were not that important to his develop- ment and are hardly his best works. On the other hand, Twachtman’s and Dow’s depictions of the west are intriguing revelations. Neff considers Georgia O’Keeffe’s watercolours of Texas from the 1910s very important and she carefully analyses a few of them. Her discussion of O’Keeffe’s later paintings of New Mexico is sometimes thought provoking but at other times seems rather incomplete. In discussing the Regionalists in the Prairie States, Neff has much to say about Thomas Hart Benton, but Grant Wood and Alexander Hogue are discussed briefly and John Steuart Curry is another major western artist who is missing from this book. A few painters, such Henry Farny, Arthur Mathews, and Gottardo Piazzoni, are impressive rediscoveries. Famous photographers of the west, such as Timothy O’Sullivan, Dorothea Lange, and Margaret Bourke-White are given fair, thorough consideration. Nu- merous photographers of the west who are not that well known today, such as Carlton Watkins, Anne Brigman and Laura Gilpin, or famous photographers whose depic- tions of the west are their best-known works, such as Eadweard Muybridge, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston, are interest- ing revelations featured in this book. Ansel Adams is discussed a few times but only briefly and mostly in the chapter on California. These works are not his best or most famous. O’Keeffe’s and Adams’ popularity makes them less of a revelation to readers, but their fame requires that they be carefully placed into the broad historical overview being constructed here. Thus their importance becomes a linger- ing unresolved issue in this study. The Modern West begins with a short essay by Barry Lopez that is a personal appreciation of the western landscape that leads the reader into the heart of the book, which is Neff’s all the way. It ends with a discussion of mid-century abstraction in the west that stretches the book’s scope a little too far. It probably seemed almost obligatory to discuss what Neff calls the ‘abstract West’, since Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still are internationally famous abstractionists who came from and were influenced in complex, indirect ways by the west of their youth. The Modern West is a useful study whose flaws and quirks demonstrate how the development of any such broad overview depends on more specialised studies, which in the case of western American art are still lacking. It should help to broaden our geographic perspective on American modernism and landscape painting, which is still centred on the north-east. In doing this, it is both invaluable and long overdue. herbert r hartel, jr John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY THE MOST ARROGANT MAN IN FRANCE: GUSTAVE COURBET AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY MEDIA CULTURE petra ten-doesschate chu Princeton University Press 2007 d29.95 $45.00 248 pp. 137col & mono illus isbn 9780691126791 T his most arrogant of men, by his own admission, is maybe best known for an act of destruction rather than creation. His deep involvement in the 1871 Paris Commune and its decision to destroy the monument in the Place Vendome bring to a tragic end a long productive and politically committed ca- reer that spanned a troubled and unstable period in French history. Mediated through his prodigious work, Courbet and his politics are unavoidable and any attempt to drift into banal aesthetics or turgid formalism will prove fruitless or at best irrelevant, for here is an artist who mixed openly in politically charged circles, who wrote copiously to friends and influential others about his paintings, and who painted in order to provoke responses from both public and critics. His audience was largely an urban one, while Courbet himself was a member of the rural bourgeoisie. In fact this position as ‘other’ was exploited by the artist, who caused consternation and often disgust among the Salon audiences and the newspaper readership of the July Monarchy, the short-lived Second Republic and the ultimately catastrophic Second Empire of Louis Napoleon. Indeed, this highly charged atmo- sphere of political, social and economic change was reflected in the changes in the relations between artist and public. In her brief yet illuminating introduction, Petra Chu applies Bourdieu’s analogy of the new-found position of the former family servant, abandoned to the labour market, facing the dichotomy of alienation and freedom that that position entailed, and applying it to the contemporary artist faced with either artistic autonomy and the accompanying material moral and physical degradation that went with it, or submission to the dominant culture. Petra Chu pays due credit, albeit qualified, to Oskar Ba ¨tschman, who described the way post-revolutionary artists positioned themselves in the new art market without, in her opinion, stressing Courbet’s unique role in the development of the ‘modern market artist’. Both stereotypical romantic genius and commodity maker for the bourgeoisie, she succeeds in showing how Courbet handled his artistic output and marketing strategy to deal with this contradiction. She draws not only on the massive output of Courbet’s painting, reproduced here in abundance, but also on his own prodigious writing – normally in the form of letters to friends – the writings of others, including hostile re- viewers, and superb illustrations from contemporary publications that offer an insight into the way in which a nineteenth- century Salon audience viewed Courbet’s often shocking oeuvre. Petra Chu’s task is well managed. She has divided her monograph into six areas, devoting a chapter to each. An example of her concerns can be seen where she applies Naomi Schor’s term bisextuality in order to examine Courbet’s and others’ attempts to appeal to a mixed audience. Although this term has only previously been applied to literature, Petra Chu suggests reasonably that the same con- cerns must have applied to the contem- porary artist: bourgeois women were regular Salon attenders and their maga- zines provided them with Salon reviews. A number of Courbet’s paintings are shown to have a ‘dual resonance’ with men and women and that this ambiguity upset and confused male viewers and reviewers, who failed to find and fix meaning. Her analysis of his 1857 Salon piece The Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine – Summer demonstrates the difficulty male viewers had in reading an image in which two young women, one partially undressed, lounge by the banks of the river. Clothes become an important metaphor says Petra Chu as Courbet sets up the popular trope of city versus country, and comparison with his previous 1852 Salon entry The Young Ladies of the Village. From the former, most shocking is that one of the demoi- selles is stripped to her underwear. Oddly, says Petra Chu, not one reviewer noted this and it implies either male ignorance of 34 The Art Book volume 15 issue 1 february 2008 r 2008 the authors. journal compilation r 2008 bpl/aah Reviews