About Realism

Realism

A 19th century style of art that showed a down-to-earth version of the real world – often depicting the lives of everyday people. In general, it means any realistic or natural representation of people, places,or things in art.

A development in mid-19th-century France lead by Gustave Courbet. Its aim was to depict the customs, ideas, and appearances of the time using scenes from everyday life.

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realism, in art, the movement of the mid-19th cent. formed in reaction against the severely academic production of the French school. Realist painters sought to portray what they saw without idealizing it, choosing their subjects from the commonplaces of everyday life. Major realists included Gustave Courbet, J. F. Millet, and Honoré Daumier. In a broader sense the term is applied to an unembellished rendering of natural forms. In recent years realism has come to mean the presentation of forms and materials that are simply themselves, not primarily representations of things that already exist.

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• Realism: 19th century attempt to give illusion of reality.

• Focused on special effects, spectacle

• Generally not a critical posture

Realism (1850-1880)

The second half of the 19th century has been called the positivist age. It was an age of faith in all knowledge which would derive from science and scientific objective methods which could solve all human problems.

In the visual arts this spirit is most obvious in the widespread rejection of Romantic subjectivism and imagination in favor of Realism - the accurate and objective description of the ordinary, observable world, a change especially evident in painting. Positivist thinking is evident in the full range of artistic...