johnny depp meets gustave courbet
Sunday, 24 February 2008 | | |
JOHNNY DEPP MEETS GUSTAVE COURBET
UPDATED POSTING: 8 Feb 2008
Private Collection/Conseil Investissement Art, BNP Paribas
Lovely little portrait of Johnny Depp in one of his Libertine
absinthe-soaked roles you might think. In fact, its 'Despair'
(1844-1845), a self-portrait by the French realist painter Gustave
Courbet (1819-77).
It first came to my attention in a newspaper story in the summer of
2006, at the opening of an exhibition entitled 'Rebels And Martyrs:
The Image Of The Artist In The 19th Century' at London's National
Gallery. The Independent reported that the exhibition's curator's knew
of the painting's existence and wanted to include it in the show.
However the painting had vanished, after being last seen in 1978 at a
Courbet retrospective at the Royal Academy. The week before the Rebel
show was due to be installed, the curators received a phone call from
France offering to lend them the painting. The owner's identity
remains a mystery.
Yesterday, I bought the New York Review of Books' to see the painting
staring out at me once more. There is a major Courbet exhibition which
recently ended in Paris, soon to be seen at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (February 27-May 18, 2008)
As John Golding writes in 'The Born Rebel Artist': 'This is the image
that was chosen for the traditional banners that Paris sports to
advertise major exhibitions. It would have pleased Courbet to be
presiding over hundreds of thousands of Parisians as they roamed
through the streets of the capital. And the fact that this relatively
small picture survives magnificently the test of being blown up to
twenty or thirty times the size of the original testifies to its power
and the beauty of its paint effects. It will be seen on posters in New
York.'