Realist Painting Style and Realism
The Realist style owes its existence to the Realist concept. "Realism is democracy in art," Courbet believed. (Nochlin, xiii) Taking that as the credo upon which the works of the artists were constructed, the style itself can be nothing if not anti-academic, anti-historical, anti-conservative. Indeed, whether brushstrokes or pen markings or etching into stone or metal form the image, the underlying attitude is one of freedom, attention to the gross characteristics of form, dismissal of mere decoration for its own sake, and obvious celebration of anything. The self-consciousness of the finely chosen brushstroke or marking is gone, in favor of a brushstroke or marking that favors expression of the interplay between what is seen and the seer. Gone is any demand from outside the artist to make things appear lovelier, grander, more stately than they perhaps really are. It is, in short, art with the warts painted in. It is the "attempt to render in paint that exists in three dimensions." (Parlez-vous Web site) It is, moreover, a less light-filled art than what had gone before, the Romantic style, and what would come after, Impressionism. It used the colors of the palette that corresponded to the nature of the subject matter, and the subject matter had changed from nobility in shining satins to the peasantry in rough and dirty woolens and linens. It might be fair to say that Realism was a portrait of reality gone down market one full step, for the painters themselves were, by and large, firmly bourgeoisie. So it might also be reasonably concluded that Realism is a style depicting 'what is' from a viewpoint that could easily look down were it not rooted in an egalitarian philosophy and a compassionate attitude.
Because the peasantry has no history, and the bourgeoisie has little -- certainly not the illustrious genetic trees of the nobility nominally deposed in the events, all across Europe, of 1848 -- the concept of time as a locus for Realist paintings was far different from the concept of time as it had been used in all the 'isms' that had gone before. Classicism was timeless in that it was a self-involved ethos that imagined that events that had happened 2000 years earlier, or even longer, had lasting value for the viewer and were fit subjects for art. Romanticism was timeless in that it celebrated the enduring noble qualities of mankind in an imaginary, color-washed palette that could, to a Realist, only be the things of dreams. But Realism took on the nature of the eternal Now, although certainly the meat-and-potatoes Courbet, who originated the concept in great part, would not have expressed it that way. How he did express it is this way: "Il faut tre de son temps." (Nochlin, 19) Translated, the slogan, "It is necessary to be of your own time," was the rallying cry of all Realists.
But exactly what did it mean? It was a simplistic call to what the artists saw as authenticity, to express and inform regarding the actual events and people of the day, month, year, decade, always changing and never being stuck in a particularly admired era, as they would say the classical academicians had done. It is entirely possible, of course, that the introduction of photography -- an 'instant painting' -- may have informed this viewpoint as much as did the 1848 Revolution and its destruction of great part of remaining Bonapartist elitism, previous noble stratification of French society. By anchoring the subject matter of art in its own time, the eternal present, the way was opened for the invention of the avant-garde, meaning that something is in advance of one's own time. (Nochlin, 7) In attempting to bring about social change -- which would happen sometime in the future -- art was necessarily perennially in advance of its own time, although it often lagged behind technically.
Charles Baudelaire, author and eloquent spokesman of Realism, had fought on the barricades in the 1848 Revolution, and later wrote on art. In one work he condemned the "puerile utopia of the art-for-art's sake school." (Nochlin, 3) As an egalitarian, Baudelaire wanted art, as much as anything else in life, to both reflect and be of interest to the greatest number of people, the working class. He decried that even when they did walk through a great treasure house of art, such as the Louvre, they would come away having seen objects, but not having been involved or moved at any elemental level. (It is distressing to say this, but together, Courbet and Baudelaire might well have been the thinkers who, a century and a half later, engendered the completely mass population-oriented 'reality show.') His call for "painters of modern life"...
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