I find the synchronicity between an artist's life and his work and my own beliefs and values an inspiration. The following prose-poem illustrates my point.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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THE NEW AND THE DEAD
In 1844, just weeks after the religion of the Báb began in Shiraz, the foremost realist artist of mid-19th century France, Gustave Courbet, exhibited three of his works: Self-Portrait with a Black Dog, The Desperate Man and The Hammock at the Paris Salon. Courbet painted these works from 1842 to 1844 in the last two years of the life of Siyyid Kazim. The Siyyid met the Báb in Karbila in what was for this precursor of the Revelation of the Bab a memorable, indeed, a monumental experience. Courbet was the first painter to give everyday scenes a monumental treatment, to give everyday reality a new life, an honesty and a vibrancy, a contemporaneously fresh reality.
Born four months before the birth of the Báb in 1817, Courbet became the undisputed leader of French realist art by the time the Baha’i Faith began in 1863. Courbet was imprisoned in 1871 at the same time the Baha’i Faith’s Founder, Bahá’u’lláh, was in the prison of Akka. Courbet died in 1877, just months after the termination of Baha’u’llah’s confinement within Akka’s prison walls.
In his art Courbet was able to control what he was not able to control in everyday life-- his emotions. He possessed an anxious restlessness, a rich inner intensity and a sense of life’s tests, its sturm und drang.1 His work had a continuing resonance in the movement of Realism, one of the most significant artistic movements of the nineteenth century. He responded with courage to the insolent attacks of critics and others who opposed his work, choosing not to accept rejection, but instead to find new means of promotion. –Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV, "Impressionism," 3:00-4:40 p.m., 30 March 2008.
People were deeply offended
by these new spiritual-artistic
messages which conveyed the
weight of the world in forms
new and revolutionary, sharper
than blades of steel and finer
than a hair—that perchance
people would see the world
as if for the first time, a new
world bright with promise
where old rites, ceremonies
and customs would make no
sense and become dead letters
and where criticism--perchance--
would fall on deaf ears--with
the hearer not feeling dejected.
Ron Price
6 April 2008 |