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Gustave Courbet
A Political Painter?
From Communard to Proudhonian
It's tempting to reduce history to a few simplistic narratives, using classifications and clever labels, and so Gustave Courbet remained for a long time the paragon of the committed painter.
But a closer look won't reveal anarchist scenes or revolutionary landscapes. And if there is politics, it is insidiously distilled and subtly violent, acting through the transgression of the pictorial and the social.
An exercise in unmasking his distortions of reality and academic conventions, perhaps to the benefit of his political convictions.
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