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The Stone Breakers Analysis

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The context in which an artwork is created influences the artwork. Context helps unravel an artwork’s content to discuss the relations, references, or allusions we may not otherwise understand. Context also helps us understand why certain elements of the artwork are considered revolutionary. The political, economical, and social environment of the artwork is essential to understanding its form and content. Gustave Courbet’s oil painting, The Stone Breakers, (see fig. 1) is an example of an artwork considered representative of its art historical time period, during the mid-19th century. Courbet’s socialist views combined with tensions in the government following the French Revolution of 1789, as well as the progression of the industrial …show more content…

He painted them with authenticity. Courbet used the framing techniques of photography, but also exploited paint to its potential, creating a modern artwork. However, what Courbet did with this narrative that made it so shocking was that the artwork measures 1.59×2.59m, rendering the figures nearly life size, and he was aware that the connotation of such a large scale alludes to the size of history paintings.
Along with the evolving society, Courbet was also evolving his ideas and straying away from the traditional artmaking practices. Courbet challenged the conventions of the French Academy by producing an artwork that shifted the attention from the narrative as a whole to depicting a specific moment of the banal and the every day life in such a deliberate grand scale (Young 58-60). He questioned the institutional relation between art and the public by creating politically subversive artwork by calling attention to the individual and ordinary rural populations. The artwork portrays a young man beside an old man breaking rocks to make way for a road on the outskirts of a town like Ornans, Courbet’s birthplace (Eisenman 214). The juxtaposition of the young and old man is pitiable and it creates the idea of an endless cycle. The treachery in this scene is what the narrative entails (Eisenman 209). It is the story of an old father with his

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