Overview

“Show me an angel, and I’ll paint one.” — Gustave Courbet. This quote sums up Realism. After the emotional drama of Romanticism, artists like Courbet wanted to get back to facts. They wanted to paint the world exactly as it was—warts and all. They painted peasants, stone breakers, and funerals. They refused to beautify poverty or glorify war.

Core Idea

The core idea is Truth to Life. Art should not be an escape from reality; it should be a mirror of it. This was a political act. By painting the working class on huge canvases (a size previously reserved for kings and gods), they were saying: “These people matter. Their suffering is heroic.”

Formal Definition

The attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding artistic conventions, implausible, exotic, and supernatural elements.

Intuition

Imagine scrolling through Instagram.

  • Romanticism: A heavily filtered photo of a girl in a flowing dress on a cliff at sunset.
  • Realism: A raw, unedited photo of a tired nurse riding the subway home. Realism is the “no filter” movement of the 19th century.

Examples

  • Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers (1849): Two men breaking rocks on the side of the road. Their clothes are torn. Their faces are hidden. It is not a “happy peasant” scene; it is a brutal depiction of backbreaking labor. It shocked the Paris Salon.
  • Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners (1857): Three women picking up leftover grain in a field. It shows the extreme poverty of rural life, but gives the women a sculptural dignity.
  • Édouard Manet, Olympia (1863): A painting of a prostitute. Unlike the “Venus” paintings of the past (which made nudity mythological and safe), this woman looks directly at the viewer with a cold, businesslike stare. It forced the viewer to confront the reality of the sex trade.

Common Misconceptions

  • It’s “Photo-Realism”: It doesn’t mean painting every eyelash (that came later). It means the subject matter is real. The painting style can still be rough.
  • It’s boring: Critics thought it was ugly and vulgar (“Why paint a pile of manure?”). But Realists found beauty in the mundane.
  • Socialist Realism: The official art style of the Soviet Union. Ironically, it wasn’t “real” at all; it was idealized propaganda showing happy workers. Realism (Western) is critical; Socialist Realism is promotional.
  • Naturalism: A literary movement (Zola) closely linked to Realism, focusing on the scientific observation of society.
  • Ashcan School: An American Realist group (early 20th century) that painted the gritty streets of New York.

Applications

  • Documentary Photography: The spirit of Realism lives on in photojournalism—witnessing the world without intervening.
  • Cinema: “Italian Neorealism” (movies like Bicycle Thieves) used non-actors and real locations to tell stories of the poor, directly influenced by 19th-century Realism.

Criticism / Limitations

  • Lack of Imagination: By refusing to paint angels or dreams, it limits art to the visible surface of things.
  • Drabness: It can be relentlessly depressing.

Further Reading

  • Nochlin, Linda. Realism. 1971. (The classic text).
  • Fried, Michael. Courbet’s Realism. 1990.
  • Clark, T.J. Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution. 1973.