Gustave Courbet

Courbet's own works prefigured and influenced those by many of the Impressionists, among the Manet, Monet, and Cezanne. "Creator of defiantly anti-official art, French realist painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) insisted on the right of artists to be independent witnesses to the truth of their own time. This attitude, according to Faunce, lies at the heart of our own concept of the modern. Faunce, curator of European painting and sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum, has written a fresh, timely reassessment of an artist who still looks contemporary. Courbet coined the term "real allegory" to describe his paintings of persons and places familiar to him, depicted as the embodiments of ideas. He "invented a whole vocabulary of touch" in his landscapes, powerful meditations on natural forces. Some of his erotic pictures startle even today. This beautifully illustrated study includes 40 color plates with facing-page commentaries and 59 in black-and-white." -- Publishers Weekly.