Into the Woods and Out on a Limb
Courbet Landscapes Get an Unorthodox, And Unsettling, Treatment at Walters

By Paul Richard
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, Nov. 5, 2006

The Count of Nieuwerkerke was appalled. Landscapes painted in the woods were sprouting up like weeds in the garden of French art, and now the count had had enough. Since the emperor himself had charged him with defending the good taste of the nation, the count felt compelled to speak.

"This art," he said with hauteur in 1855, "displeases and disgusts me."

Having just encountered 37 of those pictures in "Courbet and the Modern Landscape" at the Walters Art Museum, I know sort of how he felt. Their exhibition appalled me.

It is not the landscapes' fault. All competent authorities agree Courbet's are wonderful. It's the way they've been installed by curator Eik Kahng.

Where to start?

All the landscapes and the seascapes in Kahng's Courbet exhibit come with background music. Half a dozen students at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University composed the sound "interpretations" of the pictures on the walls. The art is 19th-century. The music, in sharp contrast, is distinctly 21st. It tends to hum and bleep, and sounds computer-tweaked.

Similarly newfangled is the lighting Kahng commissioned from Baltimore's Paul Deeb -- which casts shadows on the floor, and keeps shifting right before your eyes, and spotlights Courbet's snow scenes so severely that they shine like color slides projected on a screen.

Speaking of snow scenes, Kahng has hung her show not chronologically but seasonally, or sort of seasonally. The galleries are labeled Winter, Summer, Fall and Spring, not because she's interested in the theme of the Four Seasons (she isn't, nor was he), and not because his landscapes group themselves to show the turning of the year (they don't), but just because. The "Spring" pictures she has chosen sometimes show the rusts and reds of autumn; the "Fall" paintings, just as disconcertingly, might show spring flowers. "It is," acknowledges the museum's curator of 18th- and 19th-century art, "an arbitrary conceit."

As soon as Kahng's show started, my heart began to sink. Then I started thinking: She has an arts degree from Princeton, and a PhD from Berkeley, and is clearly very smart, and hey, maybe I've been tricked.

Courbet, after all, hated doing things the safe way. He scorned what he dismissed as "the ideal of the conventional." And he didn't mind a hostile press. "When I am no longer controversial," he said in 1852, "I will no longer be important." Maybe he'd have liked this oddball installation. Maybe he'd have been on her side, not on mine.

Take that trope of the Four Seasons. It dates to late antiquity, to the frescoes of Pompeii, as the Count of Nieuwerkerke no doubt would have known. So what's it doing here?

The rough-hewn Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) didn't give a fig for Latinate allusions. You can see that in his pictures, which are macho and immediate, and pretend that they were painted roughly, and at speed, out there in the wilds where only he-men go. In no sense are they classical.

Courbet's groves and grottoes "are afflicted," wrote one scholar, "with an aggravated nymphlessness."

This the count despised. The high purpose of the artist was to paint what he imagined. Coarse naturalists content with depicting what they saw were not noble painters but, instead, mere vulgarians, men in muddy boots blind to the ideal.

Courbet wasn't bothered by putdowns of that kind. Indeed he played the part.

On the boulevards of Paris he came across as a mountain man. His shirt was a bold check. His boots were workman's boots. He smoked a stubby pipe, drank huge amounts of beer, bragged about his hunting.

This was startling enough. More startling were his surfaces. For Courbet applied his colors with a bendy steel palette knife, scraping at his canvases, smearing them and thumbing them. Let other lesser artists fiddle with their itty-bitty brushes, their thin translucent glazes, their delicate French curves. Courbet would have none of it. His battle cry was "shout loud and walk straight."

An atheist, a democrat, that burly and pugnacious man thought himself a radical tribune of the people. Accused of vandalizing a monument in the hot days of the Commune when the radicals took over Paris, he was forced to flee from France and died an exile in Switzerland -- but enough of all that history. Kahng's show makes no attempt to rehash that well-known story.

His craggy and robust proto-modern landscapes prefigure those of Cezanne, but she does not explore that, either.

There are no wall-texts in the galleries of Eik Kahng's exhibition. They might have seemed a crutch. She wants to cleanse our minds of aesthetic preconceptions, and of accepted notions of the noble art museum. In this regard, at least, her intent, and Courbet's, seem pretty much the same.

The Post's Michael O'Sullivan had this to say about the Courbet exhibit:

If, however, you're looking for French painting with a little zing, I'd suggest checking out the Walters Art Museum's "Courbet and the Modern Landscape." While better known for his monumental figurative pictures, Courbet was, as the tightly focused show illustrates, no slouch in the landscape department, despite that his efforts in this genre have been traditionally dismissed by historians and critics as dashed-off hack work from a cash-strapped painter.

Divided into four small, seasonally themed galleries, the show is notable less for its central thesis -- that Courbet, with his loosely expressive brushwork and deft use of the palette knife, was a forerunner of modernism -- than for its singular, and highly effective, presentation of the material.

Forgoing extensive wall labels for a stripped-down look, and using color-coordinated paint in each room (yellow for spring, light rose for autumn, cool blue for winter and the palest of greens for summer), "Courbet" also makes use of dramatic lighting effects by designer Paul Deeb that vary from room to room and even dim and brighten as you stand in front of each painting. Each room also has its own ambient music soundtrack composed by students at the nearby Peabody Institute.

While the lighting modulation is less than seamless, causing a barely perceptible flicker as you linger at each picture, the overall effect is stunning. The darkened "winter" room, in particular, with its six spotlighted canvases that seem to glow like windows into an alternate universe of snow-covered hush, feels almost chapel-like. And the music, whose volume was still being tweaked during a press walk-through, adds a subtle level of emotional connection to the art.

Taking their cues from lists of adjectives provided by the Walters's curatorial staff -- autumn's soundtrack, for instance, was, ideally, "melancholic, dark, damp and primordial," according to curator Eik Kahng -- the show's composers, and the museum's bold administration, have embarked on what remains, at heart, an experiment. Less than perfect, but far more than a gimmick, the bold, innovative packaging of "Courbet and the Modern Landscape" proves that there are still new ways to look at old pictures.