The artist's studio
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| The artist's studio |
|---|
| Gustave Courbet , 1855 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 361 × 598 cm |
| Musée d'Orsay |
The artist's studio , full French title L'Atelier du peintre. Allégorie Réelle déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique (et morale) , Eng. A real allegory of a seven-year phase in my artistic (and moral) life is a painting by Gustave Courbet from 1855, which is now in the Musée d'Orsay is located in Paris .
history
Courbet painted the picture in just six weeks and said of the picture:
- “ The world comes to my studio to be painted ”.
The picture is in the tradition of Diego Velázquez Las Meninas and in turn influenced two early works by Édouard Manet , The Old Musician and Music in the Tuileries Garden .
description
The figures shown are allegorical representations of various influences on Courbet's artistic work as well as representations of people from his real life. On the left there are people from all walks of life, a clergyman, a merchant, a hunter, the resemblance to Napoleon III. as well as a worker and a beggar who symbolize poverty and, together with the male model, turn against the art of the academy. In the left part of the picture there is also a guitar, a dagger and a hat. In the middle, Courbet himself is working on a landscape painting, he seems to exercise the socially mediated function between the two outer camps. On the right are friends and acquaintances, among them in a bearded profile his patron Alfred Bruyas , behind him in front view the philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon , the art critic Jules Champfleury is sitting on a stool, Charles Baudelaire is absorbed in his reading, and there is also George Sand , as well as François Sabatier and his wife, the Austrian singer Caroline Unger . The couple in the foreground symbolizes the art lovers and the lovers next to the window stand for free love.
The naked figures on both sides of the landscape painting also have great symbolic significance. The figure in the semi-darkness, not accidentally banned from the painter's field of vision, is a jointed doll that served to study postures and proportions and, for Courbet, symbolized the unrealistic tradition of the art academies (symbols of academic painting ). Courbet himself adhered less to tradition than to reality, which in his picture is embodied in the truest sense of the word by the naked woman (in whom contemporaries wanted to recognize the muse of truth). In doing so, Courbet consciously broke with the rigid rules of tradition and established a new, realistic way of seeing things.
reception
The jury of the World Exhibition of 1855 in Paris accepted eleven Courbet works, but rejected this and two others. With the help of Alfred Bruyas, Courbet opened his own exhibition in the “Pavilion of Realism” in the immediate vicinity of the World's Fair, an early example of a Salon des Refusés (exhibition of the rejected). The painting received little praise, and Eugène Delacroix was one of the few painters to appreciate it. As part of this exhibition, he also showed a funeral in Ornans .
Homage
The sculpture “Hommage a Courbet” (1988–1995, Romanian limestone) by the Austrian sculptor Hortensia Fussy is a translation of the nude female figure depicted in the painting into a monumental stone sculpture that has been exhibited in front of the Rathaus in Deutschlandsberg since July 2014 .
