For every Madame X out there, there is the desperate man:

For a long time now, I’ve wanted to talk about one of my favorite painters, Gustave Courbet, and I probably will, this week or in the next, but right now, I just want to talk about his 1844-45 self portrait, seen above, called The Desperate Man.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel taking in an exhibit of Courbet’s paintings in Paris.

There’s so much on display in the painting by Courbet, art’s original enfant terrible, and the creator and chief innovator of realism (and the official killer of romanticism in my book). To call the look on his face desperate, is an understatement. The way he holds himself, the bulged eyes, there’s a need on display beyond desperate. It’s a lost look. Terrified, almost. Fearful of losing something precious, I would say, but whether it’s something he sees before him or something diminishing inside him, who knows.

That’s what I’ve always thought of this painting, ever since I first discovered it a few years ago. And in a sad way, perhaps an almost romanticized way of looking at myself, it’s something that I’ve identified with. Something that I felt I understood on some level.

I’ll say much more about Courbet soon, I imagine, but for now I think I was half right in my estimate of the painting. But perhaps only because I later realized that the painting acts almost like a Wittgenstein-ian mirror. There’s very little data on display in the work, and the rest of what you see is something reflected. Courbet wanted to paint life as it actually was, and in a way, he did just that here in a work that you bring your own meaning to, your own personalized feeling of what constitutes the desperate man.

from here.