Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Gustave Courbet
French; 19th-century
Rochester, NY: Memorial Art Gallery
90%
The Stonebreaker. c1872. Oil on canvas
In the bottom left corner of this painting there's a line cutting kitty-corner across the pebbly ground that reads like nothing but a slash through paint. It's a literal furrow, its edges slightly raised. Courbet probably made it by dragging some implement through his just-laid paint. At the right end of this rut, though, there's a little rectangle, vaguely limned, that's a hair grayer than its surroundings: it's the head of the stonebreaker's hammer. Notice this and the line is a representation of the hammer's handle; screen it out and the line's a trace of Courbet's hand working his painting's surface. Sure, it's one of modern painting's key operations to make the stuff it's made of at once virtual and real — but man is it brazen here, but also almost vanishing. And that slash, too, is so suited to the painting as a whole, to the way Courbet's handling seems poised — but only poised — to rend the image apart right at its midriff, where brown meets green. The hammer's handle is like a mediator between the painting's two halves. Contained in it is all the roughness and the thereness of the rocks in the picture's lower segment, plus all the soft indistinction of the blended greens up top. The central figure — especially given his rosy brushmark of a nose — is something of an interruption to the truce talks going on between foreground and background. But he's there to clarify why in the first place a single image would ever need to contain such disparity. Remember that it's his hammer lying there. (2025)