COURBET'S STROKES OF GENIUS REALIST TRANSFORMED ART.

Byline: Steven Rosen Correspondent

The prevailing belief is that the French Impressionists changed everything about art in the 1860s and 1870s, rejecting the neoclassical formalism of painters before them in order to subjectively interpret what they saw in nature.

But the truth is that there were a few previous rebels and iconoclasts, none so radical and daring as Gustave Courbet. The French realist painter, who lived from 1819 to 1877, devoted himself to shaking up the art establishment by any means necessary.

The Getty Center has curated a show, "Courbet and the Modern Landscape," to give his innovative nature paintings their due. It is on view through May 14. Collecting 45 works from public and private collections, the exhibition aims to show his influence as a landscape painter on Impressionists. It will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

Courbet constantly challenged the status quo. In his 1849-1850 "Burial at Ornans," he painted an uncle's funeral as if it was as historically important as a Napoleonic victory. His figural work, for which he is best known, included scandalously daring and sexual depictions of nudes. He hated academic painting, which often told allegorical stories with religious or mythological figures. He refused to paint an angel, he once said, because he had never seen one.

And eight years before young Impressionists started the famous Salon des Refuses as an alternative to the official Paris salon art show, Courbet in 1855 created his anti-establishment Pavilion of Realism outside a Paris exhibition in protest of his work being rejected. In 1873, after the collapse of the radical/revolutionary Paris Commune, which he supported, he was forced into exile in Switzerland.

But his rebelliousness also included the way he painted - and this show provides abundant examples of that. To him, the palette knife was just like a brush, a way to apply oil paint to a canvas. It gave the rocks and trees, dirt and sky a visceral thickness that connoted emotion. Today, the technique is common. But in Courbet's time, it was a breakthrough. It made him a modernist.

"There are pictures in this show in which he's sitting at a particular site outdoors and trying to represent his visual perception of it, which is at the heart of what the Impressionists wanted to project," said Getty curator Mary Morton, who organized the exhibit with co-curator Charlotte Eyerman. "There's nothing art-historical in terms of his representation (nor) in terms of his paint handling. The palette knife, an instrument used just to move paint around on a palette, he used to paint in some cases entire pictures."

That innovation is evident early on in this show, in which the blues and greens of Courbet's paintings combine with the gold of his frames and the sienna of the gallery walls to produce all the colors of nature itself.

In the first gallery, titled "Cliffs and Valleys," the palette knife-applied white paint applied to 1864's "Landscape Near Ornans" makes the sides of cliffs look three-dimensionally rocky and gritty while the muddy path in the foreground looks ready to splatter dirt. There's nothing prim or neoclassically formal about this - no angels or mythological figures wandering around idealized countryside.

In the same gallery, the monumental 1865 "Gust of Wind" provides even stronger evidence of Courbet's sure hand and vision, as he makes layers of rock around a stream seem to come alive and move. The pond itself, with its slightly white gurgling surface, seems overpowered by the stronger powers of the rock. It's a tour de force of the elements. One can see the influence on Cezanne, especially.

This painting, on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, was the impetus for the exhibition. "It was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts in 2002," Morton said. "This had been out of sight and out of art-historical discourse for 100 years. It had been in a private collection in Minneapolis and then came to Christie's in 1998.

"When it came back on the radar screen, everyone was surprised by the power of it and the virtuosity of it," she said. "It's in great condition, so you can see Courbet's skill very clearly. So we started to look around at other examples and discovered this area of his career had not been satisfactorily dealt with. He's very much part of the canon of great French painters, but primarily as a figural painter."

Aiding the show was the Getty's 2004 acquisition of Courbet's 1864 "Grotto of Sarrazine." Displayed in this show's "Rocks and Grottoes" gallery, it fits in perfectly with such dark, mysterious explorations of sun and shadow as 1864's "Source of the Loue," in which a shaft of light illuminates distant rocks while the center of a cave is chillingly cold.

There's a touch of the metaphoric sublime in this - it appears the light source is through a tunnel.

It's possible that Courbet sought solace in nature - in the 1860s he was in a battle with the much younger Edouard Manet to paint the frankest, most sexualized nudes and shock France.

That might be especially true after fleeing to Switzerland. The show ends with galleries devoted to his water views - lovely, serene and a touch autumnal. His 1865-66 "Channel Coast at Trouville, the Black Rocks" brings the sky down low like a falling curtain over the water. The two are kept separate by a thin, horizontal band of reddish sunset.

The show also includes the first Courbet acquired by an American museum - the modest "Sunset, Vevay, Switzerland" from the Cincinnati Art Museum, painted while Courbet lived near Lake Geneva in the 1870s. It was purchased by an Ohio judge who empathized with Courbet's politics and wanted to support him after the Commune. The judge became governor and gave the museum the painting in 1887.

"To buy a Courbet was not as simple as buying a pretty picture to please the eye," Morton said. "It was a show of support."

COURBET AND THE MODERN LANDSCAPE

Where: Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles. Through May 14.

Tickets: Admission is free. Call [phone] for information or visit getty.edu.

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1) ``PORTRAIT OF GUSTAVE COURBET'' (about 1860-65)

(2 -- color) ``LE CHATEAU DE CHILLON'' (1874)

(3 -- color) ``THE GUST OF WIND'' (1865)