Gustave Courbet, "When I'm No Longer Controversial, I Will No Longer Be Important"
Something about Courbet reminds me strongly of my own struggles to pursue creative works. I've not known much about him before my visit to the Met Museum. And I'm writing down these thoughts months after I dashed one weekend to make it to the last day of this Courbet exhibit at the Met, even just by myself (and I never felt so gratified, after I read about him on a catalogue from an art magazine). He certainly has been a trailblazer during his time, but you'd see his works pale in comparison with what we see and take for granted these days!! He was not among those artists based in the main city, which was Paris then (even perhaps up to now). He was proud of his social background which I understand was "middle class" during that period, his local culture which looked like very rural compared to the very urban Paris at that time, and his art of which he has proven he's got the abilities and strength to see thru the completion of his works. He was also well loved and supported by his family and relatives, which I think somewhat accounts to the relative absence of psychosis that other struggling and individualistic artists are made to suffer. He was very daring, as what can be gleamed from his surviving works, and tended to question by way of his styles the usual notions about art. He certainly made people uncomfortable with their standards and beliefs on arts. And I noticed that he certainly had immense fun doing his work; a fun that's irreverent, heady, and wonderfully colorful as what we can see on the photographic samples above. His "pornographic" picture renditions of women nudes become more interesting to me, as I recall the abstract paintings of the former spouse of one of my bosses who paints female genitalia, among others, in their most abstract forms (i.e. Picasso's nudes actually can be scary, as a point of comparison). Those paintings are less representative of those genitals that the artist wishes to present. Courbet's works come in clean, neat, and very lovingly done. It becomes now a matter of taste, as what we all experience, when we come face to face with art works!!!
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