Courbet's Exhibitionism

FIG. 1 4. - C. THURSTON THOMPSON. "Fireman's Station and Division Wall be ween the Picture Gallery and Sugar Refinery",
from R.J. Bingham and C.T. Thompson, Paris Exhibition, 1855, Tome I, No. XXXVIII. By Courtesy of the Board of Trustees
of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
To his conservative audience, Courbet's 1855 show
was certainly an exhibition. He travestied every aspect
of high art practice, ostentatiously and immodestly, and
did so with publicly avowed commercial intent. His
contemporaries saw Courbet the carnival barker presiding
over a disturbing vision of the world-upside-down,
parodying the high, the mighty and the respectable; at
the same time, they saw the spectre he presented of the
COURBET'S EXHIBITIONISM
future of art'', in the capitalist commodity system. For to
true nineteenth century conservatives, the coming of the
new bourgeois economic and social order was the
world -ups id -down. What looks like a contradiction to
us today was, in fact, a single nightmare vision in 1855,
the defiant 11ero and the entrepreneur.
P.M.