Neo-Realism

Neo-Realism. An aesthetic philosophy developed by Harold Gilman and Charles Ginner in 1913. They exhibited together under the name ‘Neo-Realists’ on two occasions: at the Allied Artists' Association in 1913, and in a joint exhibition at the Goupil Gallery, London, in 1914. The catalogue of the Goupil exhibition was prefaced by an article by Ginner entitled ‘Neo-Realism'; it had originally been published in the periodical The New Age on 1 January that year. In this article he put forward the idea that good art is the result of constantly renewed contact with nature: ‘the aim of Neo-Realism is the plastic interpretation of life through the intimate research into Nature.’ He thought that the Impressionists and the three foremost Post-Impressionists—Cézanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh—had exemplified this contact with nature, but that the Neo-Impressionists had neglected it in favour of scientific interests and that the Cubists and Matisse had debased art because they had lost direct contact with reality. Ginner thought that the lack of such contact led to Academicism, which he defined as ‘the adoption by weaker commercial painters of the creative artist's personal methods of interpreting nature and the consequent creation of a formula'. In the catalogue of the 1981–2 Arts Council Harold Gilman exhibition, Andrew Causey writes that ‘Neo-Realism drew an aggressive riposte from Sickert [in The New Age, 30 April 1914], not because he deeply disagreed with it, as he admitted, but probably because he resented the pontifical tone of what was certainly a statement of modest substance.’

The term ‘Neo-Realism’ has also been used in other ways, notably as a synonym for New Realism or Nouveau Réalisme. In Werner Haftmann's Painting in the Twentieth Century (1961) it is used more or less as a synonym for Neue Sachlichkeit. Haftmann uses the term ‘Neo-Verism’ in a similar way.