A funeral in Ornans
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| A funeral in Ornans |
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| Gustave Courbet , 1849-1850 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 315 × 668 cm |
| Musée d'Orsay |
A funeral in Ornans, French Un enterrement à Ornans , is an oil painting by the French painter Gustave Courbet . It was his first large format and was originally titled Tableau de figures humaines, historique d'un enterrement à Ornans (German: painting of historical human figures at a burial in Ornans). His exhibition at the Paris Salon in 1850 caused a scandal because the picture severely violated the aesthetic rules of academic art . It is considered a major work of realism .
Image description
A funeral procession is gathered on a long horizontal format. About thirty people are shown in life size. They represent a kind of cross-section of the population through the small town of Ornans , Courbet's birthplace. The scene is backed by the landscape of the Jura Mountains . Four men in wide hats carry the coffin. The sexton with the lecture cross in his hands, accompanied by two acolytes, stands next to it in the white choir shirt . The priest in the black choir cloak says the prayers for the dead. To his right are two church servants in red robes. The gravedigger kneels at her feet in front of the open grave. Two men in knee breeches are standing near the grave. In front of them lies a skull on the ground, very succinctly. On the far right, as in the church, separate from the men, appear the mourning women. A greyhound stands in front of them at the bottom of the picture. There is something casual about the scene, as if the visitors to the village funeral would have to go straight back to their work.
analysis
The painting is arranged in a triptych . Traditionally, large formats like this were reserved for history paintings, which were considered the highest academic genre . The art historian Klaus Herding points out that the title A Burial in Ornans makes it clear that this is not or should not be a history painting. As a community, the people shown are represented and recognizable as real villagers of Ornans. The nameless and historically insignificant corpse was a distant relative of the artist; among the anonymous mourners, Courbet portrayed his mother and sisters without any euphemism: “... his Parisian critics suspected that he wanted to talk to the priest make fun of his slightly mindless expression, as well as the pallbearers with their red noses or the women with their gaunt faces. ”Despite the people, some of whom are known by name, and the similarity to the group portraits of Dutch rifle guilds of the 17th century, such as Rembrandt van Rijn's Night Watch , this painting is not to be read as a group portrait: although the faces are individually characterized by the artist, the dark colors make them appear like any people in any crowd. By not removing any of the sitters from the funeral procession or defining any real pictorial center, Courbet denied the picture the properties of a history painting. The predominant color black illustrates the mood of mourning, but also refers to the dress of honor of the third estate in the French National Assembly since 1789.
In contrast to his painting The Artist's Studio , it is not an allegory either : the skull and grave depicted suggest an allegory of death, but they remain insignificant in relation to the size of the picture. By disappointing the expectations of the academically trained viewer, Courbet took an artistic stand against the academic genre canon. The emphasis on the ordinary and the everyday places everything shown on one level of meaning and thus makes up the realism of this painting.
reception
Courbet's work was seen by his contemporaries as an attack on the state art academy and he himself was seen as an iconoclast . Courbet wrote that he was reviled as a realist after the exhibition of A Funeral in Ornans . Many also saw the portrayal of the mourning community as caricatures . He was also accused of blurring people into a dark mass. According to academic rules of art, the painting lacked dignity, appropriateness and mastery of line, color, composition and depth.
The representation of reality and truth in this painting means above all the unacademic, unidealized form of representation. Courbet's contemporaries polemically compared it with a daguerreotype . The possibility of obtaining a comparatively naturalistic picture of the world by means of photography was again taken as an opportunity to devalue realism as a copying art.
meaning
A funeral in Ornans is seen as a program of realism and marks a historical intersection in the history of painting. Klaus Herding explains that it was only here that the secularization of art that began in the French Revolution was able to prevail.
Courbet did not want to create an exact representation of nature with his painting. In accordance with the maxim of realism, Courbet painted what he saw and condensed it into essentials. Unlike what the photographer was able to do, he was able to reproduce reality from his subjective experience and at the same time transform it. Courbet did not reproduce the scene in his picture as it really was, but only gave it a semblance of reality.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Gustave Courbet: Un enterrement à Ornans. In: www.musee-orsay.fr. Retrieved December 3, 2015 (French).
- ↑ See Klaus Herding: Realism. In: Werner Busch, Peter Schmoock (Ed.): Art. The history of their functions. Weinheim, Berlin 1987, p. 694.
- ↑ Klaus Herding: Realismus I. (PDF) realismworkinggroup.org, p. 4 , accessed on December 3, 2015 .
- ↑ Hugh Honor, John Flemming: World History of Art . Munich 1999, p. 503.
- ↑ See Hugh Honor, John Flemming: Weltgeschichte der Kunst . Munich 1999, p. 502.
- ↑ See Klaus Herding: Realism. In: Werner Busch, Peter Schmoock (Ed.): Art. The history of their functions. Weinheim, Berlin 1987, p. 740.
- ↑ See ibid., P. 741.
