We're at the Musee D'Orsay and we're looking at Gustave Courbet's
gigantic canvas "The Burial at Ornans."
It was painted in 1849-1850 and exhibited
the next year. This is the funeral of Courbet's
great uncle. Courbet came from a relatively
wealthy family in this relatively small town in France
but close to the Swiss border. Right, I think we just read it had
about three thousand people in it at that time so it's a
really small town. We're looking at a group of people where everyone
knows each other, so these long-standing ties.
We see the cliffs are very typical
of this area of France. He's pushed all of the figures really close
to us, it's almost like a classical frieze in the way in which the figures
play across this shallow foreground, and they're forced forward
at least optically by those cliffs. And what that does
is it means that these figures which are a little bit bigger than life-size in reality
are really available to us and it's not
an idealized representation of what a funeral would be
but it is all of the distractions of a funeral, of an actual
funeral. And I think we all know what that feels like.
So these are very specific people. If exhibited in the salon
it would have someone heroic who had died, and the sky would open up
and there would be a sense of the afterlife. There would be a sense of
redemption and here there isn't that promise
of redemption, but to me the redemption although it doesn't lie in Christ,
lies somewhere else. So the redemption is his faith
in these people, his faith in the real. Because of course Courbet was removing
that classicism and saying the art that is authentic,
the art that is an expression of what we actually experience,
that art is true and this was the heart of realism and of Courbet's project.
What's interesting though is the representation
of Christ as a sculpture carried by one of the clergymen
amongst the people who are going about the business of the funeral,
carrying the coffin, reading from the Bible, and officiating in general.
The sense of the coffin moving in from the left, its imminence in
the grave feels much more palpable to me, separated
only by the figure who's officiating there at the graveside and
some small children. But there's a real sense of this community in that
we have children, lots of children, and there's old people
and middle-aged people and a dog. But Courbet is not creating that photographic
realism at all. He's creating a synthetic realism. The dog
chancing by becomes kind of an emblem for
the sense of distractiveness, the chaos, the actuality
of a moment. There's something very poignant to me about this community
coming together for this funeral, for a long-standing
member of the community, and the way it almost functions
as a modern momento mori. Death comes
to all of us, and all we have in a way
is our moment, our time, our community.
Courbet, I think, underscores that
in a number of ways. First of all there's real beauty to the way he's rendering
these figures, but there's also a discarded skull
at the edge of that hole in the ground, which
seems as if it had been dug up absentmindedly when
they dug this fresh grave. And that skull,
a reminder of course of the more traditional paintings of Golgotha
and Christ, of the crucifixion, but here
this notion that there was somebody else who died who has now been forgotten.
In the extreme right, there's the
face of a child, and that paint is so black
that the face floats in space.
There is this quality of thinking about the nature of selfhood
and of our own mortality that is very poignant.
Because we don't have that typical composition which would have focused us on a main
heroic figure and there's instead this kind of
democracy of attention where everyone
is getting their own portrait. Each person is
in the private space of their own mind at this moment
of a funeral, thinking about mortality
but at the same time thinking about maybe dinner. I would argue that there are two things going on.
I think you're absolutely right.
There is that individual that is represented here, that was so important to Courbet.
But at the same time there's a kind of type, as well, and that is still
here. There's the clergy. There's the town officials.
There are the women going about their traditional role
weeping and mourning. There are the children who may be distracted
but are also representing beauty and youth, and a kind of innocence.
And so there are still types at work but he is transcending those types
with that individual experience. This was shown first
in Ornans itself and then in the Paris salon
where people were just astounded. What was this thing that Courbet was showing?
Well, I mean it broke every rule.
And it didn't look like how art was supposed to look, certainly at this scale.
It wasn't composed. It had no redemptive message
it wasn't ideal. It wasn't the right kind of subject. I mean, it wasn't right
in any way. The people who posed for this, some scholars
have suggested felt ridiculed by the Parisans
but for Courbet that notion of the rural
was in fact much more authentic
without the polish, and in a sense without the falseness that urban
culture had developed. And of course Courbet's whole
idea is to paint the real and the concrete and to turn his
back on Romanticism and that kind of emotion and to
paint things, I think the famous thing is, "Show me an angel and I'll paint one."