Realist visual arts  

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Olympia by Édouard Manet, painted in 1863, it stirred an uproar when it was first exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon. Today, it is considered as the start of modern art.

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Realism in the visual arts is a style that depicts the actuality of what the eyes can see. The term is used in different senses in art history; it may mean the same as illusionism, the representation of subjects with visual mimesis or verisimilitude, or may mean an emphasis on the everyday life of subjects, depicting them without idealization, and not omitting their sordid aspects. Works may be realist in either of these senses, or both. Use of the two senses can be confusing, but depending on context the second sense is perhaps more common.

Realism as a tendency in 19th century art was related to similar movements in the theatre, literature and opera. All emphasized the depiction of everyday subjects, but by no means always discarding classical, Romantic or sentimental approaches to their treatment. The movement began in the 1850s in France. One of Gustave Courbet's most important works is A Burial at Ornans, 1849-1850, a canvas recording an event which he witnessed in September 1848. Courbet's painting of the funeral of his grand uncle became the first grand statement of the Realist style.

Overview

Realism in the visual arts can refer to specific art movements (e.g. Social realism or Russian socialist realism) as well as verisimilitude of depiction (photographic realism such as Vermeer). As an art movement in itself, it started in 19th century France by Millet, Daumier and Courbet who were politically motivated and set about attacking social order through their art.

Realists render everyday characters, situations, dilemmas, and objects, all in a "true-to-life" manner. Realists tend to discard theatrical drama, lofty subjects and classical forms of art in favor of commonplace themes.

However no art can ever be fully realistic. Distortion in form, simplification of details are required for any painting.

History

In the broadest sense, realism in a work of art exists wherever something has been well observed and accurately depicted, even if the work as a whole does not strictly conform to the conditions of realism.

In the late 16th century, the prevailing mode in European art was mannerism, an artificial art of elongated figures in graceful but unlikely poses. Caravaggio emerged to change the direction of art by depicting flesh-and-blood human beings, painted directly from life with an immediacy never before seen.

A fondness for humble subjects and homely details characterizes much of Dutch art, and Rembrandt is an outstanding realist in his renunciation of the ideal and his embrace of the life around him. In the 19th century a group of French landscape artists known as the Barbizon School emphasized close observation of nature, paving the way for the Impressionists. In England the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood rejected what they saw as the formulaic idealism of the followers of Raphael, which led some of them to an art of intense realism.

Trompe l'oeil (literally, "fool the eye"), a technique which creates the illusion that the objects depicted actually exist, is an extreme example of artistic realism. Examples of this tendency can be found in art from antiquity to the present day.

Notes

Related: everyday life - genre painting - modern art - photorealism - realism - representation - visual arts

In modern art: Olympia (1865) - Édouard Manet

Art movements: Gustave Courbet - social realism - Neorealism

Contrast: fantastic art - surrealism - social realism

Northrop Frye on realism

American art critic Northrop Frye calls the sort of realism displayed in Goya's work "a revolutionary or prophetic realism, of the sort that runs through Brueghel, Hogarth ¹, Goya, and Daumier. This kind of realism is often not realistic in form: it may be presented as fantasy, as in Brueghel's Mad Margaret or Goya's Caprichos. But it tears apart the façade of society and shows us the forces working behind that façade, and is realistic in the sense of sharpening our vision of society as a mode of existence rather than simply an environment."

Further reading

• Realism (1971) - Linda Nochlin

See also

Among the important realist painters are:

• William Bliss Baker
• Rosa Bonheur
• William-Adolphe Bouguereau
• Karl Briullov
• Ford Madox Brown
• Henri Cadiou
• Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin
• Camille Corot
• Gustave Courbet
• Charles-François Daubigny
• Honoré Daumier
• Edgar Degas (also an Impressionist)
• Thomas Eakins
• Nikolai Ge
• Aleksander Gierymski
• William Harnett (a specialist in trompe l'oeil)
• Winslow Homer
• Edward Hopper
• Louis Le Nain
• Édouard Manet (associated with Impressionism)
• Jean-François Millet
• Fernand Pelez
• Ilya Yefimovich Repin
• Rembrandt van Rijn
• Théodore Rousseau
• John Singer Sargent
• Andrew Wyeth
• Nikolai Yaroshenko

Schools

• Barbizon school
• Peredvizhniki
• Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Realistic art

• American Realism
• Classical Realism
• Fantastic realism
• Figurative art
• Illustration
• Genre works
• Heroic realism
• Magic realism
• Naturalism (art)
• New Realism
• Photorealism
• Romantic realism
• Social realism
• Socialist realism

See also

Realistic art

• Classical Realism
• Fantastic realism
• Figurative art
• Illustration
• Genre works
• Heroic realism
• Magic realism
• Naturalism (art)
• New Realism
• Photorealism
• Romantic realism
• Social realism
• Socialist realism
• American realism
• Ashcan School

External links

• Nineteenth-Century French Realism by Ross Finocchio