendid reclining nude Le Repos in the present exhibition, but in the landscapes as well. It may be found in his emphasis on the accidental, in a certain dislocation between figures and their setting, above all in the brooding yet expectant stillness that informs his love of twilit romances. The cliffs and gorges of the wild countryside near Ornans, with their shadowed depths and tumbling waterfalls, are of course the eighteenth-century's "Sublime," but seen under fleets of storm-clouds sweeping across a grey sky instead of in the golden haze of an Italianate sunset. Essentially, however, Courbet's poetic vision emerges from the delicacy of his tonality, allied to his subdued yet sensuous colour-scale, rather than the subject-matter of his pictures. What is remarkable, from a technical point of view, about the delicacy of his half-tones is that they are realised, not by diffusion, but with the densest of tints and pigments placed in exact relationship one to another and handled with a lightness of touch which would amount at times to a mere display of virtuosity were it not for the sobriety of the conception as a whole. In a typical Courbet the whole picture-surface is alive and palpitating and unified. Courbet came very, very near, thought Van Gogh, to the marrying of form and colour.
But this is very far from the world of political tracts. Millet's humanitarian sympathies led him also to paint a labouring peasantry, but it failed to make of him a great painter. Artists, like the rest of us, act instinctively and rationalise afterwards. Courbet, robust, honest (he was fifty when he set himself to make the copy of the Alte Pinakothek Rembrandt in this show) and unintellectual soul that he was, caught up in the aspirations of liberty that were sweeping Europe, expressed himself the enemy of the ideal and the official academic. Constable achieved much the same position in landscape without the aid of politics.
There are none of the very large compositions in this exhibition, but with a few exceptions (the coarsely handled Woman with Red Hair is the main example) the paintings are of a high standard. It is touching to note the freedom and vigour of the handling in the very last example dated 1876, when the artist had abandoned himself to exile, illness and the bottle, and had only a few more months to live. In his letter refusing the Legion of Honour he had written : " When I am dead they will have to say of me : He never belonged to any school, to any church, to any institution, to any academy." If now the most diverse judgements continue to be made of him, they perhaps serve only to prove that he is one of those painters of
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