Art: An Abiding Passion for Reality Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet has been seen for most of this century as the patriarch of the avant-garde ideal, a man both embodying his time and working in defiance of bourgeois taste: in short, a hero. He was born in 1819 the son of a farmer, lived as a socialist, and died in 1877 exiled in Switzerland, his paintings deemed unexhibitable in France on political grounds. In the end, Courbet was financially crushed by a judgment imposed on him by the French government of more than 300 million francs -- precisely the cost of re-erecting the Vendome Column, the imperial symbol for whose toppling, during the Paris Commune of 1871, he was unjustly blamed.

All that, and a painter of unassailable, though uneven, greatness! Courbet has become one of the titans of radical nostalgia. There cannot be a political artist alive who does not dream of having Courbet's sweeping breadth of access to the public. "Courbet Reconsidered," the show of 97 paintings and drawings, organized by the art historians Sarah Faunce and Linda Nochlin, currently at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City (and scheduled to open at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in February), is not, and could not have been, a "complete" show. But it is the first attempt by an American museum to show Courbet whole in nearly 30 years.

Unlike the Courbet exhibition in Paris in 1977, it leaves out several of the most ambitious Second Empire paintings: A Burial at Ornans, The Meeting, The Bathers -- with its "Hottentot Venus," as one hostile critic called her, that waddling wardrobe of a nude that became the scandal of the 1853 Salon. Also missing is Courbet's "real allegory," The Painter's Studio, which hangs at the Musee d'Orsay. Such things can no longer be moved. Without them, can a Courbet retrospective make full sense? Emphatically yes. The character of Courbet the painter is richly distributed through his work, not just in its most famous images; in any case, the curators have secured other magisterial works from French museums, such as his great image of lesbian love, Sleep, 1866, and The Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (Summer), 1856-57.

Every aspect of his work is thoroughly set on view in Brooklyn: landscape, portraiture, animal painting, social commentary, erotica. And from them Courbet rises more vividly and intensely now than ever before in living memory, at least in America. Courbet -- this combative, ambitious, narcissistic and earthy man, crazy about women, convinced of his own historical mission -- thought he was the painter of his time. His egotism still grates. What school did he belong to? "I am Courbetist, that's all. My painting is the only true one. I am the first and unique artist of the century; the others are students or drivelers."

Without this battleship of an ego, Courbet would hardly have survived the attacks of the critics of his day. What was realism to his enemies? Atheism, socialism, materialism, crudity: a denial of all decent control. An audience that doted on the rococo peasant had insuperable difficulties with Courbet's frieze of worn faces and homespun black suits in Burial at Ornans, 1850. He painted, someone gibed, the way one waxed boots. He was seen as a dangerous socialist, a besmircher of the ideal, a bucolic thug from the Franche-Comte trampling all over the classical tradition with his wooden clogs.