The great realist Gustave Courbet in Essen: sensitive, power painter, political rebel

The pitiful man is clearly floating over an abyss, his cape fluttering, even though a peaceful landscape with blue sky stretches out behind him. The abyss is the unfinished painting, the sheer abstraction opening beneath it like a chasm.

Courbet painted this self-portrait when he was 25 years old. At that age, self-doubt, panic and delusions can take over, especially as an ambitious artist. For the past three years, the self-taught artist, who moved from the provinces to Paris in 1839 and celebrated impetuosity and country origins with a strong accent, had tried in vain to submit his pictures to the Salon.

That was to change in 1844 at the moment of greatest despair; he finally achieved a breakthrough – deliberately accompanied by extravagant self-portrayals. They were part of his branding as an artist: sometimes he portrayed the sensitive little one with his hand gently raised to his chin in a Renaissance style, sometimes the monkish cello player, sometimes the bohemian with a pipe in his sensual mouth, looking at the viewer from under heavy eyelids. Another shows him with a bleeding chest. X-ray examinations revealed that a woman was originally in the picture. All that was left was heartbreak.

“I, Gustave Courbet, painter and rebel” is the exhibition title of the ninety-work retrospective at the Folkwang Museum in Essen, the first in 50 years. The entrance hall is full of “Is”. There is another portrait hanging from his collector Alfred Bruyas, with which the painter actually wanted to start an art revolution. That didn’t happen, but Courbet still went down in art history as a revolutionary and even as a pioneer of modernism.

Cézanne admired his bold brushstrokes

His rough brushstrokes, his immediacy, his bold depictions of simple people brought realism into painting. Cézanne later said of him: “I hardly dare admit it, but I have been working on it since 1894. I wanted to paint like Courbet with thick applications of paint.” By then the artist had not been alive for over a quarter of a century.

How influential he was, an artist for artists, is demonstrated by the juxtaposition of Cézanne’s “Bibémus Quarry” (around 1895) – created at the foot of his beloved Montaigne Sainte-Victoire in Provence – with rock formations that Courbet had painted thirty years earlier in his home region of Franche-Comté. Cézanne depicts the jagged brown chunks as stacked cubes. Courbet brings out the structure of the limestone walls with a palette knife, spreading the paint boldly across the canvas with a spatula rather than a brush.

This was completely new to the audience; they only knew smooth, academic painting. But the motifs with which Courbet was successful at the Salon were even more fundamental. In 1849 he submitted After Dinner at Ornans, which depicts a domestic scene in his hometown with four men, including his father. Such genre scenes previously only existed in small formats; Courbet painted them monumentally. Stone hammers doing their hard work and a woman asleep at the spinning wheel were his everyday heroes.

The artist received a silver medal for it, the state bought the “dinner” and Courbet’s career took off. One would have liked to see another key painting, more precisely: “Bonjour Monsieur Courbet”, in which the painter as a wanderer meets his patron and his servant. Unlike its previous location in Vienna’s Leopold Museum, it was not available on loan.

For this, Essen received the “Origin of the World”, the scandalous work that only depicts the lower body of a naked woman, with the exposed sex in the center. The work, commissioned by the Ottoman diplomat Khalil Bey, is now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and was allowed to travel for the first time.

If you don’t want to see the explicit painting, you can walk around the room with the nude pictures in the exhibition route. They show a different side of the rebellious painter, who earned a reputation as a rule-breaker, but at the same time served the market – for example with hunting pictures or depictions of the famous rock on the cliffs of Étretat. Tourism was just picking up.

During his stays on the Norman coast, Courbet continued to show stubbornness and created his own genre, the “seascape”. He considered this term, which he invented, to be more appropriate than the previous term marine painting. Instead of depicting the heroic sea with rocking ships as before, he zoomed in close and captured rolling waves spraying spray. Émile Zola, the naturalist novelist, was enthusiastic: “Courbet simply painted a wave, a real wave, breaking on the shore.”

The Essen exhibition is captivating; it presents Courbet as an egocentric, assertive painter and, ultimately, even a political actor, who, however, fails. The fall from famous painter to outlaw is tragic. He has to leave his country. You can therefore immediately forgive the fact that his Swiss pictures are less convincing and even seem kitschy from today’s perspective with their sunsets over Lake Geneva.

After Napoleon’s fall, the artist became involved in the Paris Commune and took over the chairmanship of the Republican Art Commission. When the insurgents toppled the iconic Vendôme Column, he was held responsible and sentenced to half a year in prison. When he also had to bear the costs of reconstruction, he fled to Switzerland. Four years later he died in exile at the age of just 58.

Twelve years ago, what was probably his last work emerged from his sister’s possessions: a view of the Alps, once again powerfully painted in landscape format, with a bright blue sky. Whether he actually completed it is unclear. The foreground appears darkly shadowed, as if there were an uncertain abyss. It is reminiscent of his self-portrait as a young man who seems to be falling into abstraction. In 1919, on the occasion of his 100th birthday, his body was transported to his hometown in Ornans – as a late rehabilitation.