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

A comprehensive reinterpretation of the pioneering and media-savvy artist

The modern artist strives to be independent of the public's taste—and yet depends on the public for a living. Petra Chu argues that the French Realist Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) understood this dilemma perhaps better than any painter before him. In The Most Arrogant Man in France, Chu tells the fascinating story of how, in the initial age of mass media and popular high art, this important artist managed to achieve an ...