Courbet

Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism

Courbet Details

About the Author Linda Nochlin is the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Read more

Reviews

The short biographical note at the front of my 1976 Penguin edition of Linda Nochlin's REALISM states that the author "is planning a book on Gustave Courbet." That book seems not to have materialized; possibly it was simply sidelined by Prof. Nochlin's many other activities and projects as she by degrees became one of our most distinguished and productive art scholars and the leading founder of the discipline of feminist art history. Perhaps we shall never have that particular Courbet book (Prof. Nochlin is now 80 years old), and if that is so, we must be all the more thankful to have, in its place, the volume here under review, which gathers together the major results of her half-century long occupation with Courbet, beginning in the early '60's with a paper written for one of Horst Janson's classes at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and continuing, even beyond the current volume, in her contribution to the catalogue of the exhibition "Courbet: A Dream of Modern Art," published just last year (see my review on this website).It is a boon to have all this material gathered together. Some of the essays have been readily accessible for some time, but others were previously available only in the journals in which they first appeared, or in the German into which they were translated for original publication. Although the notes refer to these essays as "chapters," they are less organic book chapters in the ordinary sense than they represent chapters in Prof. Nochlin's long intellectual engagement with Courbet's works. The author's introduction takes us on a quick tour of that engagement and candidly discusses how the leftist orientation of her thought applies to her considerations of Courbet. This is as it should be, for if there is one thing that characterizes Nochlins' analytical style, it is her insistence on placing the formal and painterly aspects of the works she discusses into a wider historical, social, and--in the broadest sense--political context and on accounting for the ideological content of the works and the critical responses to them. She is aware at every point that painting is unavoidably a political act and every painting inescapably an ideological statement. For Linda Nochlin, there is no "right or wrong" interpretation of a painting. However, there is certainly a "right or left" one, for, as she states in her fascinating feminist reading of "The Painter's Studio," "interpretation occurs concretely, in specific historical circumstances" (p. 167). It is clear from all of her interpretations that she has remained true to her roots as "a young American leftist growing up in New York in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s" (p. 9).This book is obviously intended more for a community of scholars and Courbet enthusiasts than for the general public, but it could have been made more accessible to a wider readership if, in the reprinting, English translation had been provided for the frequent quotations in French and if more illustrations had been provided when the discussion concerns a comparison between a Courbet and a painting by a different artist--not everyone has a volume of Balthus, Oller, or even Cezanne to hand. And one wishes the widest possible readership for these brilliant, lucid, and fundamentally significant essays, which are models not only for the clarity of their analytic prose but also for their solid scholarly methodology.

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