The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture Hardcover - 2007

From the rear cover

"This important book will instantly claim a place among the standard works on Courbet. Petra Chu has done an admirable job of tying together art, literature, and history to put Courbet in context in a way that has not been done before. She reveals a Courbet who is ambitious to succeed and who realizes that the new media of nineteenth-century France can be harnessed to his ambition. With this book, Chu brings to fruition a lifetime of studying Courbet and nineteenth-century French art."--Patricia Mainardi, City University of New York

"Petra Chu has worked on Courbet throughout her long and productive career and this book is a capstone of her work, the product of considerable thought, insight, perception, and interpretation. Covering all phases of his evolution, from his earliest self-portraits to his late landscapes, she contextualizes Courbet in new ways and ties him to celebrity and media culture so that we can see how he thought as well as why he reacted in his work as he did. This is no small achievement."--Gabriel P. Weisberg, University of Minnesota

"The Most Arrogant Man in France is an original study of Courbet's entrepreneurial methods, and as such distinguishes itself from the rest of the voluminous recent writing on the artist. Petra Chu carefully sifts through Courbet's contacts with the press, newly investigates his patronage, and speculates about his appeal to the wider public. The book will interest not just art historians but also general readers since it dissects the intelligence and entrepreneurial flair of a canonical artistic personality who anticipates artists such as Dalí and Warhol."--Albert Boime, UCLA

Media reviews

Citations

• Choice, 10/02/2007, Page 272
• Foreword, 07/01/2007, Page 95
• New York Review of Books, 02/14/2008, Page 30
• Publishers Weekly, 04/09/2007, Page 47