Before I riff on realism (for class).  I will riff extremely briefly on a repeated point made by Robert Motherwell on the nature of abstraction, or rather what abstraction is.

The world is immensely complex, abstraction is a form of simplification, we see this in math, in language and in art.  Abstraction is a process of selection, a process of what to emphasize and what not to emphasize.  I write this more to instantiate it within myself than share it with my nonexistent reader. 

This does bring me to a later point that emerged in my Realism reading this week as it pertains specifically to the challenges the realism “movement” faced in the beginning of the 20th century, under immense state and ideological pressures. A portion of the quote reads: “art forfeited the right to report the world.” – the comment was made in specific relation to the camera and the follow up is something to the extent of: “the romantic longing of the masses are satisfied on social media (movies).” I editorialized there at the end.

The jarring types of pictures one would need to paint today in order to be considered a realist are “I don’t even know what.” Perhaps Banksy would be considered a realist, there does seem to me to be a realist sensibility in bringing art into the public space, even in an illegal capacity. Actually that is a nice point I will hold on to for the subject of a paper later in the semester.

Realism formally emerged with Courbet, in his insistence of painting the present in its immediacy and social reality. Sure painters like Hogarth (is mentioned specifically) had painted peasants and laborers in the past but did so in a moralizing and even comic way.  Genre paintings like these were essentially a way for an increasingly growing merchant (bourgeoisie) class to perhaps “virtue signal” while keeping a comfortable distance from their social realities.  All of this, and perhaps most important, is contextualized within an increasingly secular and rational society influenced by scientific phenomena like mathematical perspective. A new dogma for interpreting the universe outside of a religious one.

This is perhaps the largest and most key factor for what made this 19th century movement take on the most momentum in comparison to other attempts within art to document their social realities.  The worldview was becoming dominated by a scientific rationale in which the observable phenomena of the universe could be documented with a higher degree of fidelity (thank photography) and even more importantly (and I can quite make this intellectual jump yet, perhaps because I have only ever known the world through this lens too) a material rationalism was emerging that tainted their perceptions of reality as distinct from say Velasquez. 

To Courbet, and shortly after Manet, painting was a vehicle for social truths.  They preferred to state things in quite a matter of fact way in a way that imposed new forms and elucidated new truths to the public in a way that was quite jarring.  In essence they removed any amount of poetry from painting, but this in and of itself possessed its own type of poetry.  It would be hard to look at a Manet painting and say there is no poetry, but perhaps for the observers back then this is maybe how it felt. 

One of the art historians I read made the important point of not taking these artists and their fellow Realist literary champions at face value and instead scrutinizing them from the convenient distance of retrospect.

There is another detail here which is they began painting in a very matter of fact way. In that the flatness of the picture plane was beginning to come through, Manet famously used black as a color and didnt render mid tones etc.

Some notes:

The realists valued philosophical elements over stylistic ones. 

History painting is today.

The artist can only paint what the artist has on hand, making pictures venerating the tales of antiquity is so yesterday!

The realists are steeped in the history of the present. 

This is the big point I was trying to make, which I think is the most important. Prior to realism artists were steeped in a belief that meaning existed outside of the material world. This group of 19th century artists were “free” from the ideological limitations of societies united by myth/religion.  Belief in facts was belief itself.

This movement was unique specifically for the above reason but also because of how self-conscious, aware and singularly fixated these artists were on this social endeavor through their picture making.

Ultimately the goals of Realism are fairly concrete. They wanted to depict the social realities of the time with as much fidelity as their minds and technology would allow.  I say their minds in that they themselves needed to step outside of preconceived ideas in order to document the social realities of their era. What is less concrete are the social, political and technological factors that informed this happening.  I will endeavor to list a few things I understand.  Rational thought was increasingly becoming the dominant form of thought. Innovations and discoveries in science and technology informed this shift.  Meanwhile the middle class is growing and the economic disparity is growing as a result of it.  Some bourgeoisie were comfortable documenting this reality and others were not.  It is important to keep in mind that Courbet and Manet were “rich kids” essentially.  But then again it’s always like that. Prior to this time the dominant belief was that meaning existed outside of the material world.  This was increasingly no longer the case and these artists endeavored to document meaning in the material reality they saw before them and endeavored to do so with the utmost fidelity even at the sacrifice of “style”.