The Landscape Car. Lives of Gustave Courbet.
The Contemporary Workshop| N° d'inventaire | 23172 |
| Format | 21.5 x 25 |
| Détails | 128 p., paperback with flaps. |
| Publication | Strasbourg, 2020 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782850350122 |
The landscape car: this is how Gustave Courbet described the cart pulled by the donkey Gérôme - named after his Bonapartist rival from Vesoul - through the landscapes of his native Doubs. Equipped with a slightly more powerful car, the writer François Laut and the photographer Lin Delpierre traveled the plateaus and valleys of what was at once the land of his childhood, his favorite motif and, extended to Switzerland, his land of exile. From the land of caves to the Alpine ranges, from Puits-Noir, near Ornan, to the peaks seen from Lake Geneva, passing through the highest and lowest hours of Paris's history, this is a comprehensive journey that will allow the reader, in the wake of the bicentenary of the artist's birth, to discover with new eyes some of the famous sites of his paintings, and to reconstruct, among all of Courbet's lives, those that are perhaps the least known. For the five series of eight photographs, a contemporary photographer's view of the pictorial territory of a 19th-century painter, are answered by as many texts which, based on the images, open up the field even further by quoting Courbet's paintings and writings in abundance. The least tasty of these quotes is not this one: "We are obliged to meet photographers everywhere in life and we will end up finding them in the butter and on the soup, we must resign ourselves." We can appreciate the humor the authors demonstrate by placing it at the beginning of the work; but then we must also appreciate the consequences they draw from it in their dialogue between writing and photography. As they explain: if Lin Delpierre's images tell a story in their own way, François Laut's texts give rise to yet other images. At the crossroads of Parisian life and Swiss exile, the Jura, a point of departure and eternal return, thus acts as a revealer of Courbet's themes and practices, his relationship with nature, his relationships with those around him and his time, with his close friends and patrons, men and women. A true source of inspiration for the artist, it provided the subject of many of his paintings and perhaps the matrix of his realist conceptions: "Why imagine a landscape when you have the nature of your country in front of you? I don't care where I put myself, it's always good if I have nature before my eyes! "It is one of the merits of this book to teach us this, or to remind us of it.
The landscape car: this is how Gustave Courbet described the cart pulled by the donkey Gérôme - named after his Bonapartist rival from Vesoul - through the landscapes of his native Doubs. Equipped with a slightly more powerful car, the writer François Laut and the photographer Lin Delpierre traveled the plateaus and valleys of what was at once the land of his childhood, his favorite motif and, extended to Switzerland, his land of exile. From the land of caves to the Alpine ranges, from Puits-Noir, near Ornan, to the peaks seen from Lake Geneva, passing through the highest and lowest hours of Paris's history, this is a comprehensive journey that will allow the reader, in the wake of the bicentenary of the artist's birth, to discover with new eyes some of the famous sites of his paintings, and to reconstruct, among all of Courbet's lives, those that are perhaps the least known. For the five series of eight photographs, a contemporary photographer's view of the pictorial territory of a 19th-century painter, are answered by as many texts which, based on the images, open up the field even further by quoting Courbet's paintings and writings in abundance. The least tasty of these quotes is not this one: "We are obliged to meet photographers everywhere in life and we will end up finding them in the butter and on the soup, we must resign ourselves." We can appreciate the humor the authors demonstrate by placing it at the beginning of the work; but then we must also appreciate the consequences they draw from it in their dialogue between writing and photography. As they explain: if Lin Delpierre's images tell a story in their own way, François Laut's texts give rise to yet other images. At the crossroads of Parisian life and Swiss exile, the Jura, a point of departure and eternal return, thus acts as a revealer of Courbet's themes and practices, his relationship with nature, his relationships with those around him and his time, with his close friends and patrons, men and women. A true source of inspiration for the artist, it provided the subject of many of his paintings and perhaps the matrix of his realist conceptions: "Why imagine a landscape when you have the nature of your country in front of you? I don't care where I put myself, it's always good if I have nature before my eyes! "It is one of the merits of this book to teach us this, or to remind us of it.