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Into the Woods and Out on a Limb
Gustave Courbet's "The Gust of Wind," circa 1865, one of the painter's rough-hewn works at the Walters Art Museum.
(Museum Of Fine Arts, Houston)
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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 Cézanne, 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.
Courbet and the Modern Landscape already has been shown, although in different form, at the J. Paul Getty Museum in California and at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. It will remain at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, 600 N. Charles St., through Jan. 7. The Walters is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and until 8 p.m. on Fridays. For information call 410-547-9000 or visit http:/
