| The recent Gustave Courbet exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum (traveling from the Musée d’Orsay and Petit Palais, France) provides the public with a moment to reflect upon how Courbet’s approaches to crossing artistic boundaries led to innovative developments in art, painting, and the very notion of the artist. Ironically, this is most apparent by what is not included in the exhibition: Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio. A study of the work is exciting not only for revealing how Courbet’s art is constantly changing, moving, shifting focus, but also for how it remains bold and equally sentimental. | 
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Horace Brockington
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) was on view at the Metroplitan Museum of
Art in May and will travel to the Musée Fabre in Montpellier from June
14-Sept 28.
The recent Gustave Courbet exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum (traveling from the Musée d’Orsay and Petit Palais, France) provides the public with a moment to reflect upon how Courbet’s approaches to crossing artistic boundaries led to innovative developments in art, painting, and the very notion of the artist. Ironically, this is most apparent by what is not included in the exhibition: Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio. A study of the work is exciting not only for revealing how Courbet’s art is constantly changing, moving, shifting focus, but also for how it remains bold and equally sentimental. Courbet mounted several personal projects, including the now legendary 1855 one–person exhibition he entitled Realism G. Courbet that contained this seminal work in the history of art now in the collection of the Orsay in Paris. After a public quarrel with the Comte Nieuwerkerke resulting in several of his works being refused in the Salon and Universal Exposition of l855, Courbet responded by mounting his own Pavilion of Realism within sight of the official Salon. Nowhere in French art before Latour’s Batignolles Studio—which owes a great deal to Courbet’s picture—can one discover such a galaxy of contemporary talents grouped together on a single canvas.
Gustave Courbet was born at Ornans in the Franche-Comte near Besancon on June 10, 1819 and died December 31, 1877 at Le Tour de Peilz near Vevey in Switzerland. His father was a farmer. In 1837, He was enrolled as a boarder at the College Royal, Besancon. He left for Paris in 1840 and from this point onward divided his time between Paris and Ornans. He exhibited at the Salon from 1844 onwards but generally his submissions were rejected. Despite his achievement, his reputation was not established until about 1860. As early as the Salon of 1850-51 his works had created a scandal. In 1871, Courbet joined the Commune, and after its suppression, he was implicated in the destruction of the Vendome column, and was imprisoned. Courbet spent his last years in exile in Switzerland.
The art world of the time was that of a Paris under the impact of a massive modernization and revitalization. Until around 1852, the city had retained its medieval infrastructure, which was impacted by a growing urban population. Modernization efforts not only affected the physical environment of Paris, but also the cultural and social atmosphere as well. Many people were employed, the streets were widened and lengthened, storefronts were redesigned, and buildings were torn down and redeveloped.
Courbet envisioned himself a maverick in this modern time whose obligation was to push art in different directions. Courbet moved away from traditional artistic practices and venues in order to reposition art as part of a real world. Courbet responded to a world often in flux, in which instability, and unpredictability was becoming part of the modern world. Despite wide acceptance in the art historical canon of today, Courbet remains a radical artist, one who never shied away from uproar or controversy. Whether moved by political events or his own artistic sentiments, Courbet followed an individual and singular path.
It was this air of modernism that shifted his painting technical and thematic approach to painting. He began recording the appearance of the physical world with a new authenticity. Courbet’s realism became the point of departure that would transform the tradition of painting that began earlier with Giotto de Bondone. While Manet is often credited with pushing the pre-industrial world into the modern world through his controversial subject matter and painterly approach, Courbet essentially started the dialogue. Courbet was an artist fascinated by the world around him, often sitting around his studio contemplating the rapid changes. Guided by a unique confidence, his stoic insight pushed Courbet to ambitious projects. Still Courbet was impacted by his times, and often passionately held on to his own local traditions.
No work is more reflective of the changing nature of art and Courbet’s modern world, with its intersection of patrons, collaborators, observers, commentators, and iconoclasts, than his The Studio of the Painter. The proper title of the work is The Artist’s Studio, a Real Allegory Determining A Phase of Seven Years of my Artists and Moral Life. The allegory that he alludes to is one of self-fulfillment. Courbet’s use of the word “allegory” in his title has given rise to various interpretations. The painting has been viewed as a coded reference to the governance intended for Napoleon III and a political cartoon criticizing the imperial regime. Its meaning remains elusive.
Painted in 1854-5 at Ornans and exhibited in Paris in 1855, it was shown twice more during Courbet’s lifetime at Bordeaux and Vienna, but it was still in his possession when he died. In 1920 it was acquired by the Louvre. Courbet insisted that it is his Parisian, not his Ornans studio that is depicted, i.e. the studio that he had taken on the first floor of 32 Rue Hautefeuille at the corner of Rue de l’École de Medicine, where he stayed until l871 (since demolished).
In his desire to introduce his friends who did not reside nearby into the picture, he had to fall back on prefabricated likenesses. Thus many of the depictions are based on existing portraits that Courbet, through various means, managed to gather in his studio. In terms of the composition’s structure, there is no communication between the various figures, nor do they share a common event. They do not exist as a group. Nothing binds them together, except for Courbet’s own conception. They exist as symbols, in the form of individuals and of types.
From a technical standpoint, laboratory investigations of the work reveal that its warm tonality was produced by a thin paint layer worked over a warm ground of varying tawny and brown-red colors, principally iron earths, mixed with only small quantities of oil binder. The varying colors of the ground probably were the result of an inadequate mixing and the fact that the ground was put on without special care, which might suggest the use of an irregular ground. This may support the notion that the artist himself prepared the ground. The patch-work canvas strips used for the picture and sewn together at the same time, may have been an amateur job. However, these facts may also be indicative of the speed that Courbet was forced to produce the work, perhaps under pressure to complete it for his solo exhibition of 1855.
In the work, Courbet combines average people—exploited, victims of circumstances, and lovers—alongside some of the most remarkable men of the age, who had been closely involved with the painter in one role or another at different times. Comprising 30 figures, the composition which remains unfinished, is divided into three parts, as described by Courbet: on the left is “the world of commonplace life, signified by figures including a priest, a hunter, a worker, and a Republican of 1793,” on the right are “the people who serve me, support me in my ideas, and take part in my actions,” based on portraits that Courbet had painted. In the center Courbet represents himself, painting a landscape flanked by a nude model and a little boy.
This complex monumental painting has been the subject of numerous studies by art historians, most of which concentrate on the particular development and iconography of the composition. Over the course of its development Courbet made various changes to the work, adding more figures, and eliminating others. Linda Nochlin has put forward a Fourierst interpretation of the painting, which is to some extent dependent upon the identification of the bourgeois couple at the far right as the Fourierist Francois Sabatier. The figures on the right, have been identified as Courbet’s friend, the violinist Alphones Promayet next to the collector Alfred Bruyas in profile, and close together P.J. Proudhon, Urbain Cuenot, and Max Buchon. Seated in the foreground is Champfleury, the Realist writer and supporter of Courbet, and behind him, a pair of symbolic lovers. Beyond the bourgeois couple is Baudelaire, the mulatto (Negress) Jeanne Duval (Baudelaire’s mistress), who was actually removed, and is only now visible as a result of the thinning of the paint surface in that area. A small boy is shown at their feet crouched and apparently drawing. The figures standing on the left—the outcasts—include the Jew, whom Courbet had seen in England making his way through traffic carrying a casket on this right arm and covering it with his left, an old Republican, and a huntsman with his gun slung on his back and a peasant laborer. The crouched, central group on the left includes a clown, a professional strong man, a mower, a working–class couple, and an undertaker’s mute, who are all being shown the wares of a rag-picker. Immediately behind the artist’s easel appears traditional studio furniture for large sale figure paintings, which is noticeably shunned by Courbet here working on a landscape, this perhaps reflective of his anti-academic sentiments. At the figure’s feet lies a skull on a newspaper, and below that a women, a symbol of poverty suckling a baby. The most prominent figure to the left is another huntsman who is seated and wearing high leather boots, with two gun dogs close at hand. A still life at his feet completes the group.
In the second part of the canvas, Courbet himself is presented showing an Assyrian profile of his head. Behind his chair stands a nude female model. She is leaning against the back of his chair as she watches him paint for a moment, and her clothes are on the floor. Although not the central theme of the work, the centralized nude figure continues the codified image of the artist’s studio in which the female model is presented as an essential part. In the foreground, there is a white cat near his chair. At back in the window can be seen a pair of lovers whispering to each other, one is seated on a hammock, above the window are draperies of green cloth; against the wall are some plaster casts, a bracket holding the statue of a little girl, a lamp, and a few pots, also the backs of canvases, a screen and a bare wall.
The objects have been interpreted as forms of still life: the skull on the newspaper symbolizing the death of journalism, and the guitar, dagger, buckled shoe, and plumed hat at the huntsman feet symbolizing the death of Romanticism. While much attention has focused on the symbolic and thematic intent of the work, few scholars have considered the work within the context of the changing notion of the artist’s studio.
The studio is a more complex entity as Courbet makes astonishingly clear. It is representative of a society at its best, its worst, and its average. Courbet’s Studio, like the painting itself, was a symbol of defiance. Courbet’s image of the studio is loaded with political and moralizing themes. Similar to Andy Warhol’s enterprise, Courbet envisioned his studio as a factory of Realism, where he could sit arguing and drinking into the late hours with artists and writers. His house was a converted Priory, and the room we see in the picture was the apse of the chapel with the roof for a ceiling. There was a window looking out on to the rue d’École de Medicine, as well as a large skylight. A wooden partition in the corner enclosed a tiny bedroom. According to near contemporary description, there was very little furniture: a divan, a half dozen chairs, and old dresser with a curved front, a small table littered with pipes, beer glasses and newspapers. There were pictures of all shapes and sizes, some without frames and hung in the wall, others stacked with their backs to the wall. Courbet’s studio was a type of universal salon, through which individual’s engaged in complex relationships nourished by drink, and engaged in talk of abstract ideas, mostly discussing the death of Romanticism and of picturesque Bohemia, spending evenings advocating the death of the new, rejecting the academic tradition, and the codification of order to achieve a directness of artistic vision.
The studio has ceased to be a singular autonomous institution, one in which Schmahmann has described as traditionally bound up with endeavors that suggest that art is the product of creative mastery and special perception, to assert that the art has, or ought to have a status beyond that of mere artisan. This theme she continues, has afforded artists the opportunity to establish an image of themselves as visionaries and during the Romantic period to imply that they were blessed with perceptions that separate them from society at large.
According to Ronnie Zakon, a view of the studio is put forward that provided a foundation for a conception of the artist as “the Bohemian who fought all conventional attitudes, especially those fostered by the Philistines of the middle class, and by extension, of the studio functions as a private realm in which the artist could give form to his perceptions. In the 20th century, images of artist’ studios are re-imagined as conceptually isolated working environments.
Matisse and Picasso devoted a considerable body of artwork on the theme of the artist’s studio, and each allowed several photographic images to be created of them in their shifting creative settings. Picasso’s studio has been described as the crossroads of life and contemporary society. His Paris studio became not only a site for production of artwork, but also became the scene of Picasso’s theatrical work during the Occupation. For the Surrealists, the notion of “studio,” during WWII took on an expansive meaning, including working outdoors, or in the interior of the site, Air Bel in Marseilles. Often the very physical nature of these alternative studios impacted the artist’s working method.
The studio for Constantin Brancusi was a workshop, for Olafur Elliason, a laboratory; Francis Bacon’s studio appears to be a deconstructivist’s test site. Cindy Sherman’s studio, images of which she recently produced for Tate magazine, consists of a large room that takes up roughly half of her loft apartment in New York. George Segal’s 1963 The Artist’s Studio depicts a female nude from a body cast with a small bucket of paintbrushes and a palette encrusted with congealed pigments, a chimney of actual cinder blocks, an old wooden chair, and a painted representation of a wall and window, which has been described by Segal biographer Jan van deer Marck as a accurate reconstruction of Segal’s attic studio. Brenda Schmahmann however argues that this depiction is less autobiographical and symbolic of previous depictions of studio settings and with the ideas that underpin them: the artist.
Stephen Shore created a collection of photographs between 1965 and 1967, which depicts the scene at Andy Warhol’s studio, the Factory. Shore captures a time when Warhol was emerging as a prominent visual artist and avant-garde filmmaker. Similar to Courbet’s Painter’s Studio, The Factory that Shore depicts is populated with a diverse group of musicians, artists, actors, writers and aspiring cultural sophisticates, but it essentially remained a place in which he produced collaborative and individual works.
Physically absent, but nevertheless a presence through the paintbrushes and loaded palette—i.e. the studio as prop—the artist appears more or less as generic figure whose iconographic intent had been constructed through and by a history of such representations exemplified by Picasso’s chair and Ruben’s women.
Art papers and other historical records documenting American art history reveal images of Grant Wood, Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder and others—sometimes posing, sometimes hard at work in their ateliers—along with letters and other ephemera related to studio practice. Collectively, these images of artists and their studios offer a telling look at the ways in which art-making has changed over time yet essentially remained the same.
The German-born, American photographer Hans Namuth produced a series depicting artists working in the context of their studio spaces including John Cage, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollack, Larry Rivers, Robert Motherwell, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Saul Steinberg, Clyford Stills, Tony Smith, Marisol, Ben Shan, Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeosis, Lucas Samaras, Noguchi, Frank Stella, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Roy Lichtenstein, Sam Francis, Barnett Newman, Jim Dine, and George Segal.
Bruce Nauman’s Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage); a large-scale video installation records the nocturnal activity in the artist’s studio of his cat and an infestation of mice during the summer of 2000. With seven projections and multiple audio tracks of ambient sounds, Nauman, in his words, "used this traffic as a way of mapping the leftover parts and work areas of the last several years of other completed, unfinished, or discarded projects."
Seven greenish gray monochrome video projections reveal facets of Nauman’s studio and the residue of his practice, including molds and equipment. Audio speakers project ambient sounds of the mice, Nauman’s prowling cat, moths, and a screen door, along with other noises indicative of the studio’s rural setting. Viewers may catch a dark flash of movement in their peripheral vision as a rodent speeds across the projection, with the occasional profile of the skulking predator or its striking head-on image, eyes glowing as it pauses in its chase.
The reference to the artist’s work process implicit in Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage) invokes some of his early pieces of the late 1960s, when he directed his focus to pursuing regimented tasks in his San Francisco studio. Bouncing Two Balls Between the Floor and Ceiling with Changing Rhythms, 1967-68, were also recorded in Nauman’s studio and involve one concentrated activity repeated for the duration of the film.
Recently, Inspired by the presence of the studio of Francis Bacon, which is on permanent view at the Dubli-based Hugh Lane Gallery, curators Jens Hoffmann and Cristina Kennedy mounted the project The Studio, intended to explore the changes in the significance of the artist studio in a cultural moment where the art world has become more idea-based and less about skill. In their view, the role and function of the artist’s studio becomes the main space of activity in the making and production of art. It becomes an intriguing site for critical confluence of cultural, social, political, and literary histories—a place in which internal and external artistic identity fuse.
Jens Hoffman and Cristina Kennedy note that the concept of the studio has long captivated audiences with its association of unbridled creativity, freedom from convention, bohemian lifestyle, and struggle for success. Through documentation, video, re-installation, and paintings and sculpture, historically the viewer has been offered an examination of the role and function of the studio for the artists. Often these images provide insight as to what the studio means for artists whose creative production is based on ideas and process and for whom the notion of permanency for the artwork is often redundant. Addressing this subject provides fascinating insights into the artistic environment and the role and activities of the artists within those structures—socially, economically, and politically—which inform society locally and globally. The studio thus becomes part sanctuary, part laboratory, and finally a marginalized site of creative refuge.
A historical overview of the artists’ studios reveal changes over centuries in which the relevance, role and function of the studio pose a range of questions such as: What is the “studio” within the diverse and competing terms of art practice? Is there a tension between the studio as a workshop and the studio as both a space and an object of spectacle? How might we approach the lived experience of inhabiting and operating the studio? In terms of the economy of objects what are the multiple relays between the studio and the museum? What is the “location” of the studio for the multiple nomadic practices of contemporary culture? What makes the studio such a topical matter for discussion? Does the studio still function as a place, a situation, an activity, a space of sociability, a zone of autonomy?
Changes in ideas of the studio have been under attack over the last decades and its position as the main sphere of creative production has been called into question at a moment when art has become increasingly idea-based.
The studio remains a site of “collective memory.” Views of the artist in his/her studio demonstrate the various ways in which the creative process is shaped by the creative/intellectual environment. The studio becomes the historical context for a complex range of human experience, within the broader socio-political and cultural arena. Images of the studio contribute significantly to exploring the interaction between the cultural production and the individual. The studio presented in all its manifestations becomes a political, economic, religious, scientific, and creative institution. It remains a site of trans-disciplinary approaches to art making, a place for critique and analysis.
By inviting the viewer into the space of creation, we are invited to connect theory with practice, art, and history. Collectively, these wide ranging images of the various artists in their studio reflect the complexity of the artists’ struggle for creative uniqueness and innovation. Moreover, they equally reflect the studio as a type of multifaceted arena. The studio thus becomes a point that seamlessly integrates social, cultural, and intellectual forces with the play on individual personality. In several cases the studio becomes a point of confrontation and refusal, a conceptual place of conflicting demands, and self re-invention, in which no precise synthesis or explication is possible. As a site of rest, contemplation, and creativity, the studio becomes an iconic point of critical historical moments. As a site of united and divided memories, it is equally a site in which the artists in the process of creative analysis often embraces a host of contradictory emotions, and human challenges.
The studio, as presented herein, illuminates the conceptual range of the notion of the “artist’s studio” from “the classic” to the more interdisciplinary contemporary concept studio—or the “non-studio”—as exemplified by artists whose studios are more associated with the idea of a laboratory, or portable laptop computer, demonstrating the way the idea of the “ studio “ has changed over the course of centuries, and the parallel correlation with rapidly changing notions of “ art” itself.
For many recent artists, the studio is pad and pencil. For several migratory artists, the studio is a portable laptop, or in the case of artists such as Liam Gillick, it is non-existent. The studio is less static, less specific, becoming in some instances a rather contested concept. Driven by art forms that demand new technologies and strategies, the contemporary studio has become a place for the nuanced and balanced activities of individual and collaborative forces. It’s very hegemony and singularity is called into in question.
The traditional notion of the isolated solitary “genius” in monk-like seclusion seeks to be the norm. The studio has lost its neutral point of intimate creative sanctuary, and has become a place for power, practice, patronage, geography, and commerce—a site of localized interests in our contemporary world. In various cases, it has become an institution of transnational collaboration, becoming merely a symbolic rather than an actual “site” for bringing together exciting new works by a group of innovative collaborators who are often on the cutting edge of research and experimentation. It can open up new ways of thinking about artistic and intellectual boundaries in a variety of domains. Like the contemporary world, the studio has been re-contextualized by Postmodernism to reflect all its complexities and subtleties.
The images presented herein have been selected from archival, published, primary, and individual sources in order to present a provocative overview of the eclectic and complex concept of the artist’s studio. What emerges is the complexities of power, context, agency, mentality, and politics presented by a site traditionally envisioned as a mere location of creativity. The viewer was intrigued both by what is there, as well as what the artist is doing there. However, images of the artists at work in the studio expose it as a place loaded with multiple fractures and interplays between the studio as an institution, and a site of creative process, politics, social transformation, and cultural change.
