calm your shit barbie not everyone has white privilege like you do
^
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Gustave Courbet, “The Meeting (Bonjour Mr. Courbet)” (1854)
This painting, whose meaning is often debated in art history circles, was commissioned by Alfred Bruyas, in the center of the painting, from Courbet, who is depicted on the right.
According to Ting Chang, writing in Burlington Magazine in September 1996:
The Meeting of 1854 has widely and justifiably been seen as an unequivocal statement on the position of the nineteenth-century artist in society … Representing himself in the company of the art collector Afrred Bruyas of Montepellier and Bruyas’s servant, Courbet appears as an independent, sovereign figure in full command of his relationship with his patron.
The painting is one is one of first to blatantly explore the question of the artist’s identity in relation to the artist’s patron.
According to former Time Magazine art critic, Robert Hughes, the painting:
… was based on a woodcut of two bourgeois meeting the Wandering Jew; but its poses (oddly ritualized for a “realist” work) may carry an esoteric reference to Masonry.
According to Tom Lubbock of the Independent:
When it was first exhibited, critics thought this a boastful work, a blatant self-advertisement. For what kind of subject is it? It shows a 35-year-old painter exchanging greetings with a provincial art collector.
… Big deal. Yet it is painted like some great scene from history, even sacred history. Three monumental figures, viewed slightly from below, bestride the world. It might be a meeting of two monarchs. It might be Christ meeting the Apostles on the road to Emmaus. Who does this artist think he is? And so the picture was given a belittling nickname - “Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet!” - which then became an alternative title for it.
According to the National Gallery of Australia’s online catalogue of the Musee Fabre collection, which it exhibited in 2003–4:
The painting thus marks in the most compelling way the ambition of the collector, keen to insert his own name, taste and generosity into the history of painting. Courbet was acutely aware of this relationship. Note the way in which only Courbet stands on the earth; neither the deferential Bruyas nor Calas cast a shadow, as if only the painter, as labourer, is of this earth.
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