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Gustave Courbet, born Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet, was a famous French artist of the 19th century. He devoted himself to presenting his own artistic style, while turning away from the techniques of traditional art. His unique styles have even become a source of inspiration for cubists and impressionists. It was his paintings in the 1840s that made him very popular. Meanwhile, his masterpieces have attempted to challenge the conventions. Most of his photos also contain fewer political themes such as nude photos, still lifes, hunting scenes and landscapes.
The controversial French painter was one of the first representatives of realism - a nineteenth-century style of French painting characterized by a representation of contemporary life, without idealization, without sentimentality and without nobility. This makes him one of the best genre painters of his time and one of the most influential modern artists in France. Realistic artists such as Courbet have rejected both the vagueness of Romanticism and the heroism of neoclassical painting in favor of objective truth, as ugly as it is unpleasant. For Courbet, art is not only about painting beautiful pictures, but also about depicting the irregularities of nature in all their beauty and rigor. By displaying such a daily naturalism, he rejected the conventions of the French Academy and the Paris Salon, but brought the art of genre painting to a level comparable to that of the 17th century at the time of Dutch realism.
His work includes portraits, female nudes, still lifes, landscapes and animal photographs. Courbet is closely associated with other realists such as Honoré Daumier (1808-79) and Jean-François Millet (1814-75), known for masterpieces such as ‘A Burial at Ornans’ (1849, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) and ‘The Stone Breakers’ (1849, now lost) and ‘The Artist's Studio’ (1855, Musée d'Orsay). Courbet's independent behavior and contemptuous attitude towards academic art had a major impact on Parisian artists, both impressionists and post-impressionists.
Courbet's self-portrait as ‘The Desperate Man’ is a first example of 1845 that marks the culmination of the artist's melancholy and romantic disillusionment. Courbet presents himself frontally in a narrow and claustrophobic horizontal frame. His expression seems to be both fear and psychosis. His arms reach his head and shake his black hair. Tense muscles bounce off his wrists and forearms. The smooth line and friction combined with the dark shade represent there is no way to escape and the confrontation with the viewer reaches an intensity rarely seen in the history of art. It was thought that Courbet's aim was to “share the intensity of a moment in which the artist, having come to the end of his romantic education and suddenly overcome at the spectacle of his imminent downfall, finds the strength to repudiate a destiny that is not his”. Thus, appearing as an important work in the life of the artist and remained in his studio until his death.
Courbet has made a series of romantic self-portraits, including this one. ‘The Desperate Man’ is one of the first works of the artist completed in 1845. Eyes wide open, Courbet fixed and tears his hair. The romantic approach to portraits, which was popular at the time, was to express the emotional and psychological states of the individual. And although Courbet never considered himself a romantic painter, he mastered the task very well. If you look at this self-portrait, you feel not only despair (as the title suggests), but also the personality of Gustave Courbet himself. Bold, intelligent, radical, ambitious and determined. Determined to challenge established genres of painting, to protest against traditional stereotypes and to change the course of art history.
This 22-foot canvas is located in a main room of the Musée d'Orsay and buries the spectator as if he were in a cave. In a pronounced unconventional composition, the figures roar in the dark without focusing on the ceremony. An excellent example of realism, the painting adheres to the facts of a true burial and avoids an increased spiritual connotation. Courbet emphasized the temporary nature of life and did not let the light of the painting express the eternal. While the sunset could have expressed the great transition from the soul of the temporal to the eternal, Courbet covered the evening sky with clouds, so that the transition from day to night was merely a reflection of coffin, from the light to the darkness of the ground goes away. Some critics have considered respecting the rigorous facts of death as a disregard for religion and have described it as a poor composition of exhausted workers, tailor-made in a gigantic work, as if they had some kind of noble sense. Other critics, such as Proudhon, worshiped the inference of the equality and virtue of all people and saw how such a painting could contribute to changing the course of Western art and politics.
Moreover, Courbet’s life-size mourners are not affected by dramatic funeral gestures or other emotions suggesting a noble character. Some people in mourning look more like caricatures, as if the artist had made ugliness a virtue.
Despite its modernity, ‘A Burial at Ornans’ contains a number of traditional composition elements. First, the image sector is deliberately narrow and busy to emphasize the monumentality and solidarity of the occasion. Furthermore, the silhouette of people in mourning follows the skyline and nothing can go beyond the crucifix in the evening sky. This emphasizes not only the fundamental terrestrial nature of life, but also emphasizes that all people are equal before God. Finally, through the use of soft colors (marked by white hoods, handkerchiefs and dresses) and the dark and sober reserve of mourners and priests, the artist emphasizes the importance and dignity of life and the death of an ordinary person.
In conclusion, Gustave Courbet is extraordinary artist in his field. He followed for a different style, unique to him, in the effort to mark his creation in history. He is known for his realistic works, the most impressive and famous of which are ‘The Desperate Man’ of 1845 and 'A Burial at Ornans' of 1849.
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