Realism

Realism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Realism as a nameable phenomenon in Western thought and culture emerged in France during the mid-nineteenth century. Primarily a movement in art and literature, it claimed to represent common people and their everyday circumstances based on accurate observation. Realism challenged centuries of tradition, when the highest art aspired to idealized pictorial forms and heroic subjects. Supporters of realist art considered its veracity to be an indication of an artist’s “sincerity,” a moral judgment. It acquired a democratic political dimension from its inclusiveness and from the accessibility of its imagery to ordinary people unversed in the classics but capable of recognizing “truth.” These appeals were informed by progressive attitudes and an empirical concept of knowledge, as in the social theories of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) and the scientific epistemology and the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte (1798-1857). The leader of artistic realism was the French painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). Its advent revolutionized the history of art, leading to impressionism. In literature, various writers represented realism, from Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) to Henry James (1843-1916). Unlike in art, literary realism was rarely self-conscious or polemical.

The movement realism must be distinguished from the generic term realism —the latter an aspect of much art and literature throughout time. In its general meaning, the word can refer to an optical or descriptive realism, in which forms or details appear to be drawn from life or produce an illusion of reality. In art, this type of realism is an ingredient in the high classicism of the Greek age of the Parthenon, in Roman portraiture, in certain Renaissance and Baroque styles, in Pre-Raphaelitism, and in photorealism, among many others. In literature, it is an aspect in certain passages of Homer’s Iliad, in the early novel generally, and in the provincial settings of Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) or the urban settings of James. Indeed, in literature, prose generally developed as a realist genre, as opposed to epic or lyric poetry. In theater, realism was associated primarily with comedy, whereas tragedy was considered more ideal. Following a related hierarchy, realism in art developed in opposition to academic classicism, which looked back to antiquity and the conventions of the French classical theater of Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) and Jean Racine (1639-1699) for its idealist forms.

The realism movement was a response to two interrelated factors. On the one hand, there was an increasing demand for rational and eventually scientific empiricism, which since the Enlightenment had been regarded as intellectually and socially progressive. The invention of photography in 1839, which introduced a new standard for optical realism, can be considered in the light of the same spirit, for there would otherwise have been no incentive or use for it. Second, the same rationalism encouraged the rights of the individual against both coercive political regimes and their art academies. Realism represented a rebellion, said to be grounded in “truth,” against academic recipes and conventions. When Courbet’s paintings of 1849 to 1855 made such attitudes militant, he adopted the term realism, which was being used by both his critics and supporters. A later term, naturalism, was developed as a more scientific-sounding, less-politicized alternative by the French novelist Émile Zola (1840-1902) and the art critic Jules Castagnary (1830-1888).

Realism’s most coherent artistic manifestation occurred in mid-nineteenth-century France. It followed romanticism, which was already encouraging artistic freedom and self-expression, with artists looking to nature as their source. In his Realist Manifesto (1955), Courbet stated his aim as: “to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch according to my own appreciation” (Rubin 1997, pp. 157-158). Linking a faithful portrayal of his times with artistic independence (from teachings based on imitations of classical art), he made both elements the basis for the movement of which he became the undisputed leader. In the 1840s, Courbet’s generation drew on two related artistic trends. First was the Barbizon school of landscape painters, who studied people and places from a recognizable countryside, usually near Paris. Second was the recent popularity in literature and art of rural and provincial life. As a contrast to urban materialism and its inequities, the virtues and innocence of country folk were extolled in novels by George Sand (1804-1876) and stories by Courbet’s friend Champfleury (Jules Husson, 1821-1889). Painters like the Leleux brothers and Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) embodied this ethos in their representations of peasants. In addition, simple, often crude folk art and poetry were admired as naive expressions of popular culture and the working class.

The difference between Courbet and these artists was that, beginning with his Stonebreakers (1849, destroyed during World War II), the people, places, and activities in Courbet’s paintings appeared specifically contemporary, devoid of antimodern nostalgia, whereas his predecessors evoked a timelessness associated with romantic innocence and virtue. Courbet’s workers alluded to the harsh conditions of the 1840s, when failing harvests drove many off the land into day-wage labor, providing raw materials for modern roads, railroads, housing, and industry. A Burial at Ornans, painted in 1850, showed a ceremony outside Courbet’s hometown in the region of Franche-Comté near Switzerland. Against their rugged landscape, some thirty odd friends and neighbors gathered at the open grave of a respected citizen. Courbet portrays death as a prosaic, literally “down-to-earth” event whose meaning goes no further than laying the body in the ground. The huge canvas with life-sized figures flaunted Courbet’s challenge to assumptions about what was worthy of large-scale artistic representation, and his ostensibly coarse technique evoked a worker’s handicraft. Combined with their ostensible politics, the lower-class content and unrefined surfaces of his paintings caused a scandal. In 1855 Courbet challenged authority in a solo exhibition outside the grounds of the Universal Exposition. The central painting in his “Realist Pavilion” was The Studio of the Painter, in which he showed himself at the easel, supported by friends on the right and facing on the left a mix of figures embodying various ideas he considered outdated. The purpose of this much-interpreted painting was a declaration of both artistic freedom and solidarity with his own community.

Similar scandals shook the realm of literature. Earlier in the nineteenth century, Stendhal (Henri Beyle, 1783-1842) began the study of contemporary manners as a way to expose hypocrisy. In 1856 and 1857 respectively, Flaubert and the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) were brought to trial for offending public morality. Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1856) was about an adulterous housewife bored by her conventional husband. Poems from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) were often set in contemporary Paris and sometimes described erotic experience in a highly suggestive manner. A decade later, Zola considered his own novels analytic. In a preface to his notorious murder story Thérèse Racquin (1867), he compared his way of representing subjects—an adulterous woman and her lover plotting to murder her husband— to the scientific analysis performed by surgeons in medical dissections. In his art criticism, Zola’s interpretation of the painting of Édouard Manet (1832-1883) was similar. Calling Manet a child of his times, in which the direction was toward positivism, Zola praised the artist’s Olympia (1863-1864), a painting of a naked prostitute that was obviously meant to shock. Zola wrote that this picture, drawn from modern life, was sincerely observed by a dispassionate artist whose sole interest was to observe forms, colors, light, and shade.

Realism was associated with impressionism when the latter first appeared, since impressionism took up the commitment to modern life and contemporary manners flaunted by Manet and the contemporary novel. The young Claude Monet (1840-1926) was friendly with and drew upon Courbet and his technique, as did several other impressionists. Their imagery ranged from sailboats, promenades, and other forms of modern leisure to representations of industrial riverbanks, railroads, and factories. But the greater legacy of realism was to free artists to paint “sincerely”—that is, from their personal vision, which they indicated by a highly individualized style, often loosely handled as if the performance of representation were as important as the subject matter being painted. Hence, impressionism, praised by many for capturing the reality of a fleeting moment, contained the seeds of the demise of realism. The artifice of its execution was in constant tension with its illusion of the real. Yet realism successfully undermined doctrinal academicism once and for all by legitimizing images of modern life, heroic or anecdotal, rural or urban, and painted in whatever way the artist chose. It even entered sculpture, though as a more literal medium sculpture was far less challenging to traditional modes of representation than was painting, until the liberties with form taken by the “impressionist” sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917).

Russian linguist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) theorized that at the core of realism in art and literature is metonymy, a mode of figuration in which the part stands for the physical whole. The metonym is opposed to metaphor, in which an object stands for an idea; it is, in other words, a wholly concrete means of expression. Roland Barthes (1915-1980), in his famous short essay “The Reality Effect” (1968), pointed out that a profusion of observed detail in the realist novel slows the narrative, making it seem to advance almost unnoticeably, as if in real time, and making it appear to be the result of the concrete context established by such extensive description. In realist and impressionist painting, a sense of materiality and a dispersion of interest were achieved by a profusion of detail and a fragmentation of form across the entire image, along with subject matter from everyday modernity. Such painting was often compared to photography, the latter considered no more than a mechanical exercise, devoid of imagination and creativity. Painting was expected to emphasize certain truths in order to uplift and educate its audience, whereas photography’s lack of selectivity made the edges of a composition as interesting as the center and seemed to negate the possibility of moral content.

The response to realism by establishment artists was to employ their labor toward a finished optical realism, as in the work of Léon Bonnat (1833-1922), or to incorporate occasional free paint handling, as did Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884). In other countries, realism reinforced existing trends in genre painting, as occurred in Holland (e.g., Jozef Israëls [1824-1911]) and England. The macchiaioli movement in Italy paralleled realism and impressionism, especially in outdoor scenes. Verismo in opera followed later, near the turn of the century. In Germany, where Courbet was popular, realist images acquired a grander scale and avant-garde technique, as seen in the work of Wilhelm Leibl (1844-1900) and Max Liebermann (1847-1935). Artists in the United States adopted realism, as exemplified by Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), then impressionism, as national styles, although usually without the avant-garde connotations. Later realisms, such as in Richard Estes’s displays of photograph-like technique or Eric Fischl’s suburban psycho-realism, were often ostentatious. Even in politics, first with Klemens von Metternich (1773-1859) in Austria, then with Willy Brandt (1913-1992) in Germany, there emerged a so-called realpolitik that looked to facts on the ground rather than ideology for its goals. Whatever its manifestations, then, realism continues to have a grip on consciousness thanks to its claim to represent “reality” truthfully, compared to forms of thought that defy material verification.

SEE ALSO Naturalism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Auerbach, Erich. 1953. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Becker, George J., ed. 1963. Documents of Modern Literary Realism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Nochlin, Linda. 1971. Realism. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin.

Rubin, James H. 1997. Courbet. London: Phaidon.

Rubin, James H. 1999. Impressionism. London: Phaidon.

Weisberg, Gabriel P., ed. 1981. The Realist Tradition: French Paintings and Drawings, 1830-1900. Exhibition catalog. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art.

James H. Rubin