ABSTRACT
In May 1882, less than five years after the death in Switzerland of Gustave Courbet, the art critic Jules Castagnary (1830–1888) organized a large retrospective of the artist's work in Paris, the first monographic exhibition after the one Courbet had organized himself at the occasion of the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1867. The 1882 exhibition in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was an integral part of the Courbet rehabilitation effort of the 1880s. The exhibition catalogue had a short preface by Castagnary, in which he talked about the organizational logistics of the exhibition, as well as a twenty-two-page introductory essay. While the 1882 retrospective exhibition of Courbet's work was an important impetus to the writing of the first monograph of Courbet, it also inspired the long and discontinuous effort of establishing a catalogue raisonne of the artist's work, an effort that, in the end, would take nearly a century.
