Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

The Stone Break­ers, by Gus­tave Courbet. 1849

One of my favorite painters is Gus­tave Courbet. And not just for his art. His bold, coura­geous per­son­al­ity, his refusal to accept the sta­tus quo, his abil­ity to some­times lead his fel­low artists into greater ver­sions of them­selves, make this man from Ornans impor­tant beyond his work. He was, in some ways, an exis­ten­tial­ist before the word was in use, and that clicks for me. That sings my own song.

“I am fifty years old and I have always lived in free­dom; let me end my life free; when I am dead let this be said of me: ‘He belonged to no school, to no church, to no insti­tu­tion, to no acad­emy, least of all to any régime except the régime of liberty.”

The work above (The Stone Break­ers) depicts some­thing that all too many crit­ics thought (at the time) was beneath the artist, lit­er­ally and metaphor­i­cally. Some­thing an artist should not con­cern him­self or her­self with. The blood and guts and sinew and mus­cle of life. So often, when it comes to artis­tic rev­o­lu­tions, a return to blood and guts, sinew and mus­cle is a nec­es­sary com­po­nent. With poetry, it’s often a return to “nat­ural speech”. With music, it’s often a cast­ing off of lay­ers and lay­ers of beau­ti­ful notes called for by aris­to­cratic patrons. And with art, it’s most often a return to real life, to nature in nature, to the everyday.

Of course, rev­o­lu­tions of this type can not work if the con­text is already there, if the every­day is already the norm. There is noth­ing essen­tially good about depic­tions of “the real”. There is noth­ing essen­tially good about depic­tions of the beau­ti­ful, the ide­al­ized, or the sur­real. Con­text is every­thing. Dif­fer­ence is every­thing. Con­trast, exe­cu­tion, com­mit­ment, diver­sity are among the best horse­men avail­able for the fine arts.

If the poetic stan­dard of the day is for folksy, direct, every­day speech, it won’t make for much of a rev­o­lu­tion to give more of that. If the artis­tic stan­dard of the day is a depic­tion of down and out­ers at their hard-​​scrabble best, then more of the same won’t con­sti­tute much in the way of excit­ing change. Musi­cally, if we already are in the midst of a min­i­mal­ist regime, or a “roots” imperium, more of the same won’t exactly set the barn on fire.

Courbet, of course, knew this. What he could not have known, how­ever, was that his won­der­ful stone break­ers would be blown up in WWII. Though, hav­ing lived through sev­eral wars and a rev­o­lu­tion or two in his own nation of ori­gin, he prob­a­bly real­ized the fragility of what he did. He was, in fact, impris­oned in 1871 for his sup­port of the Paris Com­mune and had to go into exile upon release. A stormy life. A strong record of it set in stone.

Copy­right© 2009, by Dou­glas Pin­son. All Rights Reserved.