Into the Woods and Out on a Limb

Courbet Landscapes Get an Unorthodox, And Unsettling, Treatment at Walters

BALTIMORE -- 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.