Realism In Art: Characteristics, Origins And Examples
Art is an intrinsically human expression. Precisely for this reason, and because of the extraordinary cultural diversity that has always existed, each era and each community has exercised artistic creation in different ways, adapting art to their own needs of expression and communication.
Art has not always sought to imitate reality; Not only did the avant-garde of the 20th century experience a considerable departure from this, but we also do not find realism in the artistic expression of civilizations such as ancient Egypt or the medieval West. However, there have been cultures and historical moments in which the imitation of nature was the most important thing, and the idea was completely subordinated to the representation of reality.
How has realism emerged in art? What has been your evolution? In this article we will try to draw a tour through the different artistic manifestations and their degree of realism.
It is important to distinguish between two concepts: Realism as an artistic movement and realism as a characteristic of a work of art Thus, while the first is a plastic and literary movement that is limited to the decades ranging from 1840 to 1880, realism as a characteristic of a work of art has to do with the degree of realism that the work presents, to know: perspective, proportion, volumes, space, etc.
In this way, not all realist works belong to the Realism movement, just as a work framed in this movement does not have to present realist characteristics (although the latter is not the most common).
Characteristics of Realism as an artistic movement of the 19th century
The Realism movement emerged in France and was a clear response to its predecessor, Romanticism. In this way, while the latter was inspired by legendary themes and took human emotions to their paroxysm, Realism proposed a radical turn and directed its gaze to the surrounding reality of everyday life This realistic vision of the themes became, with Naturalism (the “dark” son of realism), a sordid exploration of the underworld and the darkest situations of humanity. Some of the most important pictorial representatives of this movement are Jean-François Millet and, in the literary field, Émile Zola, considered the father of Naturalism.
So, we have that Realism and Naturalism, in terms of artistic currents of the 19th century, explore themes related to everyday life and move away from motifs that are not based on an empirical observation of the artist’s environment. This is why both one and the other (especially Naturalism) often represent an acidic denunciation of the social precariousness that came with the Industrial Revolution.
On the other hand, realism as a characteristic of a work of art is related, as we have already said, to its formal characteristics. With this example it will be quite clear: a Renaissance work that displays a mathematical perspective and respects the volumes of the figures is a formally realistic work, but it is in no way limited to the realist movement of the 19th century.
Already in the first artistic manifestations (the so-called rock art) we find characteristics that we could consider realistic. Because, although in the bison of Altamira and in the horses represented in the caves of Lascaux (France) we do not find any indication of perspective or an authentic desire to represent a real scene, we do find an unusual detail in the representation of the animals.
Despite this, we cannot yet speak of realistic art, since cave paintings generally present an evident schematization and would be related to a more conceptual art. In fact, broadly speaking, The art of humanity was never strictly realistic until the arrival of the Renaissance with the exception, of course, of Greek and Roman art.
In Egypt we once again find an eminently conceptual art: attempts are made to express concepts and ideas, and even everyday scenes follow marked conventions that have nothing to do with a mimetic representation of the surrounding reality. In the art of ancient Egypt, the scenes are organized in horizontal bands, and there is no realistic order of the elements of the representation In addition, the most significant parts of each element were chosen, so the face was represented in profile, the eyes and torso from the front, and the legs from the side. This did not obey any reality and was subject exclusively to the desire to represent the most recognizable parts of each element.
That is, the Egyptians “shaped” reality in their own way. Nile Valley artists strictly followed a scale system related to the importance of the individual depicted. Thus, in the same scene and on the same plane, we find some figures much larger than others. This difference in sizes is not due to any attempt at perspective, but is linked to the hierarchy (very strict, by the way) of the Egyptians: a god will always be represented much larger than a pharaoh, he will always have a much larger size than his wife and children, etc.
This conceptual representation will be recovered in medieval art, as we will see later. But Between the art of ancient civilizations and the Middle Ages there was a brief parenthesis of realistic art: Greek art and Roman art which we will discuss below.
The “realist” parenthesis: Greece and Rome
Greek archaic art was closely related to the way of representation of the people of the East, especially Egypt. However, towards the 6th century BC something began to change. It is the so-called classical Greek period, in which a type of plastic representations more coherent with reality is encouraged.
The growing interest of the Greeks in human anatomy gave rise to a sculptural production that strictly imitated nature It is the greek mimesisthe attempt to capture reality as it is, therefore following criteria of proportion, volume and symmetry.
However, despite capturing tremendously realistic anatomies in marble and bronze, let us not forget that, at the same time, these works obeyed what they understood as “ideal beauty.” In other words, although anatomically perfect, the gods and goddesses of Greek sculptures represent prototypes, and not concrete, identifiable people.
To do this, we will have to wait for Rome, where individualization reaches unsuspected levels through portraiture. On the other hand, The frescoes found in Pompeii, especially those corresponding to the so-called second and fourth Pompeian styles, show a realism that will not be found again in Western painting until the 15th century
These paintings remained hidden for centuries, buried by the remains of the ash produced by the eruption of Vesuvius. Paradoxically, the disaster allowed the remains to remain practically intact until the discovery of the ruins in the 18th century. The surprise of the discoverers was enormous, because before their eyes paintings of exquisite quality and an even more surprising realism unfolded.
Indeed, in the frescoes of the so-called second Pompeian style, very elaborate architectural perspectives are shown through a fictitious window, which truly seem to “open” a space on the wall. The same technique was used many centuries later by Masaccio in his fresco of the Trinityfrom the Florentine Santa Maria Novella, which astonished its contemporaries because it seemed to open a hole in the church wall.
Medieval plastic
Masaccio’s work was very innovative for its time; Let’s think that not since the Pompeian frescoes has there been an attempt to create a space of such marked realism. The medieval art that followed the last years of the Roman Empire is, in general (we cannot dwell here on all the styles and manifestations) schematic and eminently conceptual.
In the same way as the Egyptians, medieval artists did not represent real spaces and elements, but rather expressed, through painting and sculpture, a series of concepts and ideas. Elements such as symmetry and volume are lost in this type of work but not, as many have maintained (and unfortunately, still maintain) because “they did not know how to paint”, but because their objective when representing these works was not the imitation of nature.
There are many clichés about Romanesque “inexpressiveness”; inexpressiveness that is not such, as can be quickly appreciated if one carefully contemplates some of the reliefs that have been preserved. Because although Romanesque art (and medieval art in general) is eminently conceptual (just like Egyptian art), it is not true that it lacks expression. The problem is that their way of expression is not ours, so Many of the ways that Romanesque artists had of expressing feelings and emotions do not correspond to our current language
On the other hand, many of the works of Romanesque art are loaded with details, which can be manifested in the fall of the folds of a tunic (schematic, but often very detailed) or in the borders that decorate a tablecloth from the Latter Dinner.
Achieving perspective
At the beginning of the 15th century, Filippo Brunelleschi marked a milestone in the history of art by establishing the procedure for mathematical or linear perspective. A little later, Alberti wrote down Brunelleschi’s new theories in his work From picture (1435). From then on, Western art will be built on these precepts, which will be considered the basis of “good” painting.
So, The Italian Renaissance tried throughout the 15th century and part of the 16th century to reproduce linear perspective in its pictorial works This perspective is achieved through the establishment of a vanishing point, from where all the lines that construct the space of the painting emerge. This produces an optical illusion that gives the brain the sensation of depth.
The so-called Flemish Renaissance coexists with the Renaissance of the Italian peninsula, another of the great revolutions in painting that, in this case, was carried out by the artists of Flanders in the 15th century. These “Flemish primitives” gave depth to their works through the succession of planes and, above all, set a milestone in pictorial realism by reproducing all the details of the objects. It is said that, in Jan van Eyck’s paintings, all the plant species that appear can be cataloged thanks to the profusion of details.
The Italian mathematical perspective, however, was the great winner of Western art in the modern era and, from the 16th century onwards, realism marked European painting. Baroque art is an eminently realistic art because, despite having a (just) reputation for being an exalted and highly emotional art, it also reserves a place for the representation of reality: old people with wrinkles, toothless faces, children with dirty feet. , still lifes of fruits captured with extraordinary realism…
Return to the origins of artistic realism
Realistic art dominated the Western art scene until the mid-19th century, when the first breaks with “traditional” art appeared Impressionists, aestheticist currents, and, later, Fauves, questioned what, since the 15th century, had been established as the indisputable basis of “good” art.
The avant-garde of the 20th century constitutes, therefore, a kind of return to origins. Avant-garde artists, in their desire to distance themselves from academic and official art, seek new paths of expression, and find them in the destruction of “realism”; that is, perspective, proportion, compositional coherence. In a word, the strict imitation of reality.
The case of Picasso is well-known, whose drawings often recall Mozarabic miniatures, or the Cubists who, in a similar way to what the Egyptians did more than two millennia before, broke the realistic vision of objects and reproduced them in an absolutely subjective way. .
Hyperrealism and the new realistic currents
Often, different artistic trends and expressions respond to each other. We have already mentioned in the introduction how the realist movement of the 19th century was a response to the Romanticism of previous decades. Well, currently we find in the artistic panorama a current that elevates pictorial realism to unsuspected limits; We refer to the so-called hyperrealist current.
Hyperrealism was born at the end of the 20th century, partly as a response to the conceptual and abstract tendency of the plastic arts This trend takes the imitation of nature to its maximum expression, turning its paintings into photographic reproductions (in fact, it is also called photorealism). The sharpness of the compositions is such that it is often truly overwhelming to the viewer; There are, of course, no shortage of detractors, who call him a simple imitator of reality.
The question is: should art copy nature, as the ancient Greeks maintained with their mimesis, or does it have the “obligation” to contribute something new? If we assume that an imitation is never an exact reproduction of the real thing (since it always passes through the artist’s sieve), perhaps what we should ask ourselves is whether “realistic art” really exists.
