by Jon Lackman | 15 May 2006 | Modern
In the catalogue to the Getty Museum exhibition Courbet and the Modern Landscape, Mary Morton writes that “despite the fact that landscape constitutes more than two-thirds of his oeuvre, Courbet’s landscape painting has yet to achieve a stable position in the scholarly canon. This is due to several factors, from the difficulty of dating the landscapes and establishing a sense of stylistic evolution, to extensive problems of attribution, to the disqualification of the landscapes as artistically substandard, commercial sellouts. A comprehensive look at his contribution to the genre of landscape, however, reveals a radically innovative practice in Courbet’s choice of motifs and his compositions, use of color, and paint application. His landscapes initiated a vital current of Modernist painting, shifting the focus of ambitious painting away from narrative description–whether historical, mythological, poetic, religious, or political–to self-expression, with nature providing both a subject a less regulated arena in which the artist could enact an original performance-in-paint.”
