Realism

The Realist Era

• Typically associated with the 1850’s

• Scientific method is used rather than accept dogma

• Develops the “Age of Reason”• Industrial Revolution takes

shape as factories produce goods cheaper and faster

• Migration from rural areas into cities (urbanization), economies change from agrarian to industrial

• Major inventions are the train and photography

What is Realism?

• Enlightenment put focus on scientific method and observation

• Empiricism – knowledge based on what can be measured and directly experienced

• What can actually be seen/experienced in the world

• Realists only painted subjects they themselves could experience (personal experience)

Realism

• context: cultural– role of artist:

• no longer to simply reveal beautiful & sublime

• aimed to tell the truth

• not beholden to higher, idealized reality (i.e., God)

– subjects:• ordinary events and

objects

• working class & broad panorama of society

• psychological motivation of characters

Famous Realist Artists

• Gustave Courbet, 1819-1877

• Honore Daumier, 1808-1879

• Jean-Francois Millet

• Thomas Eakins

• Rembrandt van Rijn

• Théodore Rousseau

• Edward Hopper

• Winslow Homer, 1836-1910

style: self-educated; copied Spanish, Dutch & Venetian masters @ Louvre fight against official art (salon REJECT)man behind the term “Realism”.

Painted subjects that were considered vulgar, such as the rural peasantry and the working conditions of the poor Believed that the only possible source for a living art is the artist’s own experience (not any attempt to portray the past or future)Depicted the harshness in life and challenged contemporary academic ideas of art

The background was that Courbet was painting in reaction to the dominant Romanticism and Neoclassical schools of the time.

artist's mission was the pursuit of truth, which would help erase social contradictions and imbalances.

subjects: “Show me an angel, and I’ll paint one”

Realism in France: Gustave Courbet1819-1877

The Wounded Man, 1844-1854

7

GUSTAVE COURBET, Burial at Ornans, 1849.

Huge scale = monumental, but not glorified. Earth tones, everyday people. S curve composition. Unflattering pics of provincial officials, dog and people are distractedthe painting has been referred to as, “The Burial of Romanticism”

Courbet: The Meeting (1854)

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GUSTAVE COURBET, The Stone Breakers, 1849.

Subject = average workers painted life sized (painting 5’3” by 8’6”)Heavy impasto (against academic tradition)No emphasis on Romantic feelingNotice contrast in age of workers – too old and too young

the awful side of his life on the left side of him and the good side of his life on the right side of him. The left side represents challenge and opposition (figures like beggars and prostitutes) while the right represents friends and admirers. The painting exhibits a heightened reality that makes it almost dreamlike, with figures that are both real and symbolic.it is so original and unique in its blending of theallegorical and the actual so that the difference is almost impossible to distinguish

The Painter’s Studio

• Seems to have been influenced by the working man, or women.

• Sets his painting as in the mitts of an action, a simple one, however it is like a photograph taken as each person was in the middle of an action.

• Seems to have used much oil paint.• he can be categorized as part of the

movements of Realism and Naturalism

• Used texture as well as shading and tones to create a more realistic look.

Jean Francois Millet (1814 – January 20, 1875)

13JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET, The Gleaners, 1857.

Potato Planters

Man With a Hoe

Honore Daumier, 1808-1879

• French caricaturist, painter, sculptor and printmaker

• Imprisoned for his political cartoons against royalist government; made 500 paintings, 4000 lithographs, 1000 wood engravings, 1000 drawings and 100 sculptures

• Known during his life as political and social satirist

• After his death, paintings more recognized

18

HONORÉ DAUMIER, Rue Transnonain, 1834.

• Soldiers killed everyone in a workers apt. complex• Illustrates 3 generations murdered in surprise attack • Lithograph (print) used to mass produce image• French government tried to suppress Rue Transomonain,

19

HONORÉ DAUMIER, Third-Class Carriage, ca. 1862.

• Influence of William Hogarth • was jailed for satirizing king political cartoon • Dignity of working class, even though crammed together in

mass transportation • 1st piece showing dehumanizing mass transport

Daumier: The Uprising, 1860

Edouard Manet, 1832-1883

• Early paintings accepted by Academy until

1863: Salon de Refuses

• Not a radical artist; horrified by war. Protest

paintings mixed with scenes of daily life.

• By 1874, leader of avant garde

(Impressionists)

• Work has a “snapshot” quality with optical

contradictions

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ÉDOUARD MANET, Olympia, 1863.

25ÉDOUARD MANET, Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), 1863.

• The Balcony, 1868-1869

“The Bar at the Folies Bergere” (1882)

American Realism

• Thomas Eakins, 1844-1916

• Winslow Homer, 1836-1910

American Realism- Eakins the Anatomist

• Thomas Eakins (1844-1916)– teacher: Philadelphia

Academy of Fine Arts• taught anatomy to medical

students & figure drawing to art students

• disapproved of academic technique of drawing from plaster casts

– used nude model– allowed female

students to study male nude

• Critics called him a “butcher” and “degrading”

29

THOMAS EAKINS, The Gross Clinic, 1875.

The Bathers (1858)

Eakins vs. Rembrandt…

Thomas Eakins (British), Max Schmidt in a Single Scull

Winslow Homer, 1836-1910

• Began his career as freelance illustrator 1857.Largely self-taught

• Scenes of life behind the lines a sharp contrast to grim photographs of Civil War

• Visited France; returned to paint rural scenes

• 1881-1882 stay in fishing village transformed his paintings

• was an American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects

Lifeline” 1844

The Gulf Stream” 1899

Reaction: Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

• Not everyone was enjoying the world produced by industrialization

• In England, Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood departed from subject matter of French Realists

• Tired of classical themes, focused on medieval stories and spirituality

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DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI, BeataBeatrix, ca. 1863.

Dante Gabriel Rosetti was the leader of an art movement called the Pre-Raphaelites. This style might be considered a variant of Romanticism, for it favors subjects of mythological and literary subjects. They preferred symbolic representations with a certain poetic appeal

40

JOHN EVERETTMILLAIS, Ophelia.

John Everett Millais, a British artist, has a realistic style, but the subjects are often of a somewhat romantic nature. For example, Ophelia (1851-52) has a literary reference to a play by Shakespeare, since she was Hamlet's girlfriend who commits suicide. This painting of her dead body floating down a brook, is both beautiful and haunting

42EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE, Horse Galloping, 1878.

Pioneers of Motion Photography One of the greatest pioneers of motion

photography was Eadweard Muybridge . Muybridge's main claim to fame was his exhaustive study of movement of both animals and humans. The story goes that an owner of race horses bet a friend that when a horse gallops all four feet are, at one point, off the ground simultaneously. Using twenty four cameras, Muybridge was able to photograph a horse galloping, each triggered off by the breaking of a trip-wire on the course. In the 2nd and 3rd frame of the photograph, you can see that the horse-owner was right

Photography As A Document of the Times

• Child in spinning mill1908 boy in glass factory 1908

Lewis Hine was hired to research child labor in the early 20th century, when the practice was common. His photographs of children working in factories, on railroads, and other dangerous working environments brought greater awareness to this problem. Soon after his photographs were published, child labor laws went into effect. Child in Spinning Mill 1908 Boy in Glass Factory 1908

Symbolism

• A loosely organized movement that flourished in the late 1800’s and was closely related to the Symbolist movement in literature. In reaction against both Realism and Impressionism, Symbolist painters stressed art's subjective, symbolic, and decorative functions and turned to the mystical and occult in an attempt to evoke subjective states of mind by visual means.