FRANKFURT.- The French painter Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) ranks among the most fascinating nineteenth-century artists. He is regarded as the crucial pioneer of political realistic painting and as a revolutionary of the Paris Commune. But Courbet also had an entirely different side: he was one of the great dreamers in history. In his portraits, but also in his landscapes, drawings, and still-lifes, he depicts a world of absorption and introversion – in stark contrast to the frenzied industrialization of his age. One hundred works from eleven countries – among them loans from Stockholm, Paris, Montpellier, Los Angeles, New York, and Oslo – will present this “other” Courbet for the first time in the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt from October 15, 2010 to January 30, 2011. Curated by Professor Klaus Herding, the exhibition reveals how Courbet, from a starting point in German Romanticism, realized the visi