The burial of Romanticism

Courbet, who never in his life under-explained his own importance, later wrote — or is at least widely recorded as having said — that the Burial was, in fact, “the burial of Romanticism.” (There is no single dated letter pinning the line down; it survives as strong secondary-source consensus, so take it as a remark genuinely his, not a quote anyone invented.) It is one of the great double meanings in art history, and worth unfolding slowly, because it is the key to why this particular painting is treated as the public birth of a movement rather than just a big sad picture.

A painting of a burial — and what it buries, he says, is not only his great-uncle but an entire way of making art.

To get the line you have to know what was in the coffin. Romanticism (the generation of painting just before Courbet) was, the Realism overview explains, the academy’s opposite excess: exotic settings, heaving drama, shipwrecks and harems and battlefield agony, emotion cranked to the ceiling. Where the academy painted cold marble gods, the Romantics painted hot fevered passion. They were enemies of each other, but from Courbet’s point of view they were the same enemy: both were ways of not painting the actual, ordinary, present-tense world. One escaped into antiquity; the other escaped into drama. Neither would deign to paint a Tuesday in Ornans.

So when Courbet says the Burial buried Romanticism, he means this flat, gray, unbeautiful, undramatic, completely real funeral is the thing that kills the fever dream. You cannot look at this hole in the ground, this bored dog, these double chins, and still believe art’s only proper business is gods and shipwrecks. The painting does not argue against Romanticism. It simply stands there being real at enormous scale, and makes the alternative look like costume drama.

It helps that Courbet was not theorizing alone. The philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon(1809–1865) — an Ornans man himself, and France’s most famous radical thinker — was Courbet’s friend and intellectual partner for years, and read Courbet’s painting as social truth-telling, art with a public conscience. The self-understanding behind “the burial of Romanticism” was sharpened in that company, not generated in a vacuum.

The Realism overview tells the famous later moment: 1855, the Pavilion of Realism, the tent Courbet built across from the world’s fair with a printed catalogue inside, the place where Realism finally got its name in writing and its argument on paper. That is where Realism became a stated program.

But the Burial came five years earlier, and it made the argument with no words at all. It is the movement’s public birth as a fact before it was a public birth as a theory. In 1850, before there was a tent or a catalogue or the word “Realism” on a sign, there was already a ten-foot wall of plain reality hanging in the official Salon, forcing every visitor in France to deal with it. The painting did the work a manifesto does — declared what art was now allowed to be about — except it declared it in oil instead of ink, and it declared it inside the enemy’s own building. The tent of 1855 put Realism into words. The Burial of 1850 had already put it on the wall.

Step back and the size of the rupture is clear. Before the Burial, the question “what is a serious painting allowed to be about?” had an official answer, ranked and policed: gods at the top, the present at the bottom. After the Burial — and after the fight it started — that answer was permanently in doubt. Courbet had proved, on the largest possible canvas, in the most public possible room, that the ordinary contemporary world could carry the full weight and scale of the grandest art. He did not single-handedly cause everything that followed (the honest version resists hanging a whole century on one canvas). But the crack he opened — the present is a fit subject for serious art, at any scale a painter dares — is the crack the rest of modern painting pours through.