earticle

영어

Courbet’s landscape was mostly created from 1855 to the four-year period of his exile in Switzerland and occupied the two third of his entire oeuvre. Landscape is important for shaping the artist’s subjectivity, aesthetic, and commercial strategy, but its rich significance has received insufficient attention in scholarship. Many critics and scholars consider Courbet’s turn from rural subjects to landscape as a betrayal of the Realist causes of social concerns and as tailoring to the market demand. This article discusses how Courbet’s landscape paintings achieve the dual goals of “truth to self” and “truth to nature” by departing from the depiction of rural labors and instilling emotional and aesthetic experience and environmental identity. There are three chief modes of representation at work: a positivist observation of material phenomenon and natural evolution; a visual recollection of body experience and local consciousness; an allegory of human condition derived from an understanding of nature as unbound desire and transient existence.