Gustave Courbet

"Creator of defiantly anti-official art, French realist painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) insisted on the right of artists to be independent witnesses to the truth of their own time. This attitude, according to Faunce, lies at the heart of our own concept of the modern. Faunce, curator of European painting and sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum, has written a fresh, timely reassessment of an artist who still looks contemporary. Courbet coined the...