The French debate about Gustave Courbet’s pictorial realism and the dialogue
between literature and art in the mid-nineteenth century
In 1855, Gustave Courbet’s “Pavillon du réalisme” excited
indignation. A close scrutiny of the reactions of four prominent critics of the
time – Théophile Silvestre, Charles Baudelaire, and the Goncourt brothers – sheds
new light on the nature of the debate and the underlying aesthetic theories behind
these divided responses. All of them participated in defining the painter of Ornans
as the spearhead of a new current in painting that negated the imagination, as they
claimed. Analyzing their arguments leads me to retrace the lexical misunderstanding
at the heart of the debate about French realism, marked by unsteady definitions and
violent partisanship. According to Baudelaire and Silvestre, realism is flawed in
its very definition. For the Goncourt brothers, realism, if based on Courbet’s
pictorial model, is a burden for the new literary style they wished to promote. The
French debate of the 1850/1860s about Courbet’s pictorial realism illustrates the
dialogue between literature and art in the mid-nineteenth century and the problems
involved in operating with partisan concepts of the time, such as ‘romanticism’ and
‘realism.’
Article outline
- 1.Théophile Silvestre: The negation of the imagination
- 2.Baudelaire: Realism and poetry
- 3.The Goncourts: The beauty of ugliness and realism in literature
- 4.Conclusion
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Notes
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Works cited