Page 53 - Courbet

feelings are expressed through a delicate use of colour and skilled brushwork, yet when examined closely that
brushwork also reveals its materiality. Even if Courbet’s love of women seems exploitative and questionable, or
even basely ordinary by today’s mores, his ability to express its physical aspects was extraordinary.

When it came to landscape, Courbet used his palette knife, as Cézanne pointed out, like a mason to build
walls of stone and webs of branches and foliage that impinge on and seem to surround the viewer physically.
It is as if Courbet had invented a new way of seeing which engages the entire body in addition to the eye. I
call it ‘seeing with the body’. Courbet was conscious of his novelty, although he might not have described it as I
have.72 However, an account of Courbet’s activity by one of his greatest admirers, Jules Castagnary, shows an
understanding of this principle without naming it as such:

‘He discovered virgin territories where no one had yet set foot, and aspects of landscape forms one
could say were unknown before him.He scaled open heights where the lungs breathe freely; he descended
into mysterious caverns; he was curious to discover unnamed places and unknown refuges. Each time
he plunged in this way into the heart of deepest nature, he was like a man who passed through a beehive
and emerged covered with honey: he returned loaded with perfumes and poetry. He descended into the
crevices where springs are born from the oozing of rocks; he saw drops of water combine and let little
silver waterfalls flow through his fingers, watched the transparent stream run over its sandy bed among
stones and mosses. No one has ever painted this living, trembling humidity with such frank and accurate
strokes. One cannot contemplate The Stream of the BlackWell, The Source of the Loue or The Covered Stream,
all these fresh and brilliant landscapes, where grey boulders, green foliage, and rushing waters combine
in so many successful ways, without feeling a fresh breeze full in the face.’73

Castagnary’s statement mostly speaks for itself except that one should notice his emphasis on Courbet’s
penetration to the heart of nature and his tactile experiences of it – psychologically charged concepts. In the
end these features produce an effect on the viewer’s body – a fresh breeze on the face. It is as if seeing with the
body is the guarantee of authenticity and the key to producing effects that resonate beyond the visual.Although
Courbet’s painting is often associated with the concurrent philosophy of Positivism, which focuses on surfaces,
its relation to all the bodily senses suggests there is much more.74

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