Courbet, Burial at Ornans

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Courbet, Burial at Ornans발음듣기

We're at the Musee D'Orsay and we're looking at Gustave Courbet's gigantic canvas "The Burial at Ornans."발음듣기

It was painted in 1849-1850 and exhibited the next year.발음듣기

This is the funeral of Courbet's great uncle.발음듣기

Courbet came from a relatively wealthy family in this relatively small town in France but close to the Swiss border.발음듣기

Right, I think we just read it had about three thousand people in it at that time so it's a really small town.발음듣기

We're looking at a group of people where everyone knows each other, so these long-standing ties.발음듣기

We see the cliffs are very typical of this area of France. He's pushed all of the figures really close to us, it's almost like a classical frieze in the way in which the figures play across this shallow foreground, and they're forced forward at least optically by those cliffs.발음듣기

And what that does is it means that these figures which are a little bit bigger than life-size in reality are really available to us and it's not an idealized representation of what a funeral would be but it is all of the distractions of a funeral, of an actual funeral.발음듣기

And I think we all know what that feels like.발음듣기

So these are very specific people.발음듣기

If exhibited in the salon it would have someone heroic who had died, and the sky would open up and there would be a sense of the afterlife.발음듣기

There would be a sense of redemption and here there isn't that promise of redemption, but to me the redemption although it doesn't lie in Christ, lies somewhere else.발음듣기

So the redemption is his faith in these people, his faith in the real.발음듣기

Because of course Courbet was removing that classicism and saying the art that is authentic, the art that is an expression of what we actually experience, that art is true and this was the heart of realism and of Courbet's project.발음듣기

What's interesting though is the representation of Christ as a sculpture carried by one of the clergymen amongst the people who are going about the business of the funeral, carrying the coffin, reading from the Bible, and officiating in general.발음듣기

The sense of the coffin moving in from the left, its imminence in the grave feels much more palpable to me, separated only by the figure who's officiating there at the graveside and some small children.발음듣기

But there's a real sense of this community in that we have children, lots of children, and there's old people and middle-aged people and a dog.발음듣기

But Courbet is not creating that photographic realism at all.발음듣기

He's creating a synthetic realism. The dog chancing by becomes kind of an emblem for the sense of destructiveness, the chaos, the actuality of a moment.발음듣기

There's something very poignant to me about this community coming together for this funeral, for a long-standing member of the community, and the way it almost functions as a modern memento mori.발음듣기

Death comes to all of us, and all we have in a way is our moment, our time, our community.발음듣기

Courbet, I think, underscores that in a number of ways.발음듣기

First of all there's real beauty to the way he's rendering these figures, but there's also a discarded skull at the edge of that hole in the ground, which seems as if it had been dug up absentmindedly when they dug this fresh grave.발음듣기

And that skull, a reminder of course of the more traditional paintings of Golgotha and Christ, of the crucifixion, but here this notion that there was somebody else who died who has now been forgotten.발음듣기

In the extreme right, there's the face of a child, and that paint is so black that the face floats in space.발음듣기

There is this quality of thinking about the nature of selfhood and of our own mortality that is very poignant.발음듣기

Because we don't have that typical composition which would have focused us on a main heroic figure and there's instead this kind of democracy of attention where everyone is getting their own portrait.발음듣기

Each person is in the private space of their own mind at this moment of a funeral, thinking about mortality but at the same time thinking about maybe dinner. I would argue that there are two things going on.발음듣기

I think you're absolutely right. There is that individual that is represented here, that was so important to Courbet.발음듣기

But at the same time there's a kind of type, as well, and that is still here.발음듣기

There's the clergy. There's the town officials. There are the women going about their traditional role weeping and mourning.발음듣기

There are the children who may be distracted but are also representing beauty and youth, and a kind of innocence.발음듣기

And so there are still types at work but he is transcending those types with that individual experience.발음듣기

This was shown first in Ornans itself and then in the Paris salon where people were just astounded.발음듣기

What was this thing that Courbet was showing?발음듣기

Well, I mean it broke every rule.발음듣기

And it didn't look like how art was supposed to look, certainly at this scale.발음듣기

It wasn't composed. It had no redemptive message it wasn't ideal.발음듣기

It wasn't the right kind of subject. I mean, it wasn't right in any way.발음듣기

The people who posed for this, some scholars have suggested felt ridiculed by the Parisians but for Courbet that notion of the rural was in fact much more authentic without the polish, and in a sense without the falseness that urban culture had developed.발음듣기

And of course Courbet's whole idea is to paint the real and the concrete and to turn his back on Romanticism and that kind of emotion and to paint things, I think the famous thing is, "Show me an angel and I'll paint one."발음듣기

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