The Wave

Just as Kleist once described the Monk by the Sea, so too Cézanne described Courbet’s Wave with an equal degree of understanding: “... the one in Berlin is wonderful, one of the wonders of this century, with much greater movement, much more tension, a more poisonous green and a dirtier orange than the one here [Musée du Louvre, Paris], with the foamy surf of the tide, which comes up from out of the depths of eternity, its ragged sky and its pallid precision. It is as though it were coming right at one, it makes one jump back in shock. The whole room is filled with the smell of the foam.” In 1869 in Etretat, in a studio right by the sea, Courbet had studied breakers. He attempted to recapture their violence and monstrous power by means of radical pictorial methods. Contemporary critics also read a political message into his wave paintings of 1869–70, seeing them as republican agitation and as illustrations of the power of the people. Romanticism had already taught viewers to understand simple portrayals of nature on a symbolic level. Here the single wave is like a small section of eternity, with the plunging water as a transient moment of permanence. The layered paint, applied with a spatula and smoothed out with a palette knife, gives the portrayal of the moving mass a kind of wall-like strength, and it was this same combination of transience and permanence that the poet Baudelaire had already identified in Courbet’s earlier work.