This Month's Message from the Director

Back to Now at the Met

Philippe de Montebello, director, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Gustave Courbet, the self-proclaimed "most arrogant man in France," led a colorful career punctuated by both acclaim and scandal. A painter of portraits and still lifes, landscapes and seascapes, hunting scenes and nudes, Courbet became one of the richest and most famous artists in Paris—recognized as much for his talent as for his well-publicized rebellion against the authority of the art establishment and the state.

It is with great pleasure that the Metropolitan Museum now presents "Gustave Courbet", the first full retrospective of the French artist in thirty years. The exhibition features some 130 works by this pioneering figure in the history of modernism, accompanied by a selection of nineteenth-century photographs that relate to his work, especially his landscapes and nudes. Uniting works from public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad, the exhibition includes virtually all of the masterpieces that the artist produced in the course of his career.

Courbet was only twenty-five years old when the first of his paintings, a small, Romantic self-portrait by the handsome artist, was accepted into the Salon of 1844. Some years later, at the Salon of 1851, Courbet subverted academic convention with his painting A Burial at Ornans (Musée d'Orsay), which represented scenes of daily life in the artist's native Ornans on the large scale reserved for history painting and—much to the shock of the artist's contemporaries—in an emphatically realistic style. In 1855, Courbet exhibited a group of his modern subject paintings—including his gigantic canvas The Painter's Studio—in the Pavilion of Realism, which he gleefully constructed in opposition to the Salon that year, and published a "Manifesto of Realism" in conjunction with his infamous one-man show. At the Salon of 1866, Courbet once again generated public scandal with his Woman with a Parrot (now in the Metropolitan Museum's collection), which marked the artist's Realist challenge to the idealized female nudes that proliferated at the Salons in Paris during the Second Empire. Courbet was equally innovative as a landscape painter. His expressive renderings of the rugged terrain of his native Franche-Comté as well as his views of the Normandy coastline signal his radical approach to the genre and brought him great critical and popular success. We are most grateful for the support of the Janice H. Levin Fund, which has helped to make this exhibition possible, as well as to our colleagues and co-organizers at the Réunion des Musées Nationaux and the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, and the Communauté d'agglomération de Montpellier/Musée Fabre, Montpellier. We also owe thanks to the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities for providing an indemnity.

On a final—or, perhaps more accurately, a semifinal—note, just as this Calendar was going to press I announced my decision to retire from the Metropolitan Museum at the end of this year, or when a successor is named. After spending more than three decades as director of this extraordinary institution, it is with a vast range of emotions that I relinquish the reins: admiration for the dedication and professionalism of the staff at all levels; personal pride for having been given the privilege to lead a world-class cultural institution; optimism for the Museum's future; and, ultimately, gratitude for the support of our Members, sponsors, foundations, government agencies, and all the other individuals and institutions who have made my tenure here so immensely satisfying.