Photo by Maya Vidon.

“I told you a long time ago that I would find a way to give them a fist right in the face. That bunch of scoundrels, they caught it.”

—Gustave Courbet, in a letter to a friend.

Courbet is the new Duchamp. We’re used to genealo­gies that trace the lin­eage of con­tem­po­rary artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst back through Warhol to Marcel Duchamp and his ready­mades. But Petra ten-​Doesschate Chu, in her new book The Most Arro­gant Man in France, pushes that pedi­gree back two gen­er­a­tions, to Gus­tave Courbet.

Accord­ing to Chu, Courbet (who does his best Jack Spar­row in “Desperate Man”)

opened a per­spec­tive on a new cul­ture in the art world in which the public’s approval was valued higher than that of the gov­ern­ment or an offi­cial élite, and money was seen as a more legit­i­mate gauge of artis­tic suc­cess than offi­cial honors….[He] demon­strated that con­tro­versy need not be harm­ful to an artist’s rep­u­ta­tion, as it was just another form of publicity.

Peter Schjel­dahl, review­ing the book for The New Yorker, points to present cir­cum­stances that shape the method and thesis of Chu’s book:

The book advances a present ten­dency among art his­to­ri­ans to recon­sider the Old Mas­ters with ref­er­ence to the art worlds that allo­cated wealth and pres­tige in their times. This empha­sis is a sign of our own times, when money and celebrity—proliferating fairs and bien­ni­als, roar­ing auc­tions, around-the-clock Web jour­nals and blogs—exalt the grand­stand plays of a Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, or Matthew Barney.

Schjeldahl’s point is rat­i­fied by a quick glance back at another New Yorker arti­cle about Courbet, this one writ­ten in 1940 by Robert M. Coates. Coates says of Courbet, “it would be hard indeed to think of a painter of his gen­eral period who had a more pow­er­ful influ­ence on the gen­er­a­tion of the Impressionists.” When he speaks of Courbet as a “revolutionary,” he awards the term for the painter’s use of “direct obser­va­tion, homely sub­jects, and ‘realistic’ portrayal.”

Chu’s book and Schjeldahl’s arti­cle (which includes the exquis­itely absurd “reërection,” a con­struc­tion only the New Yorker could pull off—or want to) present a res­olutely dif­fer­ent pic­ture of Courbet than the one pro­posed by Michael Fried. For Fried, Courbet’s impor­tance has to do with his recon­fig­u­ra­tion of the field of rep­re­sen­ta­tion. (Though all three agree that Courbet is proto-​modern, if not quite modern him­self, none agree on what that means.)

A sti­fling nos­tal­gia suf­fuses Schjeldahl’s arti­cle, to the point that it can seem claus­tro­pho­bic even to those who, like the critic, don’t care for “the grand­stand plays” of Koons or Hirst. But still it’s hard not to be swayed by his clos­ing para­graph, in which he issues a procla­ma­tion worthy of Gaddis’s Wyatt Gwyon—

[Baude­laire] saw that the fate of true artists would hence­forth involve forms of inter­nal exile, even in bright cir­cles of cos­mopoli­tan fame.

—before return­ing to his grumpy elegy:

That sort of com­punc­tion was lost on Courbet, and it is hard to imag­ine, let alone detect, in the con­duct of the art world today….Dirty laun­dry has become the emperor’s new clothes.