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| Gustave Courbet The Artist's Studio 1854-55 oil on canvas Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
The Neglected Model
Courbet portrays himself at work in the studio, but builds in a paradox. Instead of painting what is actually present – for example, the nude model standing directly behind him and admiring the canvas in progress – he is shown putting the finishing touches on a landscape set in Franche-Comté. That picture and the young shepherd in sabots looking up at the artist both refer to the region of his birth.
The Present Company
On each side of the central group, numerous and various figures have wandered in to animate the scene. Some of those at left are humble people, like the large woman seated on the floor and nursing an infant, but mixed with them are exotics, like the Chinese man with a feathered hat made of newspaper. At right are gathered individuals of more distinction: art collectors, artists, dealers who have come to observe (or supervise) the painter's manner of working. The woman wrapped in a large gold-embroidered shawl seems, however, to be the only one paying full attention to the ongoing creative activity at center. We recognize several writers and friends of Courbet, among whom Baudelaire at far right is reading a book with intense absorption.
Levels of Reality
For us as spectators, only the canvas as an artifact is fully real, as we stand pondering it in the museum. In imagination, as we enter the interior represented, the studio space itself breathes an immediate reality. The picture leaning against its easel and the painter laboring over it are real enough, but what that leaning picture represents – however "realistic" in appearance – is no more than a remembered reality. The nude model also is real enough, but only temporarily so. She is present for the time it takes to turn her into a painting, whether the style of that painting is to be "realistic" or mythological. She will become perhaps a nymph, perhaps a young lady on the banks of the Seine. Looking at the whole, it becomes impossible to believe in the reality of such an assemblage as this inside an actual Parisian studio – the painting alone, as fiction, unites this crowd of disparate characters.
One detail is particularly enigmatic; it is the second nude, male this time, apparently suspended behind the landscape. He is manifestly a painted figure on canvas, but the contours of that canvas are indeterminable.* Below him and closer to the foreground we make out objects: a skull (traditional signifier of vanitas), and several accessories, including a plumed hat, a guitar, and a poignard. These last would suffice to transform the painted nude into a Spaniard, if he descended from his canvas. Moreover, this entire company on the left might pass for members of a theater troupe, in contrast to the more or less identifiable company on the right.
The Walls
Expanses of wall occupy the upper half of the composition. At left we see a canvas turned against this wall, at right a lighted opening (access to the outside world), and all across the intervening surface a vague pattern of rectangles. We cannot reliably determine if these represent completed paintings or if perhaps instead they stand for the type of wall famously described by Leonardo da Vinci on which we project the images of some personal interior landscape.
The Studio as Vestibule
The studio, then, is the site where the painter confronts humankind itself. All classes and conditions converge there, where male and female nudes are available for contemplation as pathways to ideal beauty, but where the painted landscape – a vision of the green domaine beyond the city – is equally available, offering freedom both from and to that city.
– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)
*other writers have identified the suspended male nude as a lay figure, or life-sized mannequin, an object commonly found in 19th-century art studios – a photograph of Courbet's studio proves that he owned at least one