After 175 years, Gustave Courbet’s slow procession of mourners still stirs even the hardened modern heart. Most obviously, this is because it unflinchingly confronts mankind’s eternal subject and does ...

After a seven-year tug of war, a French court has ruled that Facebook was wrong to close the social media account of educator Frédéric Durand without warning after he posted an image of Gustave ...

Gustave Courbet was already an art star but still itching for greater renown when he took matters into his own bold hands in 1855. Dissatisfied with the works representing him in the official Salon, ...

Gustave Courbet’s infamous “The Origin of the World,” an intimate portrait of a female model’s nether regions, has been shocking pretty much since it was painted in 1866. Even more shocking, though, ...

"[They] call me ‘the socialist painter.' I accept that title with pleasure. I am not only a socialist but a democrat and a Republican as well--in a word, a partisan of all the revolution and above all ...

The pale, wide-eyed young man tearing at his hair has been everywhere since the juicy Gustave Courbet retrospective opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the end of February. 1 He lunges at us, ...

After finally agreeing to teach painting, Gustave Courbet brought a cow – rather than a human – to model for his class. The French artist’s conviction that the "living art’’ he sought to paint ...

For decades, art lovers believed the painting was lost, maybe even destroyed, a casualty of Red Army or Nazi looting in Hungary during World War II. But unlike so many other tales of plundered ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...

A panel has recommended that a British museum return a landscape painting by Gustave Courbet to heirs of a Jewish engineer who joined the French Resistance. By Julia Jacobs Shortly before the Nazi ...

Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter "When I stop being controversial, I'll stop being important," Gustave Courbet wrote to his parents in 1852. He was in his early ...