Will the real Stonebreakers please stand up?

Emma Drye MFA2 Essay

I had taken our carriage and was driving on the way to the Chateau at Saint -Denis to paint a landscape; near Maisieres, I stopped to consider two men breaking stones on the highway. Its rare to meet the most complete expression of poverty, so an idea for a painting came to me on the spot. I made an appointment with them at my studio for the next day, and since then Ive been working on the painting. Its the same size as the Evening at Ornans. Would you like me to give you a description? Over there is an old man of seventy, bent over his task, sledgehammer in air, his skin tanned by the sun, his head shaded by a straw hat; his trousers of rough material are all patched; and in his cracked sabots stockings that were once blue show his bare heels. Here is a young man with dusty head and swarthy skin; his back and arms show through the holes in his filthy tattered shirt; one leather suspender holds up the remnant of his trousers, and his leather boots, caked with mud, gape dismally in many places. The old man is kneeling, the young man is behind him, standing, bearing energetically a basket of broken rock. Alas in these circumstances, one begins like this, one ends the same way. Scattered here and there is their gear: a basket, a stretcher, a how, a lunch pail, etc. All this takes place in the blazing sun, at the edge of a highway ditch: the landscape fills the canvas. (Courbet, in Fried p100) 1.

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Courbets The Stonebreakers is arguably my favourite painting and yet I have never seen it and I dont know exactly what it looks like. The painting was destroyed in the bombing of Dresden during the War. The removal of the actual physical object seems to me to be a very clear reminder of the partial knowledge and understanding we can ever hope to have of an art work, and of the dynamic and many faceted nature of looking at and thinking about art. Colour and Tone The set of photographs that began this essay show that the colours and quality of the images vary so much that for the average viewer it is impossible to decide with any certainty what the painting really looked like when originally completed and exhibited. To an extent this is only a more extreme version of the unpainted Elgin Marbles or brown stained old masters. The colours and tonal values in these photographs are all different. Colour and tone are devices which can be used by an artist to embed information into a painting and so in this case, the information has been potentially garbled or distorted. The image at the bottom for instance seems quietly pastel whereas the heavy chiaroscuro in the one just above is more dramatic and further conceals the faces of the workers. Contemporary Symbolism Much of the symbolism or narrative content within the painting can only be read from an historical perspective to me now. Because I have studied art history and enjoyed it for many years, this is not an activity which feels alien or unnatural. The history has blended with my own history, and even with my own practice, and so even though the political agenda of this painting is only visible to me visually because I have learnt the ways of that other country, it would be wrong to dissociate that experience totally from a direct response or completely disallow any authenticity. It is not a cold, sterile thing. Physical Knowledge I have painted for even longer than I have been curious about art history, and so this painting has information for me in a practical sense that my work and discoveries as a painter support me to interpret. Certain decisions which are evident from method are readable to me in a specific way because I feel as if I can unpack the network of options and paths travelled to an extent. Similar to the understanding a seated ballet dancer might have watching a performance of Giselle, I can make informed guesses about gesture and direction of movement within each brushstroke, and even time taken over certain strokes or washes. My experience of the painting is physical in that sense. Time Travel As well as the information that might be lost through the passing of time and destruction of the painting, there is also new information which the painting has accrued for better or worse. The positioning of easel painting in

contemporary art, the reading of the landscape and the obsolescence of genre painting, the developments in formal possibilities in modernism and beyond in particular in terms of composition and treatment of space and materials - all these inform my understanding of this painting and its positioning. Courbets use of paint in the stonebreakers was described by Michael Fried as brutally physical (Fried 1991, p2), his positioning of the two men so close to the front of the painting and his denial of usual compositional techniques was seen at the time to be aggressively rebellious and confrontational. Characteristics which were shocking become safe through familiarity; properties which were deemed essential to art have been shed for a century and now seem conservative. Ed Lilley suggest s (Lilley 2000, p399) that loss and absence become significant properties in a modern reading of a lost art work, something which has been a theme of contemporary art (an idea raised in a somewhat adjacent argument by Gavin Henderson 2011). Narrative Palimpsest There are a number of narratives layered in the moment of my considering this painting. One is Courbets biography. The next is the story of the making of the painting and the story of his interaction with these stone breakers. A third is the story of the political landscape of France in the second half of the 19 th century and Courbets agenda to contribute to it. There is also the story of the paintings reception at the time, and then its significant contribution to the canon of art history alongside art historys many interpretations of it. Then there is the biography of the object itself, including the tale of its destruction in the Second World War. Finally, although not exhaustively, there is the story of my own relationship with this painting and its influence on my own practice as an artist. The New Art History The New Art History, developed in the eighties, attempted to plot out this palimpsest of narratives and widen the scope of the historian to include not just the back story if you will, but the wider context both behind and in front. This was a move away from a more formal art history which focussed its attention very much within the art work and the discipline in which it was lodged. TJ Clark and Linda Nochlin in particular have researched Courbets social world and describe the social history and contemporary social and political landscape in which the stonebreakers was made and received as this Bragging, good looking man from the provinces (Chu 1977, p2), largely self taught, bowled into Paris with an ambition to paint like God. New Art History readings of the stonebreakers tend to be comparative. Clark uses a comparison with Mille ts sower (set further back in the picture plane and with a wild poetry according to contemporary sources) and suggests that it was Courbets use of the rural bourgeois which weakened the boundary protecting urban Paris from potential revolutionaries. The unsentimentalised poor were palatable when safely depicted as other, ragged and unequivocally rural. The stonebreakers may be wretched but they were exhibited alongside the Burial at Ornans with its collection of bourgeois rural villagers. He reprises t his lack of firm outlines (p149) in describing the labyrinth of Parisian society formed by decades of political upheaval and migration. Clark and Nochlins accounts are by no means objective and Clark in particular uses words like lunatic, inane and odd to describe decisions he supposes Courbet made in an account which at times feels more like historical fiction for all its painstaking research. It is not a dry read anyway, nor is it falsely authoritative. It is unclear to me how the New Art History relates to contemporaneous criticism and accounts which seem wholly conversant with the idea that the motivations, life and politics of the artist need to be considered alongside the painting. In Theophile Silvestres 1856 Histoire des artistes vivants H e wrote that in his ambition to react against the past Courbet often made an outright fool of himself. Castagnary ( a very close friend of Courbet) wrote a posthumous biography in le Gazette de Beaux Arts in 1911 in which he describes Courbets early years in such a way as to make explicit and frequent links with his early behaviour and later art practice. Its not a huge leap to see these readings as forerunners to a psychoanalytic model. In a particularly intriguing examination of the seats of authority for judgement of a painting Clark (p135) makes a study of this contemporary criticism and seeks provenance for the claims of social rebellion for the stonebreakers. His carefully researched answer is that it was a groundswell of opinion from the audience at the Salon viewing the work and responding, which was being picked up by critics after the fact, rather than

something which was provenanced from within critical circles in Paris. A contemporary writer said In M. Courbet art makes itself part of the people (Peisse in Clark p134). This implies a kind of X factor, peoples vote effect which has gone on to inform authoritative opinion and represents the way the painting is viewed in a social context being taken as one of its functioning components as an art work. We can contrast these broad ranging contextually driven readings with that of modernist Michael Fried. Frieds divination of the stonebreakers in the chapter painter into painting (Fried 1990) is hard to swallow to a contemporary ear. Like a circus fortune teller swirling tea leaves he delves into Courbets unconscious, or dowses for hidden significances, suggesting the that curved stonemason are spelling the letters G and C with their bodies, or that they represent a fixation with the artists left and right hands. The exact role of these theories is unclear, they are presented with veiled reference to their unprovability but still with a certain authority perhaps like a psychoanalysts prescription. Interestingly, it is the modernist Fried, who seems to provide a pre cursor to the concerns of current art historians and subjectivity. As a modernist, he writes about the painter beholders gaze almost as one of the materials used by the artist. The term painter beholder which combines the a rtist viewing the work both during and after production with any subsequent viewer is very interesting and seems a more productive construction than Barthes fatal splitting of the roles. The artist is both author and first viewer, and subsequent viewers contribute to a reauthoring. Fried has since come out as a poet, but this strange chapter which begins with a startlingly forensic and apparently scientific analysis of the composition and observable formal characteristics of the painting and then leaps into an abyss of lyrical conjecture is heady. Reading it is like being whisked from an operating theatre to a sance. How real is real. Realism, mimetic realism, as a tool is often underestimated. It is easy to assume that the sole ambition of artists who use it is to create an illusion of a view through a window; to perform a conjuring trick or to attempt objectivity. Most realism edges towards hyperrealism in that observed reality is tweaked in one direction or another to suit aesthetic or political ends. At the time the stonebreakers was made, the genres decreed where one might creditably find inspiration. Courbet turned away from that and looked for it locally. Castagnary describes the life sized scale of after dinner at Ornans as being as if they were mythological characters. This would have appeared outrageous to t he salon public. Due to a pathological dislike of institutions, Courbet was essentially self taught and did not align himself with any atelier. His imagery and approach are haphazard and collaged, with elements that are deeply rooted in popular art (Nochlin). Again, this collaging and appropriation is very modern and suits a viewer with todays sensibilities if we could only recognise where the seams are. Courbets contemporaries equated his paintings at once with photographs (which would seem to refer to their extreme realism) and to popular prints, shop signs, or circus paintings (Chu 1977) It seems particularly apropos that the first serious art that Courbet experienced as a small boy (according to his close friend and biographer Jules Antoine Castagnary) was a set of crappy copies of works by Jean Antoine Gros done by his school art teacher who was an inferior student of the master, forced into provincial tutoring through financial disgrace. Castagnary quotes Courbet as saying To translate the customs, the ideas, and the whole aspect of my time: In one word to make living art that is my goal. The stonebreakers was exhibited during a backlash against the Republic and so couldnt have been worse timed. It was made after Courbet had been given a medal for a scene for Ornan so had gone back to make a few more frankly, after having dithered about on the sidelines of the fighting of 1857 in a decidedly unrevolutionary bourgeois manner. Courbet is quoted as saying that making verses is dishonest; talking differently from every body else is posing as an aristocrat (Chu 1977, p3). Perversely, what made this painting scary in part, and one of the features that gives people cause to call Courbet the true father of modernism, is the relative lack of narrative within the painting itself. The usual devices to steer the viewer towards a safe categorisation of the scene have not been

employed. These people are too close to the viewer, not close enough to each other, not related to the landscape in cosy peasanthood, or composed in harmonious brotherhood. These are two individuals leaving almost no trace but having no truck with the viewer particularly apart from an almost overbearing presence. How dare they. Art Writing / Writing about Art In 2013, something from the eighties (significantly older than most of my fellow students) wears the new label somewhat incongruously. What might be a more convincing candidate for the badge would be the recent attempts, highlighted in the 2011 special spring issue of the journal of art history, to explore the field of art writing and its potential for art historians what the editor Catherine Grant described in her introduction to the journal as a new self consciousness. Gavin Parkinson in his essay blind summit and narrative voice (Parkinson 2011 ) calls for work to be done on the language and syntax of art writing to bring the writing close to the act of viewing. Writers such as Parkinson, Adrian Rifkin and George Baker (for example Baker 2010) experiment with making the experience and narrative of the art writer much more explicit, and to snuff out any potential lingering whiff of authority. When I read TJ Clarks beautiful questioning of our ability to ever understand what the word ugliness might mean to a 19 th century Frenchman, and compare that with Parkinsons writing, I feel as if humility and authority are more subtly interrelated than Parkinson might assume, and conversely that greater flexibility awarded to the composition within a piece of writing of the relative statuses of the different narratives; possibly to foreground that of the authors personal internal mental processes, might create a climate for a new kind of arrogance. Artists writing about art, writing as art and writers writing about art, are all looking to better align the tools of their trade to the job in hand. In some ways the courage or ignorance of Courbet in that regard might provide an interesting model. He crossed boundaries and conflated languages in ways which at times seemed politically naive to the point of ridiculousness (he swapped iconic image of the female Justice for a male bourgeois with a smock over his suit something akin to swapping an image of Nelson Mandela for one of Nick Clegg in drag)),and yet somehow in this complex and none too self aware character, forces were at play which led him quite sure footedly to a clash of languages and hybrid reality as hostile to easy interpretation as anything Derrida might dream of. There has been a backlash to an extent against art theoretical readings of art history, or a perception that art history is over theorised (Butt 2008) and an exploration of how writing about art can use fiction, subjectivity and multiple perspectives for example to access knowledge and information about what it is to experience an art work that needs to be so described. My own art work is a negotiated practice. In that sense I work with my audience to agree a subject matter and to explore ideas around it. The relationship relies on my being clear about what my role is, a role which differs slightly but crucially from many residency models. It harks back to the APG and John Lathams incidental person. In that sense, my role is only to be an artist. I hang about and strike up conversations and wait until something happens or is said that I feel holds a certain power. In that sense the art making is not very overt. The subject / audience are made aware of my function and I make people aware that if I ask to talk to them there may well be an art product at some point along the way. During conversations however, art making is not mentioned explicitly and people are encouraged to explain things to me in their own words. When I sidle back a few days or weeks later with an art proposal, so far most people have been extremely positive about the result. There is a clarity, a precision and an almost sterile set of boundaries around the different parts of the process which I have set up to protect the protagonists and also conversely to allow full power to each stage. I have developed this as a personal solution to narrative and to audience, seeking to find a way to make art that is relevant to an audience in a real way, but that in seeking that does not lose the qualities of art that make it interesting to me in terms of invention and conflation of associations. My practice has been developed as a meeting place for artist, subject and audience which is sensitive both to what we do know and what we dont know and what I dont say is equally if not more important than what I do. I recently attempted (Drye 2013) to write about a set of protagonists as an alternative method and as part of my study of art writing. I found that the English language in my incapable hands was far too linear and implied far too banal a consecutiveness to ideas and events. In the

hands of fiction writers like Douglas Coupland or for that matter historians like TJ Clark or John Berger however, layers and complexities can be achieved. I think what I like about the stonebreakers is that it illustrates so beautifully and materially the idea that we can never know the whole picture that we can never pin a narrative down and set it in stone. Objects have a life story which is a network of ever developing possibilities, with some being irrevocably lost to us. By completely removing the physical object, a war time bomber ensured that we would never be able to become complacent about that incompleteness and mystery are unavoidably present. I would like to see a Courbet retrospective keep a piece of wall blank for the Stonebreakers to give an art audience pause for reflection on the nature of narrative and knowledge.

Bibliography

Fried Michael. Courbets Realism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990 Clark Timothy J. Image of the People, London: Thames and Hudson, 1973 Rubin, James Henry. Realism and Social Vision in Courbet and Proudhon, Guildford: Princeton University Press, 1980 Herding, Klaus. Courbet, To Venture Independence, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1991 Doesschate Chu, Petra. Courbet in Perspective, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1977 Lilley, Ed. Lost work of art, the problem and a case study , Art History Vol. 23 No. 3 September 2000 pp. 396-416
Parkinson, Gavin. Blind Summit, Art Writing, Narrative, Middle Voice, Art History Vol 34 No.2 March 2011 pp 268 287

Baker, George. Leather and Lace. October, January 1 2010. Butt, Gavin. Frontmatter, in After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance , Oxford: Blackwell 2008 Drye, Emma. Spoiler Alert, published online at www.mywidfesabigfanofyours.wordpress.com 2013 Nochlin, Linda. The Politics of Vision, London: Thames and Hudson 1991

The above essay has also been published as part of a collection on the website below: http://firsttherewasamountainthentherewasnomountain.wordpress.com/