Page 9 - G19C Maastricht Catalog

2 Gustave Courbet

THE WAVE (LA VAGUE)

Gustave Courbet, the great Realist painter from the valley of Here, the roughly textured surface in the painting’s compressed
France’s Jura mountains, spent the summer of 1869 by the sea. foreground conveys the palpable substance of the rugged shore at
From the coastal village of Étretat, he wrote to novelist Victor Hugo Étretat, imparting the sense that we might reach out and touch it
of his obsession with the violent force of the waves crashing off directly. As Cézanne described it, The Wave “hits you right in the
the shores of Normandy. “The sea! The sea!” he wrote, “…in her chest, and you must retreat. The whole room feels the spray.”
fury which growls, she reminds me of the caged monster who can
devour me.” This painting, one of many representations of the wave This painting’s subject may recall sublime images of storied
motif created between Autumn 1869 and Spring 1870, demonstrates shipwrecks in the Romantic tradition of J.M.W. Turner or coastal
Courbet’s mature realist technique, seizing the material structure leisure scenes by a young Claude Monet. Courbet, however, rejects
of the natural world and conferring a visceral closeness to its classical tropes of visual seduction by withholding any human
subjects. Though commonly celebrated for his radically avant- presence or narrative incident. Instead, he uses tonal gradation
garde, monumental images of anonymous labor and humble village and variegated texture to draw the viewer’s eye outwards off the
life from the 1840s and 1850s, this later work demonstrates the rocks, only to be pushed back out by the force of the great uncoiling
endurance of Courbet’s remarkable artistic innovations and realist wave that occupies the entire width of the canvas. Such pictorial
ambitions, as well as his profound contributions to the development construction serves to emphasize the drama within the scene,
of modern painting. thereby conveying the effects of unbridled nature in nearly abstract
form. Indeed, in his attempt to represent the effect of crashing
Having been long fascinated with landscape painting, and especially waves with all the force of lived experience, Courbet created a
so in the latter years of his career, Courbet ambitiously undertook touchstone for later modernist painters from the Impressionists
the challenge of creating what he termed “sea landscapes” (paysages and Cézanne, to Picasso and the Abstract Expressionists. It was his
de mer) after an introduction to the genre by the painter Eugène bravura in paint handling, captivating pictorial rhythm, and anti-
Boudin in the mid-1860s. However, unlike Boudin’s picturesque narrative content that caused the critic Clement Greenberg,
artifices of bourgeois seaside folly, Courbet developed his own writing in 1949, to look back to Courbet, and The Wave in particular,
interpretation of the subject in keeping with his determination to as a point of origin for the most ambitious modern painting of
create a “living art” that truthfully represented his experience of the the 20th century.
world around him. In so doing, he laid paint across the canvas with
a palette knife, the tool normally reserved for mixing pigments on
the palette, so as to empathically evoke the facticity of the observed,
material world. In the wave’s darkest green depth, its vigorous white
froth, and the thick crags of the picture’s rocky foreground, we see
his distinctive painterly materiality evoking the very substance of
aquatic and mineral textures. As Paul Cézanne would later recall,
Courbet painted “the way a plasterer slaps on stucco. A real color
grinder. He built like a Roman mason…he was a real painter.”

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