Customer Reviews:
 great book, poor quality June 12, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
The essays of the book are so informative and useful for any scholar. I really enjoy reading this book but due to the poor and fancy typography, it makes me feel hard even reading a short paragraph. There are more than 450 color images in this book but unfortunately most of them; especially Courbet's paintings are out off focus. There are many full-page color images, one could hardly find the details of the artwork because they are blurred and dull. I would like to give 6 stars to the great texts but 2 stars for the poor quality of the printing. This book could be actually one of the best monographs on individual artist, But I think, the Met Museum owed too much to Courbet and all the contributors.
 Touche' Courbet June 5, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book is a companion piece to the recent Courbet exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum. It is lavishly illustrated and most of the exhibited works are within. The text is informative and well written. The book will make a stunning addition to your coffee table.
major new study of the art, life, and ideas of the French painter Courbet April 1, 2008
5 out of 11 found this review helpful
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) embraced the democratic ideas and values taking root in French Society following the overthrow of the French monarchy in the latter 1700s not only in his art, but in all other areas of his life as well. A moody bohemian-like person who naturally drifted to the margins of society, Courbet nonetheless sought political positions. At one time, he was the mayor of Paris's Sixth Arrondissement.
Courbet is often simplistically labeled a painter of Realism. But he disapproved of this label; and attention to the style, compositions, and innovations of his paintings disputes this as well. While Courbet's art patently and by intention marks a break with the formal, academicized, and rhetorical paintings popular with France's Ancien Regime, his turn to realism was not an attempt to depict nature with verisimilitude. The individuals of his paintings imply the broader, ideological reach of his paintings. As his contemporary the critic Castagnary put it, Courbet aimed to paint a democratic public "with all the seriousness, strength, and character normally reserved for gods, heroes, and kings." While Courbet replaced the later traditional subjects with the former contemporary ones, the dignified, to varying degrees romanticized presentation of such subjects carried over in Courbet's paintings. Courbet for instance never engaged in the caricature of Hogarth in England or even Daumier in his own country of newly-empowered democratic types crudely, vulgarly coming onto the social scene.
Furthermore, Courbet "is less concerned with presenting the truth [of nature as seen or experienced]...than with presenting solidity...[h]e seeks to express the materiality of the world around him." Like Caravaggio or Rembrandt, Courbet often uses shadowing--i. e., shades of darkness--to bring out various literal and evocative dimensions of his subjects; though this does not go nearly so far as Rembrandt in sometimes almost effacing the physicality of the subject. With Courbet, the physical is never lost. Although Courbet is not strictly a naturalist painter, the individuals and features of the natural world in his paintings ordinarily do have a naturalness of pose and ease of presence. Courbet's treatment of persons leaves the poses and coloration of those in the paintings of Manet--another 19th century French painter commonly regarded in the "movement" of realism--seem mannered. Such are the precise artistic qualities (instead of stereotyped) which make Courbet stand out as an exceptionally masterful painter as well as a historically important one.
Courbet's interest in photography is another subject. Period photographs, some of nude women, are juxtaposed to paintings. Courbet's interest in the relatively new field of photography was more like a curiosity that there were certain coincidental affinities. Courbet was naturally interested in photography because it reproduced parts of the immediate, sensible world--as he did in his own paintings.
This major study involving biography, criticism, art history, and a catalog of works is built on the Courbet exhibition at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art through mid-May 2008.
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