The Desperate Man

In Paris this season the must-see museum exhibition has been the Courbet retrospective at the Grand Palais. It’s a four-curator stunner of a show, the first French outing in 30 years for the man Linda Nochlin once called ‘the Mick Jagger of the nineteenth century.’ The Met’s Woman with a Parakeet has come to town, and the near-pornographic Origin of the World has been reunited with the André Masson landscape that its last owner, Jacques Lacan, used to disguise it. It’s reassuring when such an impressive show pulls such a large audience: the Grand Palais is now opening until late to accommodate the crowds.

One high-profile visitor has now gone twice, retinue and photographers in tow: Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president who after only seven months has made France unimaginable without him. Sarkozy’s predecessors have been vocal about their love for art: Jacques Chirac collected Japanese prints and François Mitterand initiated the grands travaux of the 1980s, most famously the Louvre’s pyramid, while having an affair with a curator at the Orsay. The vocally anti-intellectual Sarkozy, however, has been snapped more than once looking bored at state visits to exhibitions and heritage sites, and his reaction to this year’s FIAC could generously be called indifferent. The so-called hyperpresident has never been too interested in matters cultural.

Until now. ‘It’s changed me,’ Sarkozy said simply when he left the Courbet show for the first time. And last week, when Angela Merkel visited Paris, he guided her around the Grand Palais like a proud father, smiling broadly as he showed off the realist master’s landscapes. It’s a stunning, almost comic about-face: Sarkozy has fallen for not just any artist, but for the most antisocial, disruptive, indecent artist of them all – an artist who stood for everything Sarkozy opposes. Poussin we could understand, Warhol even more so. But Courbet? Gustave Courbet, who toted a gun? Who couldn’t even be bothered to put on a clean shirt when collectors came to call?

For me, and apparently for the president as well, the highlight of the Grand Palais show is the first gallery of early self-portraits, including the knockout The Desperate Man, still in a private collection and rarely exhibited. His hands struggling to fix his unkempt hair, the 24-year-old Courbet stares out like a wounded animal, eyes bulging in amazement or fear. If they met in real life Sarkozy would no doubt deploy his favorite insult: voyou, ‘hoodlum’ or ‘yob,’ the put-down for everyone from murderers to young men who don’t conform to the Sarkozian standard of working without complaint. But the photograph of the president so evidently besotted with the hoodlum-cum-painter is like Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet! come to life: just as in that masterpiece, here too the rich, powerful, suited man accepts the half-dressed artist on his own terms.

‘It’s changed me,’ says Sarkozy, but in what capacity? Has the man who only a few days ago mocked ‘latte-sipping’ philosophers opened himself to art? Perhaps, at this first moment in decades when the Paris art world seems vibrant again, the most powerful man in Europe will put his famous energy to the promotion of French culture beyond a mere liberalization of the art market. But more broadly, has Courbet changed Sarkozy the man? If a painting called Le Désespéré can transfix him, can the desperate people in the tower-block ghettoes ringing the capital do the same? I’d love to believe that art has that kind of transformative, constitutive power, but while Courbet wanted to meld art and life, Sarkozy reminds us how much further that project still has to go.