Abstract
The idea of a revolutionary art could easily be related to famous artists, such as Malevich and his attempt to transform art into a collection of universal forms, Rimbaud and his will to crush down the language in order to crush down the world, Schoenberg and his dodecaphonism or even the Dada current. But who would think to add the name of Gustave Courbet to this list? And yet, at the Salon of 1849, an art critic -Peisse- was so upset by his paintings that he claimed the “homeland was in danger”, because, to him, Courbet's paintings were “a revolutionary machine”. Well, as you can see, these so-called frightening and revolutionary paintings seem to depict only peaceful images of rural life. Gustave Courbet was born in 1819 in the small village of Ornans, at 25 kilometers of Besançon. His parents were local prominent citizens, who would have been delighted to see their son become a lawyer -a bourgeois- but he chose another path. However, Courbet was to be attached his whole life to Ornans and the Franche-Comté, which is very important to understand his work. Very early, he went to Paris to attend art courses and was in the capital during the revolution of 1848. Even though his first paintings show us that he was influenced by romanticism, he looked towards the great Dutch and Spanish masters for influence, such as Velásquez or Rembrandt. After the revolution, he came back in Ornans and started to paint his most famous series of pictures -The After-dinner at Ornans, The Stone breakers, A Burial in Ornans and The Peasants coming back from Flagey's fair.
