Realist Art
The realistic art movement occurred between 1850 AD to 1900 AD. This movement was primarily a French art movement that occurred after the 1848 Revolution (Art in Context, 2021). "The most essential element of Realism was the complete avoidance of artificiality in every aspect of the artworks that were created" (Art in Context, 2021).
- Nineteenth-Century French Realism: The Metropolitan Museum of ArtThe Realist movement in French art flourished from about 1840 until the late nineteenth century, and sought to convey a truthful and objective vision of contemporary life.
- Realism: BritannicaRealism, in the arts, the accurate, detailed, unembellished depiction of nature or of contemporary life.
- Realism: The Art StoryThough never a coherent group, 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.
- Realism: The TateIn its specific sense realism refers to a mid nineteenth century artistic movement characterised by subjects painted from everyday life in a naturalistic manner; however the term is also generally used to describe artworks painted in a realistic almost photographic way.
- Realism Paintings and Artists – The Artworks of Famous Realist PaintersBeginning in France during the mid-1800s, Realism outwardly rejected the previous art movement of Romanticism as it was said to no longer accurately capture the lives of society.
Research & Reference
- Realism: Credo ReferenceA Credo Reference landing page on realism. This page includes links to reference works, journal articles, and a mind map.
Realism: The Artistic Form of the Truth
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It is a creative impulse as old as humanity itself: to depict life faithfully, accurately, in words or in images. This program shows how that impulse led to Realism—a widespread artistic movement, born in the latter half of the 19th century, which rejected pretense, distortion, and sentimentality. Incorporating interviews with art historians and literary scholars, the program explores the sociopolitical origins of the phenomenon in the 1848 Revolution in France and the concurrent wave of industrialization that swept Europe and America. Luminous images by Édouard Manet, Gustave Courbet, Jean-François Millet, and Honoré Daumier—along with the unflinching writings of Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Anton Chekhov, August Strindberg, and Henrik Ibsen—are analyzed and compared with the work of Thomas Eakins, George Bellows, Mark Twain, Jack London, Stephen Crane, and others. The contributions of early photographers and filmmakers, as well as the first stirrings of feminism, are also examined. (54 minutes)
Source: Films on Demand
Perspectives
Art of Interruption
A history of theories of photographic practices, this text sets out to do a number of things: to recover the critical place of the photographic archive within the avant-garde; to defend the philosophic claims of realism in assessing photography this century; and to present a dialogic defence of the naturalistic or documnetary image.
The Fin-De-Siècle World
This comprehensive and beautifully illustrated collection of essays conveys a vivid picture of a fascinating and hugely significant period in history, the Fin de Siècle. Featuring contributions from over forty international scholars, this book takes a thematic approach to a period of huge upheaval across all walks of life, and is truly innovative in examining the Fin de Siècle from a global perspective. The volume includes pathbreaking essays on how the period was experienced not only in Europe and North America, but also in China, Japan, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, India, and elsewhere across the globe. Thematic topics covered include new concepts of time and space, globalization, the city, and new political movements including nationalism, the "New Liberalism", and socialism and communism. The volume also looks at the development of mass media over this period and emerging trends in culture, such as advertising and consumption, film and publishing, as well as the technological and scientific changes that shaped the world at the turn of the nineteenth century, such as the invention of the telephone, new transport systems, eugenics and physics. The Fin-de-Siècle World also considers issues such as selfhood through chapters looking at gender, sexuality, adolescence, race and class, and considers the importance of different religions, both old and new, at the turn of the century. Finally the volume examines significant and emerging trends in art, music and literature alongside movements such as realism and aestheticism. This volume conveys a vivid picture of how politics, religion, popular and artistic culture, social practices and scientific endeavours fitted together in an exciting world of change. It will be invaluable reading for all students and scholars of the Fin-de-Siècle period.
The Itinerants
This group of Russian painters, whose work is little known in the West, was the most remarkable in the history of Russian art. Founded in the mid-19th century, the Society for Itinerant Art Exhibitions (known as Peredvizhniki in Russian) consisted of a group of realist painters who decided that the best way for their work to be seen was to hold exhibitions in the Salon style of the French painters of the time, but in the form of travelling shows which moved around Russia. This helped to popularise the work of these painters, and of Russian art in general, and it helped them to sell their paintings and thus finance their work. The painters traveled with the exhibitions, recording the lives and customs of their fellow countrymen, and providing an insight into the life in Tsarist Russia, right up until the 1918 Revolution.
Manet and the Sea
This exhibition catalogue focuses on Manet's maritime paintings. Edouard Manet (1832 -1883) was passionate about the sea. Before becoming a painter, he spent six months at sea and, like many Europeans of his era, he took numerous seaside holidays. Manet made his public debut as a marine painter at the Paris Salon of 1864 with The Battle of the USS 'Kearsarge' and the CSS 'Alabama', his dramatic depiction of a US Civil War naval battle off the coast of France, and he continued to paint seascapes throughout his career. These extraordinary works clearly reflect his intimate knowledge of and love for maritime vessels and the sea. seascapes. Essays by leading scholars discuss how Manet completely overturned the established academic conventions of marine painting in France. His provocative approach was equal to that of his contemporary Gustave Courbet, and his bold and innovative techniques inspired many younger artists, including Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, James McNeill Whistler and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Essays on these and other artists place their seascapes in relation to Manet's pictures.
19th Century European Painting
This new revised edition of an established survey of 19th century European painting from David through Cézanne includes new chapters with fifteen new illustrations on four notable women artists-- Angelika Kauffmann, Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Berthe Morisot, and Mary Cassatt. This edition also contains further text revisions and updates to the bibliographies. The focus of19th Century European Painting remains on the important artists and movements of the period with chapters on each artist's life and work, characteristics of style, and the relationship of the artistic movements to historical and intellectual currents of the time.Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, Academics and Salon Painters, and Impressionism are covered and the following artists receive substantial monographic treatment: David and his followers, Goya, Ingres, Géricault, Delacroix, Corot, Courbet, Millet and theBarbizon painters, Manet, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, and Cézanne. There are 435 illustrations, suggested readings and references, and an index..