Meeting “Winter in the Jura”

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Gustave Courbet, Winter in the Jura, c. 1875. Oil on canvas, 19 7/8 x 24 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Acquired 1958

During an impromptu stroll around the galleries on a snowy January day, I was drawn in by an intriguing image that I had not noticed before in a gallery that was originally the Phillips family home’s West Parlor. The scene before my eyes was not dissimilar from the one unfolding outside. Gustave Courbet’s Winter in the Jura (c. 1875) appeared just as breathtaking as the fresh snowfall outside. Rather than belonging to a particular school or movement, Courbet is perhaps better known for his lack of association with any one group. His work is neither strictly Romantic nor Neoclassical, and Courbet believed the popular style of History painting to be a waste of his time. Instead, Courbet aimed to “…in short…create living art,” which he has certainly done successfully in Winter in the Jura. The painting has a life-like quality that goes beyond any kind of hyperrealism. The special silence of a snow-covered morning has been captured perfectly.

In the work, a single figure trudges through the picture plane towards a bend in the road. Flecks of red draw the viewer’s eye to what remains of the foliage in the Jura Mountains. As a native of one of the snowiest cities in the US, I’ve developed a level of comfort that comes along with snow, which Courbet conveys perfectly through Winter in the Jura. Artists like Courbet—who refuse to be pigeon-holed into one category—are often the most valuable to our art education, but also to the development of art as a whole. There is certainly something exceptional about a painting which stirs something familiar in a first-time viewer. The artist with this special capability must possess the “power of conception” and “sacred knowing” that Courbet so often mentioned in letters to friends. In this way, Courbet made himself truly free from the restraints of institutions as he always wished to, holding power to “…address the people directly” in self-portraits and scenes of snowy mornings.

Elizabeth Federici, Marketing & Communications Intern

Two Sides of One Painter

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Installation view of Jake Berthot: From the Permanent Collection and Promised Gifts

Bold shades of yellow screamed out from the canvas, with each layer striving to grab my attention. The densely built up surfaces of abstract forms projected into my space, to the extent that the paintings themselves became three-dimensional. The expressive texture and spontaneity in Jake Berthot’s Yellow/Yellow were enough to captivate me, along with his other equally dynamic paintings displayed throughout the gallery.

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Jake Berthot, Untitled (Trees), 1996

I entered the next gallery just as I started to feel overwhelmed by the intense emotions I read in his rough impasto techniques. This room, where his later works are displayed, offered a completely different atmosphere; instead of the highly expressive brushstrokes and abstract forms seen in the previous gallery, the paintings here were strikingly calm, devoid of any saturated colors.

In his later years, Berthot mostly depicted landscapes, focusing on proportion and perspective. His sketches are filled with grids exploring the geometry behind the natural landscape; it’s almost as if the artist had never been interested in abstract expressions like the ones seen in his previous works.

Walking around this gallery made me feel like I was stealing into the artist’s working studio while he left for a break; many of the works seem unfinished. In Untitled (Trees), underlying pencil grids are visible, drawing a stark contrast with the way nature is depicted in Pond, an earlier work by Berthot displayed in the previous gallery.

Why do his works look so different? Did he develop a sudden interest in ratio and perspective in his later years?

Berthot mentioned stylistic changes in an interview in 2013: “Young painters now know me as a representational painter. Many of my peers wonder what happened to the abstract painter. No matter what, I am still the same painter.”

Do you see the connection? What makes him “the same painter” despite the apparent stylistic differences?

Summer Park, Marketing & Communications Intern

Jake Berthot: From the Collection and Promised Gifts is on view through April 2, 2017.