Image of the People. Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution

THE FASHION for 'art and revolution' continues, and so does the effort to prove, more or less a priori, that art has nothing to do with politics. Mr Clark has written a study of the art of Gustave Courbet in the years directly after the 1848 revolution. He has aimed to rescue Courbet from the legends of the Right and Left: to destroy the image of Courbet the amiable buffoon, mixed up in politics to his own detriment; but to show also how complex was Courbet's intuition of the social and political issues of the time, and how exactly appropriate were the pictures he painted for the Salon of 1851 - the Burial at Ornans, the Sonebreakers and the Peasants of Flagey.