PREMIUM FEATURE
Advanced Search Filters
Filter search results by source, date, and more with our premium search tools.
Beauty, like truth, is a thing which is relative to the time in which one lives and to the individual capable of understanding it. The expression of … - Gustave Courbet
" "Beauty, like truth, is a thing which is relative to the time in which one lives and to the individual capable of understanding it. The expression of the beautiful bears a precise relation to the power of perception acquired by the artist.
English
Collect this quote
About Gustave Courbet
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet ( ; ; ; 10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877) was a French painter who led the Realism movement in 19th-century French painting. Committed to painting only what he could see, he rejected academic convention and the Romanticism of the previous generation of visual artists. His independence set an example that was important to later artists, such as the Impressionists and the Cubists. Courbet occupies an important place in 19th-century French painting as an innovator and as an artist willing to make bold social statements through his work. Courbet's paintings of the late 1840s and early 1850s brought him his first recognition. They challenged convention by depicting unidealized peasants and workers, often on a grand scale traditionally reserved for paintings of religious or historical subjects. Courbet's subsequent paintings were mostly of a less overtly political character: landscapes, seascapes, hunting scenes, nudes, and still lifes. Courbet was imprisoned for six months in 1871 for his involvement with the Paris Commune and lived in exile in Switzerland from 1873 until his death four years later.
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Jean Desire Gustave Courbet
•
Jean-Désiré-Gustave Courbet
•
Gi︠u︡stav Kurbe
•
Jean-Desire-Gustave Courbet
•
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet
•
Gust. Courbet
•
G. Courbet
•
Courbet
•
Gustav Courbet
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by Gustave Courbet
The history of an era is finished with that era itself and with those of its representatives who have expressed it. It is not the task of modern times to add anything to the expression of former times to ennoble or embellish the past. What has been, has been. The human spirit must always begin work afresh in the present, starting off from acquired results. One must never start out from foregone conclusions proceeding from synthesis to synthesis, from conclusion to conclusion. The real artists are those who pick up their age exactly at the point to which it has been carried by preceding times.
[An artist must apply] his personal faculties to the ideas and the events of the times in which he lives.. .[A]rt in painting should consist only of the representation of things which that are visible and tangible to the artist. Every age should be represented only by its own artists, that is to say, by the artist who have lived in it. I also maintain that painting is an essentially concrete art form and can exist only of the representation of both real and existing things.. .An abstract object, not visible, nonexistent, is not within the domain of painting.
Loading...