The newspaper Fremden-Blatt advised its readers to wait before making a final judgment in view of the fact that not all of the works Courbet had provided had yet been exhibited.[29] One could only hope that important paintings, still stored in the Kunstverein’s warehouse, would take the place of those on display. A letter by the painter Carl Schuch reported that the Burial at Ornans was actually hung in June.[30] However, Castagnary’s advice, given in wise foresight, of not showing paintings such as the Burial in the Kunstverein turned out to be right: “It has its time and its history in France. It must stay here . . . in order not to give renewed impetus to old arguments.”[31] Almost all of the works shown could be interpreted as political statements. The critics tended to see them as the transgressions of a probably important, but rough and untrained talent. The Kunstchronik noted that his Burial as well as his Studio offered “only a random lineup of figures lacking any kind of psychological coherence.”[32] In the early 1850s, the critic wrote, a small group of Courbet’s admirers had proclaimed that what appeared to be the shortcomings of his talent were actually a reformatory satire on academic emptiness. But the crude and ugly could not be the ideal of art as a whole. The German-language critics usually recognized the high level of technical mastery of the “official” French artists in the World Exposition pavilion, although the tendency toward superficial effects at the expense of profundity of content was often chastised as “chicism.”[33] But not even technical mastery, a hallmark of French art, could be found in Courbet’s figural pictures. The reviewer of the Dioskuren, for example, described Alms of a Beggar (fig. 6) as “the most off-putting, incompetent painting to have been seen in a long time.”[34] Critics regretted that there were not more landscapes and paintings of animals on display in the Kunstverein as these, in particular, had made Courbet’s reputation as an artist. The reviewer in the Kunstchronik even went so far as to say that, in his Studio, Courbet had unwittingly treated himself with irony as, in this allegory, the artist is shown painting a landscape—seeming to agree with the reviewer that “his brush is quite simply not made for showing people, it can only be used fruitfully in landscapes and in pictures of animals.”[35]
Many of the newspapers published in Vienna at the time, including the liberal Neue Freie Presse, did not even think Courbet worth reviewing.[36] On the other hand, he could not simply be ignored, nor could one pretend, as Emile Mario Bacano expressed in the Tages-Presse, that he did not exist: “He makes too much noise for that—with his voice, with his beliefs, with his brush.”[37] Bacano criticized what he considered Courbet’s ostentatious, arrogantly large, programmatic paintings. Yet the public of the Österreichischer Kunstverein was completely accustomed to colossal paintings intended as marketing tools. Such sensational pictures that circulated by way of the widely ramified channels of the Central European societies stopped over in Vienna at regular intervals. The art historian Rudolf von Eitelberger repeatedly railed against the “leveling effect of the society and trade pictures” that, through their subjects alone, “reveal the loud secret that they have been painted without any commission, that they are not intended for any purpose of the state.”[38] The commercialization of painting was the price paid for dismissing the artist from the service of the state, court, and church. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had addressed the same problem in respect to Courbet when he asked: “But just who did Monsieur Courbet intend this picture [the Burial] for? Where would be the right place for it? Definitely not in a church, where it would be an insult; nor in a school, a town hall, or even a theatre. It would take a special kind of gentleman with a taste for curiosities to even think of letting it into his attic and he would be careful not to hang it in his salon.”[39]