Heart of darkness

It is easy (if you’ve ever studied art history) to become jaded about Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). He squats indomitably over narrative accounts of Modernist painting: Courbet originator of realism, Courbet radical libertine who painted erotica, Courbet consummate self-promoter, Courbet firebrand of the Paris Commune. The very groundbreaking roles that should make him accessible to the casual art aficionado somehow turn him into a figurehead. He can seem a narrative obligation, one who is hard to love.

Such were my thoughts entering the current exhibition at Leopold Museum, Vienna (closes 21 June; touring to Folkwang Museum, Essen, 17 July-8 November 2026). Quite against my presuppositions, I found an artist incomparably stronger than I had reckoned him to be. Courbet is an artist who not only touches upon core human experiences but gets knuckle deep into them: sex, labour, grief, beauty, death, horror and the sublime.

This is a large exhibition with many important pieces, most loaned from French museums. The Painter’s Studio (1854-5), which is too large and fragile to leave Musée d’Orsay, is reproduced across one wall of the opening gallery. Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet (1854) — one of the painter’s trademark self-portrait promotional pieces — is here, hung beside the actual walking stick shown in the painting. Courbet exploited his good looks as a young man and used a stream of over 50 self-portraits (plus studio photographs) that present himself as a brooding, dashing young rebel. That is the sort of air that grows a bit stale (at least, once one gets beyond adolescence) but this frisson of danger was not unearned. His encouragement of the toppling of the Vendôme Column by the Paris Communards got him exiled and fined a crippling sum of compensation and costs — a punitive amount he could never pay off in his last years.

In art, Courbet had genuine edge. He is credited with founding realism in art, called social realism when it was allied to social critique with the intention of effecting reform. Courbet declared, “I am not only a socialist but also a democrat and republican, in a word, a partisan of the revolution and, above all, a realist, that is to say, a sincere friend of the real truth.” In his home village of Ornans, Courbet found inspiration in the life of the agricultural poor. Instead of the lofty persons of history, battles or the nobility, Courbet depicted in his art farmers, labourers and peasants. The seminal Stone Breakers (1849) caused a sensation when exhibited at the Paris Salon. An old man in clogs is on one knee breaking stones with a hammer, as a boy in ragged clothing brings him yet another rock. The never-ending cycle of back-breaking grinding labour has never been better captured. The original painting was destroyed in the Dresden bombing of 1945; a highly finished oil sketch stands in for it here.

The hang and lighting enhance the impact of the selection, which is generally very good. We only miss a couple of the grander figure pictures but that gives space for the lesser considered pictures, such as the seascapes and snow paintings which look good against the dark blues and greens of the walls. The galleries are arranged by theme and cases hold letters and photographs related to the topic at hand.   

Courbet’s grand conception of depicting the full range of existence is driven home by images of heroic death, not on the battlefield but in gloomy moorland, where the death of the hunt is evoked in merciless detail. Nowadays, hunting scenes which both show and celebrate the suffering of animals are not so much unpopular as all but verboten, yet they have a long history. Courbet shows us the stag at the extremity of its suffering, heart ready to burst. It is hard to see such scenes but (as Courbet understood) these images evoke the heroic will of the prey even unto death.

What Courbet is best known for are his erotic paintings of female nudes

In contrast, in the late period work, when he was exiled to the Swiss Alps in the 1870s, we find a more reflective detached quality. The snowscapes set under dark skies speak of the extremities of isolation and retreat. The pictures of the castle of Chillon overlooking its lake are symbolic self-portraits of a grand and proud man distanced from the common world. Inevitably, in reality things were more complicated than that. During this period Courbet was manoeuvring his assets away from his creditors and planning an imposing retrospective in Vienna (which never happened, partly due to politics). 

What Courbet is best known for are his erotic paintings of female nudes. His scenes of women bathing outdoors were considered improper in his time. The grandest set piece, The Sleepers (1866) depicts two buxom women asleep on a rumpled bed in each other’s arms. It is seen as the first modern depiction of lesbianism, albeit framed for the male gaze. On display is that painting. L’Origine du Monde (1866) depicts a close-up of the open thighs of a woman and is considered the first honest and detailed painting of the vagina. It was originally a full figure picture that Courbet cut down. This first “crotch shot” of Western art, it has been the focus of feminist analysis, free-speech advocacy and prurient fascination. It was originally secreted in the very private collection of Ottoman diplomat Khalil Bey (who also owned The Sleepers) and was later owned by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. 

He really takes flight in his landscapes of Ornans. The smaller ones were painted on site and often show waterfalls and rivers, accentuating the drama of wooded brooks and bare cliffs. In Oraguay Rock, Masieres Valley, Doubs (1860) he applies paint for the sheer stone roughly with a palette knife. This is where (with a possible exception for Turner) paint for the first time no longer describes or indicates a motif but instead substitutes for it. It lies coarse and stark yet (seen from a distance) absolutely realistic. The precision and accuracy of the painting style is electrifying.   

In this group are a series of paintings of caves that are unique inventions. Previously in art, caves have been settings for images of hermits, saints and dragons. Courbet’s are uninhabited and strikingly stark. It is a cliché to call these caves (as many commentators have) psycho-sexual representations of the vaginal entrance, source of life, but they darn well feel like that. But what discussions of these cave paintings miss is the annihilating terror of these voids. There is something not just strange but awfully compulsive about them. One is transported to the most primitive of notions about the underworld and intense fear of illimitable cold, water and darkness. We never follow water out in a river but always travel inward to that terrible heart of darkness. No artist ever described such a horror.  

Leaving the exhibition I visited floors filled with the museum’s permanent collection. Facing the gaunt nudes and angular autumnal landscapes of Schiele, not to mention the contortions of the Austrian Expressionists, perhaps Courbet himself might have felt at home there.