courbet called his art "realist."ch bell ringing] rejecting the idealized vision and false rhetoric of academic art, he painted the mourners attending a funeral in his own small town. courbet said, "it was not my intention "to attain the trivial goal of art for art's sake. "no. my aim is to translate the customs, the ideas, "and the appearance of my own epoch as i see them." we're not told who's being buried, but it's clearly no one of national significance, but courbet called his vast picture a history of a burial at ornans. by its size and title, he was claiming that his society's everyday customs were just as worthy subjects of serious historical art as any other. modern landscape and modern people were now the raw material for a serious form of painting. courbet intended his picture to be seen at the paris salon. it was clearly meant to shock, particularly in the political circumstances of 1850 when it was exhibited. in the elections of may 1849, about 1/3 of the votes in the countryside had been polled for radica

from courbet's country peasants to manet's new classes in the cities, from monet's realism of light to the visions of van gogh, the painters we've looked at seem to progressively move away from the real world, rejecting external appearances in favor of an inner, personal, imaginative truth. what we have seen is a crisis about how to handle the modern in its immediate form of the city. the importance of the artists of the 1880s and 1890s is a kind of hinge. artists still felt themselves responsible to the world-- its social, as well as its natural, orders. they had also opened up a realm of hitherto unimagined freedom for art. later artists saw, in the imaginative colors of gauguin, in the exhilaration of van gogh's energetic brushwork, and above all, in the inventiveness of cezanne's later work, resources which were to inspire the whole array of 20th-century isms from purism to expressionism, from fauvism to cubism. captioning performed by the national captioning institute, inc. captions copyright 1989 educational broadcasting corporation annenberg media ♪ ld is by movado, makers of th