Realism (arts)

• 1. Introduction

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  Realism in art is the attempt to represent subject-matter truthfully, without artificiality, exaggeration, or supernatural elements. That sounds simple. It was not. Across painting, literature, theatre, cinema and opera, the word "realism" has carried a quarrel that ran for centuries. In France, in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1848, a painter named Gustave Courbet began turning his canvases over to the mundane, the ugly, and the sordid. He was not trying to flatter anyone. Why would an artist choose a common laborer over a hero, a back street over a palace? And what is the difference between painting something accurately and painting something honestly? The two are not the same word, and the gap between them is where this story lives. There is also a deeper riddle hiding underneath. Demetrius of Alopece, a sculptor of the 4th century BCE, was already said to prefer realism over ideal beauty. If the impulse is that old, why did it take until the 19th century to become a named movement, and a political one?

• 2. Realist Versus Realistic

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  "Realistic" and "realist" are not the same thing, and the difference is the hinge of the whole subject. As an adjective tied to visual appearance, "realistic" describes accurate rendering. "Realist" art, by contrast, concerns subject matter. A picture can be one without the other. Naturalism in painting means the precise, detailed and accurate representation of how scenes and objects look. It is also called mimesis or illusionism, and it became especially marked in the Early Netherlandish painting of Robert Campin, Jan van Eyck and others in the 15th century. Courbet complicates the picture, because he was not especially noted for fully precise depiction of visual appearances. In his time, that careful skill more often belonged to academic painting, which used it to render scenes that were contrived, artificial, or imagined historical fantasies. So the realist could paint roughly, while the idealist painted with exquisite accuracy. The term naturalism itself carried a second life as a sub-movement, one that tried to distance itself from politics and claimed a quasi-scientific basis, playing on "naturalist" as a student of natural history.

• 3. Honesty Over Ideal Beauty

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  Goya painted the Spanish royal family without flattering them, an honest and unidealized portrayal of important people. That instinct, refusing to smooth a face into beauty, has classical roots that artists later used as a defense. During the Ancient Roman Republic, politicians preferred a truthful depiction in their portraits, a commitment to truth that came to be called verism. The early emperors, by contrast, favored Greek idealism. Renaissance theorists turned this into a debate that lasted several centuries, over the correct balance between drawing from the observation of nature and from idealized classical forms. Leonardo da Vinci championed the pure study of nature, wishing to depict the whole range of individual varieties of the human figure. Leon Battista Alberti stressed the typical, and Michelangelo supported selecting only the most beautiful. Michelangelo refused to make portraits for that very reason. In the 17th century, the quarrel hardened in Italy into a contrast between the classical-idealism of the Carracci and the naturalist style of the Caravaggisti. The followers of Caravaggio painted religious scenes as though set in the back streets of contemporary Italian cities. Bellori, no admirer, wrote of "Those who glory in the name of naturalists."

• 4. The Suffering Body

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  In the Late Middle Ages, some painted wooden sculptures of Christ strayed into the grotesque, showing him covered in wounds and blood. This was a recurring strand of Christian art, a "realism" that emphasized the humanity of religious figures, above all Christ and his physical sufferings in his Passion. The intent was not shock for its own sake. Following trends in devotional literature, these images were meant to stimulate the viewer to meditate on the suffering Christ had undergone on their behalf. These works were especially found in Germany and Central Europe. After abating during the Renaissance, similar pieces re-appeared in the Baroque, with Spanish sculpture taking up the bloodied, unflinching tradition once again.

• 5. The Long Climb To Illusion

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  The art of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe achieved remarkably lifelike depictions of animals, long before any theory of perspective existed. The pursuit of accurate visual appearance has a long history, built from the depiction of anatomy, the effects of distance, and the play of light and color. Ancient Greek art is recognized as having made great progress in the representation of anatomy. No original panel or wall paintings by the great Greek painters survive, but from literary accounts illusionism seems to have been highly valued. Pliny the Elder told the famous story of birds pecking at grapes painted by Zeuxis in the 5th century BC, a tale that may well be a legend. Roman painting showed an unscientific but effective grasp of making distant objects smaller and rendering rooms with perspective. This did not mean rejecting idealism. Statues of gods and heroes pursued beautiful forms, while heads of the famously ugly Socrates were allowed to fall below those standards. The art of Late Antiquity then rejected illusionism for expressive force, a change already underway as Christianity began to affect elite art. Classical standards were not reached again in the West until new oil-painting techniques arrived in the Netherlands in the early 15th century, and scientific perspective was developed in Italy around the same time.

• 6. Painting Ordinary Life

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  Drolleries in the margins of medieval illuminated manuscripts sometimes hid small scenes of everyday life. For most of art's history, ordinary subjects were squeezed into the edges of compositions or shown at a smaller scale, partly because art was expensive and commissioned for specific religious, political or personal reasons. Early Netherlandish painting pushed portraiture as low as the prosperous merchants of Flanders. The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck, dated 1434, and the Merode Altarpiece by Robert Campin and his workshop, from around 1427, fill middle-class interiors with lovingly depicted objects. Those objects, though, largely carry layers of symbolism that undercut any commitment to realism for its own sake. Cycles of the Labours of the Months, surviving in many books of hours, concentrated on peasants working through the seasons. In the 16th century, a fashion arose for large paintings of people working in food markets and kitchens, where the food was given as much prominence as the workers. Pieter Aertsen and his nephew Joachim Beuckelaer worked in this vein in the Netherlands, while the young Annibale Carracci used an unpolished style in Italy in the 1580s. Pieter Bruegel the Elder pioneered large panoramic scenes of peasant life, a prelude to the genre painting that spread across 17th-century Europe.

• 7. The Movement Named

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  Jules-Antoine Castagnary, the French art critic, announced in 1863 that "The naturalist school declares that art is the expression of life under all phases and on all levels." He called its aim to reproduce nature carried to its maximum power: "it is truth balanced with science." The Realist movement itself began in the mid-19th century as a reaction against Romanticism and History painting. Its painters chose common laborers and ordinary people in ordinary surroundings, engaged in real activities. Its chief exponents were Gustave Courbet, Jean-François Millet, Honoré Daumier and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. According to Ross Finocchio, formerly of the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Realists used unprettified detail, coinciding with the naturalist literature of Émile Zola, Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert. The French movement found equivalents across Western countries. In Russia, the Peredvizhniki, or Wanderers, formed in the 1860s and organized exhibitions from 1871, including realists such as Ilya Repin, Vasily Perov and Ivan Shishkin. In Britain, Hubert von Herkomer and Luke Fildes found success with realist paintings dealing with social issues, while the difficulties of life for the poor were emphasized from the mid-19th century onward.

• 8. Realism Beyond Paint

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  Émile Zola adopted the scientific emphasis of naturalism for the aims of his novels, carrying the quarrel out of the gallery and into the wider arts. Literary realism, broadly defined as the faithful representation of reality, focused on everyday life among the middle or lower classes, without romantic idealization. Ian Watt traced its roots to Descartes and Locke, noting it received its first full formulation by Thomas Reid in the middle of the eighteenth century. Theatrical realism is said to have first emerged in European drama in the 19th century, an offshoot of the Industrial Revolution and the age of science. Anton Chekhov used techniques meant to reproduce an uninflected slice of life, presenting characters as ordinary, impotent, and unable to solve their predicaments. In the United States, William Dean Howells and Henry James served as spokesmen for realism in drama, which preceded fictional realism there by about two decades. After World War II, the realistic approach to theatre collapsed into nihilism and the absurd. In opera, verismo brought the naturalism of Zola, Flaubert and Henrik Ibsen onto the stage, with composers such as Pietro Mascagni, Ruggero Leoncavallo and Giacomo Puccini. Some claim verismo began in 1890 with the first performance of Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana. It reached Britain through W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, whose Iolanthe is considered a realistic representation of the nobility, fantastical elements and all.