A Burial at Ornans by Gustave Courbet

A Burial at Ornans by Gustave Courbet

The French Salon was a gathering of the aristocracy where artists would present their work and the elite critics would pronounce judgement.   There had been a tradition of painting to please the aristocrats, flatter them, contribute to the evidence of their superiority,  until a radical shift in the thinking of the artists began in the late 18th century.

The successful rebellion against the British Empire by citizens of the United States planted the seed of discontent in the French psyche.   The social order in which people are ordained unequal no longer satisfied the French commoner.  Now equality, no difference between the person born in a palace and someone born in the farmhouse, became the desirable system.

Courbet became a thorn in the side of the establishment.  He began portraying common people in a way that had been reserved for heroes of biblical and mythological proportions.  This is the idea fundamental to Un Enterrement á Ornans, the common people are painted life-size (the painting measures 10ft X 22ft).  The aristocrats were unused to being forced to look upon the common citizen and they were offended, to say the least.

While Courbet accorded his common subjects some of the honors typical of the popular paintings of the day, he denied them others.  His refrained from idealizing and painted the world exactly as he saw it.  The human subjects were given no more attention than a stone and their faces did not reflect the socially acceptable formula of expressions.

Courbet's work is representative of the new philosophies and ideals that began to evolve in the 18th century and became characteristic of 19th century France.  We can trace these ideas through the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau, and others.  The other arts also showed a revolt against the formula.  The Opéra was a social institution as, if not more, influential than the Salon and often became embattled with various institutions for staging or not staging controversial operas.  Staging the French Revolution: Cultural Politics and the Paris Opera, 1789-1794 by Mark Darlow gives details of the conflicts that became typical during this period of political tension.  As with painting there was a shift away from the idyllic, romantic towards an expression of "real" emotions and events.  Though written and performed later, Carmen by Georges Bizet is the epitome of the scandalous and wild staging of reality.  The heroine is no longer a picture of virtue, but a woman perhaps more typical of of the streets.

What I love about this period is the amount of hope that the destruction of romanticism brought.  Now it was fathomable that a common person could be as heroic as a god or at least be equal under the law.  The mourners Courbet depicted at the burial are actually a picture of hope and life, not death.