Realism (arts)

Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet (1854) – a Realist painting by Gustave Courbet

Realism in

, which had come to dominate French literature and art, with roots in the late 18th century.

In 19th-century Europe, "Naturalism" or the "Naturalist school" was somewhat artificially erected as a term representing a breakaway sub-movement of realism, that attempted (not wholly successfully) to distinguish itself from its parent by its avoidance of politics and social issues, and liked to proclaim a quasi-scientific basis, playing on the sense of "naturalist" as a student of

biological sciences

were then generally known.

There have been various movements invoking realism in the other arts, such as the opera style of

.

Visual arts

When used as an adjective, "realistic" (usually related to visual appearance) distinguishes itself from "realist" art that concerns subject matter. Similarly, the term "illusionistic" might be used when referring to the accurate rendering of visual appearances in a composition.

academic painting

, which very often depicted with great skill and care scenes that were contrived and artificial, or imagined historical scenes.

Resisting idealization

Realism, or naturalism as a style depicting the unidealized version of the subject, can be used in depicting any type of subject without commitment to treating the typical or every day. Despite the general idealism of classical art, this too had classical precedents, which came in useful when defending such treatments in the Renaissance and

's portraits of the Spanish royal family represent a sort of honest, unflattering portrayal of important people.

A recurring trend in

, especially in Spanish sculpture.

Renaissance theorists opened a debate, which was to last several centuries, as to the correct balance between drawing art from the observation of nature and from idealized forms, typically those found in classical models, or the work of other artists generally. Some admitted the importance of the natural, but many believed it should be idealized to various degrees to include only the beautiful. Leonardo da Vinci was one who championed the pure study of nature and wished to depict the whole range of individual varieties of forms in the human figure and other things.^[5] Leon Battista Alberti was an early idealizer, stressing the typical,^[6] with others such as Michelangelo supporting the selection of the most beautiful – he refused to make portraits for that reason.^[7]

In the 17th century, the debate continued. In Italy, it usually centered on the contrast between the relative "classical-idealism" of

During the 19th century, naturalism developed as a broadly defined movement in European art, though it lacked the political underpinnings that motivated realist artists. The originator of the term was the French art critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary, who in 1863 announced that: "The naturalist school declares that art is the expression of life under all phases and on all levels, and that its sole aim is to reproduce nature by carrying it to its maximum power and intensity: it is truth balanced with science".^[9] Émile Zola adopted the term with a similar scientific emphasis for his aims in the novel. Many Naturalist paintings covered a similar range of subject matter as that of Impressionism, but using tighter, more traditional brushwork styles.^[9]

The term "continued to be used indiscriminately for various kinds of realism" for several decades, often as a catch-all term for art that was outside Impressionism and later movements of

• 
  Late Gothic Pietà from Lubiąż in Lower Silesia, Poland, now in National Museum in Warsaw
• 
  Alexei Savrasov, The Rooks Have Returned, 1871
• 
  Jean-François Raffaëlli, Outskirts of Paris, 1880s
• 
  Pekka Halonen, Finnish Naturalist, Pioneers in Karelia, 1900

Illusionism

Lord Leighton's Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna

of 1853–55 is at the end of a long tradition of illusionism in painting, but is not Realist in the sense of Courbet's work of the same period.

The development of increasingly accurate representations of the visual appearances of things has a long history in art. It includes elements such as the accurate depiction of the anatomy of humans and animals, the

in the 5th century BC may well be a legend.

As well as accuracy in shape, light, and color, Roman paintings show an unscientific but effective knowledge of representing distant objects smaller than closer ones and representing regular geometric forms such as the roof and walls of a room with perspective. This progress in illusionistic effects in no way meant a rejection of idealism; statues of Greek gods and heroes attempt to represent with accuracy idealized and beautiful forms, though other works, such as heads of the famously ugly Socrates, were allowed to fall below these ideal standards of beauty. Roman portraiture, when not under too much Greek influence, shows a greater commitment to a truthful depiction of its subjects, called verism.

Holy Ghost

in the sky.

The art of

remained the norm.

The accurate depiction of landscape in painting had also been developing in Early Netherlandish/Early Northern Renaissance and Italian Renaissance painting and was then brought to a very high level in 17th-century Dutch Golden Age painting, with very subtle techniques for depicting a range of weather conditions and degrees of natural light. After being another development of Early Netherlandish painting, 1600 European portraiture subjects were often idealized by smoothing features or giving them an artificial pose. Still life paintings and still life elements in other works played a considerable role in developing illusionistic painting, though in the Netherlandish tradition of flower painting they long lacked "realism", in that flowers from all seasons were typically used, either from the habit of assembling compositions from individual drawings or as a deliberate convention; the large displays of bouquets in vases were atypical of 17th-century habits; the flowers were displayed one at a time.

Depiction of ordinary subjects

The depiction of ordinary, everyday subjects in art also has a long history, though it was often squeezed into the edges of compositions or shown at a smaller scale. This was partly because art was expensive and usually commissioned for specific religious, political or personal reasons, which allowed only a relatively small amount of space or effort to be devoted to such scenes.

sometimes contain small scenes of everyday life, and the development of perspective created large background areas in many scenes set outdoors. Medieval and Early Renaissance art usually showed non-sacred figures in contemporary dress by convention.

Early Netherlandish painting brought the painting of portraits as low down the social scale as the prosperous merchants of

and the depiction of everyday working-class people.

In the 16th century, there was a fashion for the depiction in large paintings of scenes of people working, especially in food markets and kitchens; in many, the food is given as much prominence as the workers. Artists included

painted peasants, but rarely townsfolk. In the 18th century, small paintings of working people remained popular, mostly drawing on the Dutch tradition and featuring women.

Much art depicting ordinary people, especially in the form of prints, was comic and moralistic, but the mere poverty of the subjects seems relatively rarely to have been part of the moral message. From the mid-19th century onwards, the difficulties of life for the poor were emphasized. Despite this trend coinciding with large-scale migration from the countryside to cities in most of Europe, painters still tended to paint poor rural people. Crowded city street scenes were popular with the Impressionists and related painters, especially ones showing Paris.

Medieval manuscript illuminators were often asked to illustrate technology, but after the Renaissance, such images continued in book illustrations and prints, with the exception of

. Such subjects probably failed to sell very well, and there is a noticeable absence of industry, other than a few railway scenes, in painting until the later 19th century, when works began to be commissioned, typically by industrialists or for institutions in industrial cities, often on a large scale, and sometimes given a quasi-heroic treatment.

American realism

, a movement of the early 20th century, is one of many modern movements to use realism in this sense.

• 
  Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The Laundress, 1761
• 
  William Bell Scott Iron and Coal, 1855–1860
• 
  Sir Luke Fildes, The Widower, 1876
• 
  Luxembourg Gardens

  , 1887

Realist movement

The Realist movement began in the mid-19th century as a reaction to Romanticism and History painting. In favor of depictions of 'real' life, the Realist painters used common laborers, and ordinary people in ordinary surroundings engaged in real activities as subjects for their works. Its chief exponents were Gustave Courbet, Jean-François Millet, Honoré Daumier and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.^[10][11][12] According to Ross Finocchio, formerly of the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Realists used unprettified detail depicting the existence of ordinary contemporary life, coinciding with the contemporaneous naturalist literature of Émile Zola, Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert.^[13]

The French Realist movement had equivalents in all other Western countries, developing somewhat later. In particular the Peredvizhniki or Wanderers group in Russia who formed in the 1860s and organized exhibitions from 1871 included many realists such as Ilya Repin, Vasily Perov and Ivan Shishkin, and had a great influence on Russian art. In Britain, artists such as Hubert von Herkomer and Luke Fildes had great success with realist paintings dealing with social issues.

• 
  Vasily Perov, The Drowned, 1867
• 
  Religious Procession in Kursk Province

  , 1880–1883
• 
  Aleksander Gierymski Feast of Trumpets, 1884
• 
  Hubert von Herkomer, Hard Times, 1885

Literature

Broadly defined as "the faithful representation of reality",

While the preceding

Theatre

Main article:

Theatrical realism

Theatrical realism is said to have first emerged in European drama in the 19th century as an offshoot of the Industrial Revolution and the age of science.^[23][24] Some also specifically cited the invention of photography as the basis of the realist theater^[25][26] while others view that the association between realism and drama is far older as demonstrated by the principles of dramatic forms such as the presentation of the physical world that closely matches reality.^[27]

The achievement of realism in the theatre was to direct attention to the social and psychological problems of ordinary life. In its dramas, people emerge as victims of forces larger than themselves, as individuals confronted with a rapidly accelerating world.^[28] These pioneering playwrights present their characters as ordinary, impotent, and unable to arrive at answers to their predicaments. This type of art represents what we see with our human eyes. Anton Chekov, for instance, used camera works to reproduce an uninflected slice of life.^[29] Scholars such as Thomas Postlewait noted that throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there were numerous joining of melodramatic and realistic forms and functions, which could be demonstrated in the way melodramatic elements existed in realistic forms and vice versa.^[30]

In the United States, realism in drama preceded fictional realism by about two decades as theater historians identified the first impetus toward realism during the late 1870s and early 1880s.^[31] Its development is also attributed to William Dean Howells and Henry James who served as the spokesmen for realism as well as articulator of its aesthetic principles.^[31]

The realistic approach to theater collapsed into nihilism and the absurd after World War II.^[23]

Cinema

Aesthetically realist filmmakers use

Opera

Verismo was a post-Romantic operatic tradition associated with Italian composers such as Pietro Mascagni, Ruggero Leoncavallo, Umberto Giordano, Francesco Cilea and Giacomo Puccini. They sought to bring the naturalism of influential late 19th-century writers such as Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert and Henrik Ibsen into opera. This new style presented true-to-life drama that featured gritty and flawed lower-class protagonists^[34] while some described it as a heightened portrayal of a realistic event.^[35] Although an account considered Giuseppe Verdi's Luisa Miller and La traviata as the first stirrings of the verismo,^[36] some claimed that it began in 1890 with the first performance of Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana, peaked in the early 1900s.^[37] It was followed by Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, which dealt with the themes of infidelity, revenge, and violence.^[34]

Verismo also reached Britain where pioneers included the Victorian-era theatrical partnership of the dramatist W. S. Gilbert and the composer Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900).^[35] Specifically, their play Iolanthe is considered a realistic representation of the nobility although it included fantastical elements.

See also

Notes

References

• ISBN 0-19-881050-4
• Morris, Pam (2003). Realism. London: Routledge.
  ISBN 978-0-415-22938-8
  .
• Needham, Gerald, "Naturalism." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed February 23, 2013, subscriber link
• Raben, Hans, "Bellori's Art: The Taste and Distaste of a Seventeenth-Century Art Critic in Rome", Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, Vol. 32, No. 2/3 (2006), pp. 126–46, Stichting voor Nederlandse Kunsthistorische Publicaties, JSTOR
• Watt, Ian (1957). The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• West, Shearer (1996). The Bullfinch Guide to Art. UK: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
  ISBN 978-0-8212-2137-2
  .

Further reading

• Buchanan, William (1982), The Realist Tradition, in
  ISSN 0264-0856
• Dahlhaus, Carl (1985). Realism in Nineteenth-Century Music. Translated by Mary Whittall. Cambridge, London, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge University Press.
  ISBN 978-0-521-27841-6
  (pbk).
• Dahlhaus, Carl (1989). Nineteenth-Century Music. Translated by J. Bradford Robinson. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press.
  ISBN 978-0-520-07644-0
  .
• Frisch, Walter (2005). German Modernism: Music and the Arts. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press.
  ISBN 978-0-520-25148-9
  .

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Realism.

• Article on American literary realism at the Literary Movements site
• Art term: Realism at tate.org.uk