Image of the People : Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution
(T. J. Clark
)
Clark's focus is on Gustave Courbet in the four years following 1848. His book aims to show how Courbet's wholesale recasting of the terms and ambitions of modern art, in paintings like The Stonebreakers and A Burial at Ornans, was bound up with the texture of French history at a fateful moment: the battle of pamphlets and images being waged in the countryside in 1849-50, the search for a means to connect with a "popular" audience, the deepening enigma of peasant politics, and the confusions and dangers of class.
Letters of Gustave Courbet
(Gustave Courbet, Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu (Editor)
)
Besides collecting, translating, and annotating the letters, Chu provides an introduction, a chronology, biographies of persons appearing frequently in the letters, and a list of paintings and sculptures mentioned in the letters. Her work is an essential resource of immediate use to historians of art and culture, political and social historians, and readers of biography.