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Courbet relished this reputation: "I am the first and unique artist of this century. The others are students and drivelers." No artist, up to then, had ever set himself so firmly against the reigning taste of his day, and none since Jacques-Louis David had had a stronger sense of political mission. Moreover, unlike the great salon artists who went before him, Courbet was capable of lavishing enormous trouble on a work doomed to unsalability, since it had no comprehensible message: this was his masterpiece, The Studio of the Artist, 1855, which he subtitled "a real allegory, setting forth a span of seven years of my artistic life." But although he changed the history of art, his effect on the history of social stress was negligible. The struggles between left and right in France up to Courbet's death in 1877 would have turned out very much the same whether he had painted or not. For art does not act directly on politics in the way that the engagé wing of the avantgarde, from Courbet onward, expected it to do. All it can do is provide examples of radical feeling and models of dissent, unless it simply wishes to confirm the status quo.
Nevertheless, the idea of a fusion between radical art and radical politics, of art as a direct means of social subversion and reconstruction, has haunted the avant-garde since Courbet's time. On the face of it, it has a kind of logic. By changing the language of art. you affect the modes of thought; and by changing thought, you change life. The history of the avant-garde up to 1930 was suffused with various, ultimately futile, calls to revolutionary action and moral renewal. They were all formed by the belief that painting and sculpture were still the primary, dominant forms of social speech that they had been 80 years before. In uttering them, some brilliant talents of the avant-garde condemned themselves to self-deception about the limits of their art. Though it hardly alters their aesthetic achievement, it makes the legend of their deeds seem inflated.
One is used to reading how the Dadaists in Zurich during World War I struck alarm into the hearts of the Swiss burghers with their antic cabaret turns in the Café Voltaire, their sound-poems and chance-collages. But their real impact on Zurich was negligible, scarcely a ruffle on the lake, in contrast to the importance that the Dada wood reliefs of Jean Arp have since assumed within the history of art. Even when Dada was politicized after the war, its actual effect on German politics was nil, and its impact on radical thought probably much smaller than the modernist legend would have us think.