Search - Romantics & Realists - Courbet on DVD

I hope this work spreads his name to our millennium.

Jeffery Mingo | Homewood, IL USA | 11/21/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"It's easy for me to think about realism as a movement of the 1700s and impressionism as one of the 1900s. However, here is a realist painter who lived entirely in the 19th century. In the same way that Da Vinci and Michelangelo did not get along, this work says Monet thought Courbet was "pass'e."

The work uses blurry images for their reenactments. They use an actor with a unibrow to portray Courbet, yet photos of the painter suggest he had two separate brows. This work may be highly influenced by "Behind the Music." When the narrator speaks of Courbet's death, they show a lit candle falling upon a painter's palette.

Like many other painters, Courbet was a lady's man who never married. The work stated that he liked to fake his class background. Many people think Madonna grew up in a poor area of Detroit, but actually her father was an engineer. The Hughes Brothers were raised in the suburbs, not the ghetto that they represented in "Menace II Society." Surprisingly, Courbet lived when Marxist writers were publishing, so it's odd that those writers are never mentioned.

Like many artists of the 19th century, the work states that Courbet loved Japanese prints. Later, it shows a painting of his mistress. The work never connects the two. The female figure is presented as having epicanthic eyelids and yet none of the scholars note it.

The work emphasizes that Courbet was critiqued for his lack of showing dimensionality. What stood out to me was how so many paintings seemed blurry and cracked. I wonder if the French government can pay to have his work cleaned the way the Sistine Chapel has been cleaned.

There are artists who are political, but only in words. This work says Courbet was imprisoned for his support of political movements. This was an artist who paid for his views in many ways, including exile."