READINGS OF GUSTAVE COURBET MARK EDWIN SOUNESS A ...

acceptance was instrumental in the germination of the relationship between Courbet‟s work
and positivism. The Second Republic‟s liberal beginnings were accompanied by a torrent of
new radical left-wing journals, including Proudhon‟s Le Représentant du peuple, which
presented the first sustained positivist interpretation of Courbet‟s work. Here, in a series of
Salon reviews, the engraver Pierre Hawke associated the artist‟s paintings with a
revolutionary reaction against what was seen by many as the social decay caused by
capitalism and bourgeois society.
Yet, the relationship between Courbet‟s work and positivism was not only cast in a
revolutionary light. Despite the controversy surrounding the artist throughout his career and
the frequent association of his paintings with radical left-wing politics, we find positivist
reviews of his work during our period of study designed to appeal to conservative sectors of
society. We find that positivism appealed to both the left and the right. As we move through
the period and examine the different dimensions of positivism with which Courbet‟s work
was associated, it becomes clear that the philosophy‟s theoretical expanse could provide
social ideas to support the views of writers across the entire political spectrum. Our
examination concludes in 1878, the year after the artist‟s death, with an examination of the
interpretation of his work formulated by the famous writer Camille Lemonnier. As Linda
Nochlin has shown, this interpretation was published during France‟s Third Republic, at a
time when the cultural establishment began to dilute Courbet‟s political image in order to
promote him as a national hero within the great republican tradition of French art. This
republican reconstruction depended upon an ideological location of his art within the realm
exhibition celebrating the centenary of Courbet‟s death held at the Royal Academy of Arts 19
January - 19 March 1978).
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