Courbet at Orsay - Museum Highlights with POMART
Musée d’Orsay
The Orsay Museum (Musée d’Orsay) is one of the most beloved art institutions in the world for a reason. It continues to hone the way it tells one of the most magnificent chapters in art history: how painting broke free of the Academy and gave birth to Modernism.
In a recent visit to the Orsay Museum, we saw how this institution is continuing to uphold its legacy. Famously set in a whimsical Beaux-Arts train station, the experience remains one of the best in Paris
Today, let’s dive into why the late 1800s were so transformational for the world of art. As we do, we’ll keep encountering important paintings and sculptures in that story that you can see on your next trip to the Orsay Museum.
From Courbet to Today
To fully understand the arc from an art world enshrined in the restrictive holds of the French Academy to one where the individual artist could define their own path forward, we have to go back to the 19th century.
Enter Courbet
Gustave Courbet (1819 to 1877) set out to do something that few artists had ever done before. He completely eschewed pretension, genre restrictions, or audience expectations. Instead, he chose to paint only what he could see with his own eyes.
The effect is something that today we might call photographic. And that’s fitting. Photography was invented just a few years after Courbet’s birth, and he was one of the first artists to become keenly interested in the technology. He was even the very first to have photographs taken of his paintings.
This photographic style would come to be called Realism, but while we often think of this purely as the way one might decide to paint an image, Courbet went further than that.
A Burial at Ornans - Courbet
Consider his stunning A Burial at Ornans (1849-50), which you can find at the Orsay. In this painting, Courbet not only committed himself to realistic detail. He also chose as his subject matter something incredibly real, a burial in a village. The person being interred is a commoner, long considered unworthy by the French Academy of such grand artistic treatment. But Courbet chose to render it with the same care and on the same scale as one might paint Napoleon leading his troops into battle.
In this way, Courbet also had a Realism of subject. This proved controversial, but it also helped push a few major points into the minds of other artists:
● conceptual rigor
● move away from subject matter determined by the Academy’s genres
● marrying viewpoint with artistic output
Making an Impression
A generation later, the Impressionists began picking up these major threads laid down by Courbet. Most obviously, they chose subject matter that was considered less auspicious by the Academy. The everyday world of human life was their milieu.
But while Courbet wanted his canvases to appear almost photographic, the Impressionists went a different way. By the time they were active, photography was beginning to make photorealistic paintings less important. Instead, Impressionists used their sophisticated understanding of human sight to create drama by quickly capturing an image in more gestural movements and new combinations of colors.
Consider Claude Monet’s (1840 to 1926) Haystacks series — many are on view at the Orsay. These show how a moment in time can be captured with the full force of its vibe and aura when photo-realism is abandoned in favor of, well, the impression one gets of their subject.
Outside the Academy
The success of the Impressionists allowed the Post-Impressionists, most famously Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890), to work almost entirely outside the constraints of the Academy.
For that reason, the entire artworld changed dramatically by the turn of the 20th century. In a matter of decades, the way people saw and created art had entirely changed. Never again would a single institution be able to control self-expression.
Consider the work of Auguste Rodin (1840 to 1917). His sculpture, like the unbelievable Gates of Hell on view at the Orsay, gives viewers a chance to confront the singular genius of the artist outside of the confines of expectations created by the Academy. Due to this radical departure from norms, he is considered the father of Modern sculpture. He stands as an example of just how far the art world had come by the end of the 19th century.
Contemporary Art’s Debt to the Past
As we go over this history, we can better understand the links that contemporary art has to the work of Courbet, Monet, van Gogh, and Rodin.
These artists not only innovated in the aesthetic choices they made — though they certainly did that! More importantly, they made these decisions based on ideas they had about how to portray the world. While visual trends will always change, the contemporary art scene still values the way an individual artist chooses to create their images.
Last year, the Orsay brought in work by contemporary artist Kehinde Wiley (1977). These pieces show us how connected today’s art is to the innovations of the past. Wiley uses his gregarious aesthetic to forcefully present his point of view. He isn’t trying to be the best in the Academic style, he is trying to be the best in his style. And that is the lasting impact of the artists who fill the permanent collection of the Orsay.
Visiting the Orsay Museum with an Official Guide
Whether you are making your first visit to the Orsay or returning for the 100th time, the collection — and the train station it is housed in — never fails to make an impact.
This is the story of art emerging from the past and launching itself into a future with limitless possibilities. This is the link between history and us, between us and the next generation.