REALISM UNCLOTHED

GUSTAVE COURBET, WOMAN WITH A PARROT, 1866

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

‘Witchy’ is the first word that comes to mind. There’s something redolent of witchcraft about Gustave Courbet’s Woman with a Parrot, this image of a full-length nude reclining on her couch and communing with an avian familiar. Surely she is some pagan priestess resting after vague labors, lying in her tent in the wilderness and letting her hair flow out in snaky tendrils. She is a figure of fantasy, we might think, one of those exotic concoctions cooked up for the crowds at the Paris Salon, a plump, delectable little number painted to decorate a banker’s wall. If the work were signed by Thomas Couture we wouldn’t give it a second glance; we’d simply file it away in a folder labeled ‘Forgettable French Art’ and move on the next gallery. But this is Courbet; surely the arch-Realist who painted Burial at Ornans and The Stone Breakers hasn’t completely sold out to the Salon. We begin to doubt our impressions and look again. A second glance is crucial here, because only then do we notice that the woman is smiling. This changes everything. Her strange, inverted smile blows our first impression away and transports us from the dark woods of witchcraft to a sunlit space of spontaneous joy. What we thought was Romantic melodrama becomes a Realist snapshot. We are in an artist’s studio, the woman is a model, her discarded clothes are piled in the foreground, and she is reacting with unself-conscious delight to the parrot that has just flown from its perch to her hand. It is an image of pure sensuality, completely hedonistic and–for its time–startlingly real. This is Courbet, alright; and the old Generalissimo of Realism hasn’t defected to the enemy. Instead, he has decided to beat the Salon painters at their own game.

Nineteenth-century Europe’s attitude toward artistic nudes was similar to its attitude toward women in general: they were perfectly acceptable, as long as they followed the rules. These rules, inculcated in the life classes that were the basis of every artist’s training, insisted upon idealization. Bodies were to be flawless, flesh pale, pubes shaved and poses classical. The more a woman looked like a bad Roman copy of a Greek statue, the better. And to create such prodigies, artists pushed their technical skills to an unprecedented level. Neither before nor since have artists painted the nude with the technical proficiency of the late nineteenth-century French academicians, and therein lies the problem. Like locomotives, telegraphs and electric lights, Salon nudes were a triumph of nineteenth-century technology. They are the most Apollonian nudes in the history of art, their Dionysian potential all but erased by the perfection of technique. At their worst they have a cloying sentimentality, and at their best, a doll-like unreality. They are bloodless and weightless, flesh without carnality, the dangerous female body drained of sexuality and made completely unthreatening, ‘sanitized for your protection.’ They are impeccably crafted fantasy figures, but the fantasy is getting tired, the poses becoming monotonous. By the 1860's, when Courbet painted Woman with a Parrot, the Salon nudes of Cabanel and Bougereau were little more than risque wallpaper for Second Empire boudoirs.

And as such, as commodities that pandered to fashionable taste, academic nudes were greatly admired. It is humbling to anyone with strong opinions about art to consider how dramatically tastes can change over the course of a single century. The painters who were all the rage at the Paris Salons of the 1860's were by the 1960's known only to specialists, and their works were consigned to the storage rooms of the world’s art museums. At the same time, painters like Courbet and Manet, whose works were ridiculed at the Salons (Manet’s Olympia was even ridiculed by Courbet!), are now unanimously accepted as the major artists of their day. While some of this reversal of fortune is due to the narrative of art history enshrined in museums and textbooks that posits Courbet and Manet as the first real avant-garde artists and the progenitors of so much that became Modernism, the internal weakness of academic art must also play a necessary role. An art based on the unclothed female body that requires the erasure of female sexuality cannot last for long; the internal contradiction is simply too great. On a more basic level, the style exhausted itself because perfection is a dead end road. Technically perfect and perfectly lifeless, the academic nude left artists with nowhere to go but back–back to the Classical paradigms to repeat the same perfect poses again and again ad infinitum. When the monotony inherent in all perfection is added to the perfected blandness of the Salon nude, it becomes apparent that nineteenth-century academic art, like an anorexic teenager, died of its own weightlessness.

This is the context in which we must place Woman with a Parrot. Only when we imagine it hanging on a wall filled floor to ceiling with academic paintings can we understand why some Salon viewers accused Courbet of tastelessness and vulgarity. For while this painting may appear to our eyes to be a nod to academic fashion (Kenneth Clark calls it "as artificial in conception as the vulgarest Salon favorite."¹), it is in fact a profoundly non-academic work. Rather than finding a human form for an ethereal ideal, Courbet sets himself the very different problem of reconciling erotic subject matter with his Realist principles. Mexican poet Octavio Paz calls eroticism the "poetry of the body"²; it is the imaginative transformation of sexual reality, just as poetry is the transformation of ordinary language. So one sees the dangers that eroticism, with its necessary imaginative element, poses to a strictly empirical realist like Courbet who proclaims, "...painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the presentation of real and existing things..."³ There will be no comely nymphs and horny satyrs in Courbet’s erotica, but the exclusion of tired neoclassical cliches doesn’t solve the deeper problem: how to combine the poetry of eroticism with the reality of human flesh. In the mid-1860's Courbet paints three erotic masterpieces, each of which tackles the problem from a different angle. In the painting known variously as Sleep or The Sleepers, he gives us one of art’s most beautiful portrayals of lesbian sex, but his stylized poses strain credulity. We wonder how anyone could actually sleep in such a position. In the more notorious The Origin of the World we have a cunnilinguist’s-eye view of female genitalia. It’s a lovely painting, a sexually radical work of art a century ahead of its time, but here Courbet’s Realism has the upper hand, and the image may be too gynecological to be genuinely erotic. In the end, Sleep doesn’t vanish into an Orientalist opium haze of Salon artifice and The Origin of the World is hardly as prosaic as Gray’s Anatomy, but the dangers are there. Courbet must navigate between the Scylla of the Salon nude and the Charybdis of anatomical illustration, and he executes this difficult maneuver nowhere more successfully than in the first of his three great erotic paintings, Woman with a Parrot.

Characteristically, Courbet finds his poetry not in the well-thumbed pages of Ovid but in the reality of human flesh. The woman’s strange pose, with inverted head and a torsion that turns her legs toward the viewer while her upper torso remains supine, emphasizes the curve of her hip–one of art’s oldest signs of femininity. The pose also extends this curve from the top of her forehead to the ends of her feet, generalizing the female sign over her entire being. This is the secret of the pose. Her whole body is like the curve of a pregnant belly or a rise of fertile earth. Her lower arm parallels the curve of her hip as it snakes down to hold the drapery over her crotch in a gesture vaguely reminiscent of the ancient Venus Pudica or its Renaissance progeny, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. (The gesture seems so natural, however, and Courbet’s art seems so sui generis, that we might miss the reference.) At the same time, the gesture emphasizes the image’s realism. The woman is holding in place a real drapery, not a convenient hank of hair or a branch of foliage blown into place by a censorious breeze. And even this gesture of concealment is also a sensual one; she both covers herself and touches herself, her fungertips lightly brushing her thigh. The arm and drapery also serve a more mundane but important compositional function: they conceal the contour of her right side, a line that might have strongly countered and diminished the powerful feminine curve of the rest of her body.

Courbet’s realistic approach to eroticism is most apparent at the woman’s right breast. It falls to one side with a soft weight so palpable that we can almost feel it in our hands. The smaller, more disciplined breasts of academic nudes don’t act like this, and we need look no further to understand why some critics at the 1866 Salon considered this painting tasteless. The breast has such a natural weight and shape that the viewer’s aesthetic detachment is compromised and he or she can only respond erotically. It’s a breast that begs to be touched, lifted in the palm of the hand, kissed. Far from tasteless, the breast is so real the viewer can almost taste it.

The glory of the painting, though, is that incredible halo of brown hair. It is literally glorious, a crowning achievement, a fetishistic delight. "[Courbet] painted hair..." says Robert Hughes, "as though he were running his fingers through it."⁴ Here, even more than at the breast, is an effect of synesthesia: you can feel the hair with your eyes, like the fabrics in a Holbein portrait. Just by looking, you can feel the smooth, silken texture of these tresses, carefully brushed in (the bristle marks of the brush representing individual strands of hair) and set off by contrast with the rough texture of the surrounding drapery. This crown of snake-like tendrils that at first made us think of Medusa flows out like water from a single source, reminding us of Courbet’s frequent association of nudes with rivers and streams. Water, too, is erotic, as necessary for generation as rich earth and a fertile body.

Just as the smooth texture of the hair is emphasized by the roughness of the drapery, the realistic weight of the woman’s body is beautifully countered by the relative weightlessness of her raised arm and the bird. This is an image of physical lightness: the bird whose flight defies gravity perched atop the curved arm that seems equally light. Is the arm supporting the parrot, we wonder, or is the bird (impossibly) lifting the arm? The parrot is this painting’s loveliest passage, an unexpected splash of vivid tropical color, a wild symbol of technicolor joy painted in broad strokes that suggest what Manet learned from Courbet. It’s tempting for the literary-minded to see a very modern Flaubertian irony here: the parrot, as in Flaubert’s A Simple Heart, can be interpreted as an ironically diminished stand-in for the dove of the Holy Spirit descending upon the Virgin at Annunciation. But such a reading misses the mark. The parrot is Nature with a capital N–wild, exotic, unpredictable. It is the Dionysian element that was excluded from academic art, and as such it can be understood as a symbol of sexuality, the part of nature that is in all of us. Even domesticated, the bird is unpredictable, spontaneous, and Courbet’s snapshot-like realism captures the spontaneity both of its flight from perch to hand and of the woman’s reaction, her unexpected and perfectly human smile.

This pleasure, this sensual delight in the bird, is at the heart of the painting’s meaning. In the sharpest contrast to all those frigid academic Venuses on the Salon walls, here is a painting about real human pleasure, about joy in the flesh. It’s about sexual pleasure, the pleasure of touching soft skin, of running a hand over the curve of a hip, of feeling the weight of a breast or the smoothness of hair. And it’s about the pleasure of beauty, of seeing a beautiful bird perched on your hand suddenly spread its wings, of seeing a beautiful, desirable body in a state of undress. This joy in sensual pleasure, this pure hedonism in and of the work, is the point of it all. By refusing to suppress the erotic, by observing and recording the real, and–not least–by displaying his own joy in the materials of oil paint, Courbet breathes life into a dying form and makes the nude human again.

Still, we have our doubts. An ambiguity lingers in the background of the painting. What is the background? Is it a tent opening onto a wooded landscape, or are we in an artist’s studio, in which case we see a drapery arranged behind a model and part of a landscape painting leaning against a back wall? Although I consider the ‘artist’s studio’ interpretation to be more in keeping with the realistic spirit of the painting, there is nothing in the work that resolves the ambiguity. The setting is an unsettled thing, kept in play, and its interpretation is a mirror of the interpreter’s temperament. If you see this painting as a piece of Orientalist exoticism, it’s a tent; if you see a Realist work, it’s a studio. Each interpretation is balanced on a knife edge and can easily collapse into the other. It’s almost as if Courbet leaves this final ambiguity as a kind of metaphor for the fine line he walked while creating the work, the line between realism and poetic eroticism, with the dangers of mundane illustration and Salon artificiality on either side. When he painted Woman with a Parrot, Courbet walked a tightrope; when we interpret it, so do we.

NOTES

1. Clark, The Nude, 163.

2. Paz, Double Flame, 2.

3. Qtd. in Nochlin, Realism, 23.

4. Hughes, Nothing, 99.

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