On the right are friends, peers, critics and philosophers on the left is, as Courbet put it, ‘the other world of everyday life, the masses, wretchedness, poverty, wealth’. Its most famous evocation can be found in Gustave Courbet’s 1855 painting L’Atelier du peintre (The Artist’s Studio), a canvas that the artist himself called a ‘real allegory’ in which ‘the whole world is coming me to be painted’. The notion of the expanded studio isn’t a new one. The latter might be suggestive for the contemporary studio - not some garret, simply a mobile space where things and people and images can be brought together. This hybrid state is latent in the studio’s rangy etymological roots: a study (from the Latin, studium) while, more obliquely, atelier derives from the Old French word astelle or ‘yoke’. It has been a factory as well as a convivial space (for Andy Warhol, it was both), a workshop but also a school (at the Bauhaus there was no distinction). But, as an idea and as a physical space, the studio of the last 100 years has been characterized by flux rather than tradition, by dialogue rather than isolation. This image of the artist’s studio persists in the popular imagination. As Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his ‘Treatise on Painting’, published posthumously in 1651: ‘If you are alone, you belong entirely to yourself.’ This artist, almost always a man, will be without company. It will be damp, hopefully drafty - isn’t it important that artists suffer for their art? - and inhabited by a possibly misunderstood genius. The clichés are easy to recite: there’s the all- consuming clutter (proof of a brilliant mind), the unfinished canvases or half-hewn objects (this is the place of creative production, after all).
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