Realism (1840s – 1880s)

SUMMARY

Realism is recognized as the first modern movement in art, which rejected traditional forms of art,
literature, and social organization as outmoded in the wake of the Enlightenment and the Industrial
Revolution. Beginning in France in the 1840s, Realism revolutionized painting, expanding conceptions
of what constituted art. Working in a chaotic era marked by revolution and widespread social change,
Realist painters replaced the idealistic images and literary conceits of traditional art with real-life
events, giving the margins of society similar weight to grand history paintings and allegories. Their
choice to bring everyday life into their canvases was an early manifestation of the avant-garde desire
to merge art and life, and their rejection of pictorial techniques, like perspective, prefigured the many
20th-century definitions and redefinitions of modernism.

MAIN IDEAS

 Realism is broadly considered the beginning of modern art. Literally, this is due to its
conviction that everyday life and the modern world were suitable subjects for art.
Philosophically, Realism embraced the progressive aims of modernism, seeking new truths
through the re-examination and overturning of traditional systems of values and beliefs.
 Realism concerned itself with how life was structured socially, economically, politically, and
culturally in the mid-19th century. This led to unflinching, sometimes "ugly" portrayals of life's
unpleasant moments and the use of dark, earthy palettes that confronted high art's ultimate
ideals of beauty.
 Realism was the first explicitly anti-institutional, nonconformist art movement. Realist
painters took aim at the social mores and values of the bourgeoisie and monarchy upon who
patronized the art market. Though they continued submitting works to the Salons of the
official Academy of Art, they were not above mounting independent exhibitions to defiantly
show their work.
 Following the explosion of newspaper printing and mass media in the wake of the Industrial
Revolution, Realism brought in a new conception of the artist as self-publicist. Gustave
Courbet, Édouard Manet, and others purposefully courted controversy and used the media to
enhance their celebrity in a manner that continues among artists to this day.

CHARACTERISTICS

The style of Realist painting spread to almost all genres, including History painting, portraits, genre-
painting, and landscapes. For example, landscape artists went out to the provinces in search of the
'real' France, setting up artistic colonies in places like Barbizon, and later at Grez-Sur-Loing, Pont-Aven,
and Concarneau. (But note the difference between naturalism and realism.)
Favourite subject matter for Realist artists included: genre scenes of rural and urban working class life,
scenes of street-life, cafes and night clubs, as well as increasing frankness in the treatment of the body,
nudity and sensual subjects. Not surprisingly, this gritty approach shocked many of the upper and
middle class patrons of the arts, both in France and in the Victorian art of England, where Realism was
never fully embraced.

A general trend, as well as a specific style of art, Realism heralded a general move away from the 'ideal'
(as typified by the art of Classical mythology, so beloved by Renaissance artists and sculptors) towards
the ordinary. Thus, in their figure drawing and figure painting, Realists portrayed real people not
idealized types. From now on, artists felt increasingly free to depict real-life situations stripped of
aesthetics and universal truths. (No more cute-looking child beggars, picturesque streets and views,
healthy-looking contented peasants and so on.) In this sense, Realism reflected a progressive and
highly influential shift in the significance and function of art in general, including literature as well as
fine art. It influenced Impressionism - see, for instance, Realism to Impressionism (1830-1900) - and
several other modern art styles, such as Pop-Art. The style retains its influence on the visual arts to
this day.

BEGINNINGS

Before Realism: History Painting and the Academy

Established in 1648 by Louis XIV, the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture or Royal Academy
of Painting and Sculpture governed the production of art in France for nearly two centuries. Given
France's prominence in European culture during that time, the Academy set standards for art across
the continent, providing studio training for young talent and recognizing artistic achievement at its
semi-regular Salon exhibitions.

The "highest" form of art, established by the Academy in a 1668 conference, was history painting: the
large-scale depiction of a narrative, typically drawn from classical mythology, the Bible, literature, or
the annals of human achievement. Only the strongest painters were allowed to paint in this genre,
and their works were the most celebrated by the Academy. Descending in importance in the hierarchy
of genres were portraiture (the depiction of important persons), genre scenes (the depiction of
peasants, or "unimportant" persons), landscape (the depiction of living nature), and still life (nature
morte, or "dead nature").

Spurred by archaeological discoveries in Greece and Italy in the mid-18th century and Enlightenment
ideals of reason and order, Neoclassicism became the mode par excellence for history painting in the
late 1700s. Neoclassical history painting, exemplified in the work of Jacques-Louis David, used classical
references, compositional techniques, and settings to comment upon contemporary events. His
famous Oath of the Horatii (1784), for example, communicated the civic value of patriotism in the
guise of a story from the Roman historian Livy.

In response to Neoclassicism, the Industrial Revolution, and the Enlightenment's rationalization of life
and society, Romanticism embraced irrational, intense emotion and exotic subject matter as more
authentic sources for artistic creativity. Rather than beautifully ordered outdoor scenes, Romantic
landscapes became arenas for the sublime conflict between man and nature. In place of David's praise
of civic virtue were history paintings like Eugène Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus (1827): a turbulent,
chaotic scene inspired by a Lord Byron play wherein the titular king of Assyria commands his
possessions destroyed and his terrified, beseeching wives massacred in the face of final military defeat.

Revolution, the Rejection of Tradition, and the Importance of Photography

While Romanticism might have rejected certain tenets of Neoclassicism, it did not drastically change
the 17th- and 18th-century institutions of art and society. The near-perpetual state of revolution in
France in the 19th century provided an impetus to enact a more radical change. After the initial 1789
Revolution, France went through the First Republic, the First Empire under Napoleon Bonaparte, the
restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, the 1830 Revolution, the July Monarchy, the 1848 Revolution,
the Second Republic, the Second Empire, the Franco-Prussian War and institution of the Paris
Commune of 1871, and the establishment of the Third Republic.

Challenging Neoclassicism and Romanticism as escapist in the face of the larger societal issues brought
by the turbulent 19th century, Realism began in France in the 1840s as the cultural aspect of a larger
response to ever-changing governance, military occupation and economic exploitation of the colonies,
and industrialization and urbanization in the cities. Realism, more than the simple representation of
nature, was an attempt to situate oneself in the "real": in scientific, moral, and political certainty.

In the 1830s, this push toward scientific positivism manifested itself in the advent of photography.
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre publicly demonstrated the daguerreotype in 1839, mechanically fixing
an image from nature onto a metal support by the use of a camera. Simultaneously in England, William
Henry Fox Talbot accomplished the same with the calotype, which fixed the image onto paper coated
with silver iodide. In turn, the photograph fueled Realism. While Realist artists rarely worked from
photographs (some did), the photograph's biggest conceptual strength was its claim to veracity. If the
right to rule had traditionally been supported by art that idealized the powerful, the photograph
suggested the possibility to literally show rulers' real flaws. In the midst of a revolutionary century,
Realist painters sought to adapt photography's truth value to their art.

Honoré Daumier and an Art of Social Critique

Another major influence on Realism was the explosion of socially critical journalism and caricature at
the beginning of the July Monarchy (1830-48). Though the authoritarian reign of Louis Phillippe I would
end in overthrow, the first five years of his rule allowed greater freedom of the press. It was in this
moment that Honoré Daumier began publishing caricatures critical of the monarchy, such as the
lithograph Gargantua (1831), in which he mockingly depicted the king as the gluttonous giant of
François Rabelais's 1534 novel.

Engraving, which could be reproduced and disseminated in the press, enabled Daumier to circulate
his critical compositions. Despite being imprisoned for six months for his negative depiction of the
king as Gargantua, he continued to create the Realist lithograph Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril 1834
(1834), which showed the brutal aftermath of a massacre of working-class innocents by the French
government. The work was considered so powerful and dangerous to the monarchy that Louis-
Philippe sent men to purchase as many copies as possible to be destroyed. Daumier would continue
painting and engraving for several decades, producing socially focused works such as Third-Class
Carriage (1862-64).

Gustave Courbet, the Revolutions of 1848, and the Origins of Socialism

When the July Monarchy came crashing down in France in 1848, ushering in the Second Republic
(1848-51), it was as part of a larger wave of European revolution that brought wide-ranging social
changes in Germany, Italy, the Austrian Empire, the Netherlands, and Poland. These events, combined
with the publication of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty in 1846 and Marx and
Engels's Communist Manifesto in 1848, cast a new light on the margins of society, and Realism became
the visual language for their representation.

A friend of Proudhon and Realism's main proponent, Gustave Courbet led a multifaceted assault on
French political power, bourgeois social mores, and the art institution. His exhibition of A Burial at
Ornans (1849-50) at the Salon of 1850-51 marked the debut of Realism as a significant force in the
European art scene, causing a scandal with its matter-of-fact depiction of a rural funeral on a scale
traditionally reserved for allegory and history painting. The Stone Breakers (1849-50), exhibited in the
same year, represented two anonymous, lower-class workers participating in poorly compensated,
backbreaking labor, a scene that carried uncomfortable associations with Socialism for the Salon's
middle-class audience. Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (Summer) (1856) caused a similar
sensation at the Salon of 1857 with a frank depiction of two prostitutes lazily reclining on a riverbank
with their garments in disarray that offended bourgeois taste.

CONCEPTS, STYLES, AND TRENDS

Challenging the Norm and Courting Scandal: Courbet and Manet

If in the 1850s Courbet painted large works with subject matter that questioned the values of French
society, Édouard Manet pushed Realism even further in the 1860s. Having made a name for himself
at the Salon of 1861 with his exhibition of The Spanish Singer (1860), he submitted Le déjeuner sur
l'herbe (1863) to the Salon of 1863. Though the painting was rejected, it was shown in the Salon des
Refuses ("Exhibition of Rejects"). There, Manet's frank depiction of two young dandies dining in a
forest with a fully nude woman offended the sensibilities of its salon-going audience, especially
middle-class men who participated in exactly those sorts of dalliances with Parisian prostitutes and
who did not like to be reminded of this when out at art exhibitions, potentially with their families.
Manet built upon and fed into all of these scandalous charges when he submitted Olympia (1863) to
the Salon of 1865. Olympia, which places the viewer in the position of a bordello visitor attempting to
procure a disinterested prostitute, made Manet's intervention even more obvious.

The critics, however, were playing directly into Courbet's and Manet's hands: the notoriety they
commanded from their works was intentional, turning them into celebrities within the art world.
Beside muddying the traditional categories and subjects of academic painting, Courbet, and Manet in
his turn, would challenge the state art institution itself. When three of his fourteen submissions to the
Exposition Universelle of 1855 were rejected for size considerations, Courbet rented space adjacent
to the Exposition to construct his own Pavilion of Realism, in which he housed forty of his own works
for free public view. When Manet was excluded from the Exposition Universelle of 1867, he too
exhibited independently. Beyond drawing attention away from government exhibitions and creating
publicity for their work, Courbet's and Manet's interventions emboldened future artists (most notably
the Impressionists of the following generation) to exhibit their art independently.

Origins of Objectivity and Realist Aesthetics

The Greeks founded a new method of thought which was to underlie the whole development of
Western civilization. In Greek thought, the object observed was clearly separated from the subject
who observes. In the objective view of an object the interior life and inherent characteristics of the
observer are eliminated as far as humanly possible. The subject alone possesses a soul and lives in
time. The object belongs to space, where it can be defined and measured, and where it obeys the laws
of logic. We have been so profoundly penetrated by this tradition of the subjective and the objective
that we accept it as natural, spontaneous and inherent in man. This process of thought born in Greece
remains the foundation of our thinking today.

As science took to itself responsibility for the whole future of humanity it led art into accepting its
technique of objective observation, and this way of thinking was also applied to resolve the social
problems created by the development of the machine. This program was basic to Realist aesthetics,
although it was some time before realist artists fully accepted it. Millet, for example, refused to be
moved by politics and the democratic outlook. His art was dedicated to the life of the peasant in the
fields: see, for instance, works like Man with a Hoe (1862) and The Angelus (1859). Honore Daumier,
in a similar way, was moved by the force of Romanticism and translated it into a large and grandiose
vision. But he also accepted politics - after all, his people were the newcomers in the towns - the
proletariat. However, it was Courbet who finally accepted both the Realist and the socialist credo and
the need for objective Realism, in art and in politics.

Realism's Visual Revolution

While the Realist painters' manipulation of controversy through their subject matter is an obvious
manifestation of their anti-authoritarian goals, their technical innovations may be less obvious to eyes
conditioned by 150 years of modern art. At the time, however, the artistic distance between a canvas
by Courbet and a traditional history painting were obvious and confrontational.

When Courbet debuted The Stone Breakers, critics accused him of purposeful ugliness and complained
of the "flatness" of his composition, which was enhanced by the bold outlines surrounding his two key
figures. A year later, his painting Young Ladies of the Village (1851-52) was attacked as clumsy, lacking
in correct perspective, and disregarding scale in its portrayal of a trio of women who dwarf the cattle
that stand near them. Eleven years later, Manet's painting Le déjeuner sur l'herbe was attacked on
nearly the same grounds, with critics commenting negatively on Manet's coarseness of paint handling,
the flatness of his composition, and the stark, contoured whiteness of his female figure. When critics
correctly connected Manet's composition of the three-person figural group to High Renaissance works
by Marcantonio Raimondi and Giorgione, their outrage heightened at his indecorous treatment of the
Old Masters.
The follow-up exhibition of Olympia (coarser, flatter, more starkly contoured, and based on Titian's
Venus of Urbino (1538)) proved that these manipulations to traditional academic painting were not
the mistakes of a young, clumsy artist. Unwittingly, the critics had stumbled onto what would become
the groundbreaking visual achievement of Realism: Courbet and Manet each made an artistic choice
to move away from the Renaissance conception of a canvas as a "window onto the world" toward a
flatness that revealed the canvas as a two-dimensional support to be creatively covered with pigment.
This first step away from painting as a mere representational format was a crucible for generations of
modern artists and a major reason for the continued popularity of Realism today. While Courbet was
outspoken in his conviction that art could never be wholly abstract, his and Manet's nontraditional
painting empowered future artists to move further away from the direct pursuit of naturalism.

The Ennobled Peasant: Jean-François Millet, Rosa Bonheur and Jules Breton

Despite Courbet's insistence that socialism informed his Realist painting, not every Realist artist
pursued his political goals. They did, however, share an interest in the life of the lower class and desire
to represent it in high art. Jean-François Millet completed a trio of works, The Sower (1850), The
Gleaners (1857), and The Angelus (1857-59), that represented the hard work of the rural peasant class
with dignity, but with a less confrontational air than Courbet's canvases. The female painter Rosa
Bonheur, whose progressive-minded parents allowed her to study animal anatomy in barns and
slaughterhouses at a young age (while dressed as a boy!), first achieved fame for Plowing in the
Nivernais (1848), a government-commissioned painting that depicts four farmhands driving steer to
plow a field. As it was thought to reference a scene from George Sand's La Mare au Diable, this early
example of Realism was spared the criticism cast on Courbet's large works. The Horse Fair (1852-55)
further demonstrated her focus on blue-collar work and her ability to create dynamic compositions
through close observation.

However, even Millet's seemingly innocuous celebration of France's rural backbone was received as
potentially dangerous socialist content by conservative critics in the wake of the 1848 Revolution,
which granted greater rights to provincial men. Jules Breton's paintings were considered a safer
alternative, and has been referred to as "popular Realism." Breton's The Gleaners (1854) depicts the
same practice as Millet's painting, wherein poor rural women are allowed to pick up bits of grain left
behind after the harvest. However, Breton imagined the scene as one happening within a strict order:
despite gleaning being "women's work," a man with a dog dominates the scene, overseeing the
fieldwork. A steeple on the horizon would have communicated both the pious nature and Christian
values of the peasantry as well as another form of governance to Parisians concerned about the
growing equality they shared with their rural counterparts.

Realism Outside of France

Though Realism was first a French phenomenon, it obtained adherents across Europe and in the
United States. The American James Abbott McNeill Whistler befriended Courbet in the 1860s and
painted in a Realist style. Yet Whistler was an advocate for "art for art's sake" and rejected the idea of
painting as a moral or social enterprise a la Courbet. Nonetheless, his Symphony in White, no. 1: the
White Girl caused controversy at the same Salon of 1863 where Manet courted scandal, because critics
argued that it contained connotations of a bride's lost innocence.

Thomas Eakins became the United States' most prominent Realist painter, integrating photographic
study into his works and revealing the character of his subjects through close observation. The Gross
Clinic (1875), a portrait of the doctor Samuel Gross performing invasive surgery in an operating theater
is rendered in unflinching detail. His choice of a contemporary subject (modern surgery) follows the
Realist belief that an artist must be of his own time.

The German Realist Wilhelm Leibl met Courbet and saw his work when the French painter visited
Germany in 1869. Recognizing his abilities, Courbet lured him back to Paris, where Leibl achieved
considerable success, also meeting Manet before returning to Munich to establish himself as his
country's premier Realist painter. He is best known for his images of peasant scenes such as Three
Women in Church (1881), which brought the frank naturalism of the Dutch and German Old Masters
into the modern era. Though the somewhat dated outfits that the three women wear indicate their
low economic status (the new trends of the city have passed them by), Leibl ennobles them in their
patience and humility.

The Realist Ilya Repin was the most prominent painter of his country in the 19th century, responsible
for bringing Russian visual art to the attention of European audiences. His large canvas Barge Haulers
on the Volga (1870-73) celebrated the strength of Russia's lowest-ranking physical laborers. The
novelist Leo Tolstoy would write of Repin that he depicted "the life of the people much better than
any other Russian artist." Having traveled to Paris and become aware of the nascent movement of
Impressionism, Repin chose to continue painting in a Realist vein, because he felt that Impressionist
painting lacked the social motivations necessary to modern art.

LATER DEVELOPMENTS

There was no defined "group" in Realism, as we might conceive of the later Impressionists as a
coherent group who exhibited together: The Realist movement comprised of a number of artists
working independently among similar lines. Though they knew each other, and the artists and writers
were mutually supportive friends, there was no "breakup" or dissolution of the group. Thus, the
historical and artistic motives that led to Realism's genesis and development continued in the art and
ethos of painters across the globe for generations to come.

As the enfants terribles of the 19th-century art world, Courbet and Manet are often invoked as the
first avant-garde artists, and their mixture of art and critique laid groundwork for every socially
engaged artist in their wake. Moreover, their visual trajectory into flatness had widespread
ramifications for painting without which Manet's next step into Impressionism could not have
happened. Their use of contour lines to structure form and separate it into panes of color were also
an inspiration to the Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne and his followers, as well as the Cubists Pablo
Picasso and Georges Braque.

Even artists with drastically different goals than Realism named their debt to the movement. Giorgio
de Chirico, the head of the Metaphysical art movement, wrote about his reverence for Courbet, who
he acknowledged as an artistic father figure. Surrealism founder André Breton would celebrate
Courbet's mixing of the artistic with the political; Surrealist dissident Georges Bataille named Manet
the father of modern art for being the first to "destroy" the subject of painting, in Olympia.

The Ashcan School of the late-19th and early-20th century in the U.S. derived from the sometimes
gritty, matter-of-fact depiction of city life was partially based on the figurative language and social
awareness of Realism. Similarly, Social Realism, less an art movement than a cultural phenomenon,
took Realism's relation to social justice as a given and made figurative works to combat the abstract
art in vogue in the early part of the century. The Mexican muralists, American art workers in
Depression-era New Deal programs, and French and German painters in the years leading up to World
War II worked in this mode to create straightforward, legible works to transmit messages to their
audiences. Social Realism should not be confused with Socialist Realism, decreed by Joseph Stalin as
the state art of the Soviet Union in 1934. Though both shared a commitment to the education and
edification of a lower-class, uneducated populace, the Soviet variant - a visual mélange of Repin's
Realism and a sunnier Impressionism - became an official, academic art, supporting the regime and
remaining largely unchanged until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In Weimar Germany (1918-33), the artists of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) took lessons from
the matter-of-factness of Leibl's Realist canvases to move beyond the distortions and abstraction of
German Expressionism. Photorealism in the 1960s was born of a similar relationship to Abstract
Expressionism, and though its artists did not always share the social motivations of Realism (preferring
to link themselves to the example of contemporary Pop art, also a figurative language), their debt to
the movement is visually apparent.

What is Naturalism?

In fine art panting, "naturalism" describes a true-to-life style which involves the representation or
depiction of nature (including people) with the least possible distortion or interpretation. There is
a quasi-photographic quality to the best naturalistic paintings: a quality which requires a minimum
amount of visual detail. "Modern" naturalism dates from the affluence of the early 19th century,
and was much influenced by the literary fashion for authenticity - the term was first coined by the
French writer Emile Zola. It emerged first in English landscape painting, before spreading to France
and then other parts of Europe. Like all comparable styles, naturalism is influenced to a degree by
the aesthetics and culture, as well as the unavoidable subjectivism, of the artist. But it's a question
of degree - after all, no painting can be wholly naturalist: the artist is bound to make tiny distortions
to create his idea of a perfectly natural picture. Nevertheless, if an artist sets out with the clear aim
of replicating nature, then a naturalist painting is the most likely outcome.

What is the Difference Between Naturalism and Realism?

Naturalism is often confused with "realism", a true-life style of art which focuses on social realities
and observable facts, rather than the ideals and aesthetics.

The difference between Realism and Naturalism in (say) painting, is twofold. First, realism tends to
be concerned with content rather than method. That is to say, it focuses on the issue of "who" or
"what" is being painted, rather than "how" it is painted. Typically, realist artists depict common
people going about their ordinary lives, rather than grand individuals performing some kind of
heroic or noble act. In contrast, naturalism is all about "how" a subject is painted, rather than "who"
or "what" it is.

Second, Realism is typically associated with the promotion of social or political awareness. Its
images frequently champion a particular set of social or political policies, as in the case of
movements like American Scene Painting (c.1925-45), the Ashcan School (c.1900-1915),
Precisionism (flourished 1920s), Social Realism (1930s) and Socialist Realism (1930s onwards). Of
course, realist artists often paint in a naturalist way, but naturalism is not their primary concern,
and is rarely the point of their works.