Page 54 - Courbet

SEEING WITH THE BODY

C ourbet rejected convention to pursue multiple sexual affairs rather than marriage; he preferred
perpetuation of his name through artistic celebrity rather than through family. Is seeing with the body
then, his instinctive answer to the erotic needs he found defeated in his relationship with Virginie?
What is most interesting is how those desires, their frustrations and their satisfactions are channelled into a way
of seeing and painting. In addressing nature defiantly, Courbet was both challenging forces that he could not
control and yet making them his source of artistic inspiration, arriving if not at a synthesis at least at a dialogue.
This duality is typical of the two sides to masculinity: the competitive drive to dominate and yet the desire to
find shelter in the protective mother.

Seeing with the body underlies every aspect of Courbet’s art. It is what made his work uniquely provocative,
performative and modern. It was not nudity itself, but its contemporary physicality that was shocking. And so
while sexual drive is an important factor in his art, it is part of a more encompassing story. Sexual imagery and
masculinist rhetoric are symptomatic of the individual’s struggle to maintain identity and dignity in a world in
which the ideology of freedom is a convincing call to individuality yet which, at the same time, coexists with and
disguises powerful constraints – social, economic and political. Although Courbet was hardly the only person
to experience these forces early in his career, as pressures regarding marriage and rejections by the Salon juries
mounted he maintained ambitions and convictions that were able to make his disappointments productive. His
works embody a love of life – even if sometimes frustrated – which, although expressed in ways that are not
necessarily edifying to us, engaged the plenitude of his masculine self. For Courbet the resolution of desires
and angst was to make himself one with the world.

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I have taken the reader very far from Courbet’s small and exquisite Mother and Child on a Hammock.Yet it
has never been absent from my mind.The many ways it fits into Courbet’s career and biography enriches
our understanding of the picture without diminishing its uniqueness. It also adds to our understanding of
Courbet’s subsequent career. In my opinion, no future monograph on Courbet will be able to ignore this small
painting, not only as a first-rate example of skills that Courbet possessed from his very artistic inception, but as

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