It was then that I first looked seriously at the paintings of Gustave Courbet, many of which portray the life of peasants in the mid-nineteenth century, and was moved by the lofty silence of these pictures, especially one entitled The Peasants of Flagey (Doubs), Returning Home from Market. And then I knew: these are the right pictures - and not only for me.
Courbet, as his precisely localised titles show, regarded the subjects of genre paintings, these scenes of everyday life, as the true events of history. And so it is that to the sympathetic mind his peasants - as they sift grain, stand at a graveside, prepare a dead woman for burial, or return home from market at dusk (and those as well who only sit and rest, sleep and dream) - form a self-contained procession, which includes “my” genre painting of an old woman, who on a warm sunny day much later walked down a back street in West Berlin with her shopping bag and, during a brief silence that made her everyday reality more profound, revealed to me the housefronts as our shared and still happily enduring peace procession.
[The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire, from Slow Homecoming, Handke, P.]
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