Courbet Reconsidered

Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 1988. Softcover. VG. Color wraps. 245 pp. 89 bw, 100 color plates. Gustave Courbet was one of the most radical painters of nineteenth-century France. Continuously at odds with vested authority in both aesthetic and political circles, he nevertheless had enormous influence as the leader of the realist school, and his work is greatly admired today. Courbet Reconsidered is the first book to originate in English to cover the artist's entire oeuvre in depth. It is also the first to reproduce a wide range of his works in color, from the self-portraits of his formative period in the early 1840s to the sweeping landscapes he painted in exile during the last years of his life. The book examines Courbet's art from a number of fresh perspectives in essays that incorporate new discoveries and theoretical approaches. Sarah Faunce provides an overview of Courbet's career, illuminating the artist's role in early modernism. Linda Nochlin and Michael Fried engage in a provocative dialogue about the nature of Courbet's representations of women. Petra Chu provides information on the context of Courbet's landscape painting. Claudette Mainzer presents important new data about Courbet's famous Burial at Ornans, and Douglas Edelson explores for the first time the questions of Courbet's critical reception in America before 1900. The book, which serves as the catalogue for a major exhibition of the work of Courbet, also includes individual catalogue entries for more than 100 paintings and drawings.