Tim Marlow TV - Kenneth Clark TV - Gustave Courbet - John Berger - Robert Hughes - Matthew Collings TV -
The debates that had raged around realism when [Gustave] Courbet was painting also were mirrored in the development of sculpture. Tim Marlow, The Nude: The Enlightenment, Sky Arts 2012
In France there emerged two painters whose social realism was in the centre of the European tradition: Jean-Francois Millet and Gustave Courbet. They were both revolutionaries. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 13/13: Heroic Materialism, BBC 1969
9,866. Courbet painted an even more impressive example of his sympathy with ordinary people – his enormous picture of a funeral ... Courbet achieves a feeling of equality in the presence of death. ibid.
In our so very civilized society it is necessary for me to live the life of a savage. I must be free even of governments. The people have my sympathies, I must address myself to them directly. Gustave Courbet
No painter before Courbet was ever able to emphasize so uncompromisingly the density and weight of what he was painting. John Berger
On the left is the realist tradition of the 19th century, with its impulse to social description, radical criticism and meditation on things as they are ... culminating in Courbet at his mightiest. Robert Hughes
The two artists who opened the door for impressionism were Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet … What unites them artistically is a radical idea: they think art should be real and not false. Matthew Collings, Impressionism: Revenge of the Nice, Channel 4 2004
Courbet will make himself the leader and the personification of the realist style. ibid.
Courbet started painting enormous group portraits of his own people from his own region. ibid.