Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist in the representation of real and existing things.

(Gustave Courbet)

The relationship between art and everyday reality has been the subject of much debate since the nineteenth century and possibly well before that. Plato attacked poetry for being more a representation than an expression—a kind of mimesis. The perfect bodies that Greek sculptors gifted to us represent an ideal rather than real-life humans. Later, during and since the Renaissance, artists relied on pictorial techniques (perspective, chiaroscuro) to give credibility to religious and mythological scenes on canvas.

Burying the Romantics

Nineteenth-century Realism was born in France from the revolutionary and scandalous premise that everyday life and ordinary people represent a suitable subject for art. As the country was experiencing social unrest (revolutions of 1830, 1840, and 1848), poets, philosophers, and painters challenged the values and beliefs of the bourgeoisie and the monarchy.

In art, a naked female figure was an acceptable, even a gold medal-worthy, subject at the Salon, as long as she was deemed to be a goddess, coming to life on a sea wave, surrounded by cherubs (The Birth of Venus by Alexandre Cabanel, 1863). But a normal, rather plump woman, undressing to go for a swim in the river—that was outrageous. Courbet’s The Bathers (1853) was criticised for featuring a nude at the centre of the painting, watched by another woman who appears to be removing her clothes, without any apparent mythological or biblical excuse. The figures are not goddesses, not even royalty or noblewomen. Arguing, ‘I cannot paint an angel, for I have never seen one’, Courbet painted the people he could see: bourgeois, peasants, and working men, in a figurative, realistic manner. He depicted the ordinary lives of ordinary people on monumental canvases, previously reserved for historic or religious paintings. A Burial at Ornans (1850), Courbet’s large canvas populated by simple country folk, marked the death of Romanticism in France.

Shocking!

Even more scandalous were the paintings of Jean-François Millet depicting poor peasants carrying out domestic tasks or working the land. His most famous and controversial painting, The Gleaners, is not an idealised pastoral image. The three women are obviously poor (gleaning was the practice of collecting grains left behind after harvest), carrying out the lowest form of labour out of necessity. A gentle light falls onto the statuesque figures, the women bent towards the ground, while in the distance large haystacks signal a more fruitful agricultural activity. Despite the strenuous activity depicted, the painting is calm, even peaceful—the women appear to have a strong connection to the land; they belong to this landscape.

The controversy, as that surrounding Courbet’s The Stone Breakers (a painting sadly destroyed by the Dresden bombing), arose from the idea of featuring the poor, labouring to sustain the higher classes who did not like to be reminded of their dependency on them. The concepts of democracy, liberalism, and even socialism were making inroads, and the elite began to fear the gleaners, the stonebreakers—the oppressed working classes.

Olympia, a large canvas by Édouard Manet, was also harshly criticised: for portraying a courtesan; for her direct, unapologetic gaze; for being slim; for not being more like Titian’s Venus of Urbino. Apart from the controversial subject, which went against what was considered socially acceptable, the realisation of the painting defied academic conventions. Manet used studio lighting, thus reducing the range of tones and the three-dimensionality of the figures and creating stark contrasts. He applied thinner or thicker layers of paint, and the broad brushstrokes are visible, unlike the delicate, invisible brushstrokes of academic painters. Like Courbet, Manet thrived on controversy.

The real and the ideal

Outside France, the term expanded to include figurative painting rich in detail, such as the work of the English Pre-Raphaelites, shown at the 1855 Universal exhibition. Like their colleagues across the Channel, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were opposed to the rules of the Royal Academy and offended by the triviality of the genre painting, popular at the time. They chose serious themes: religious and literary, stories of love and death, real and fictional characters, but also aspects of their contemporary society, subjects regarded as quite daring in Victorian England: emigration, poverty, and prostitution. Their technique was detailed, based on close observation of nature. By representing nature as realistically as possible, the Pre-Raphaelites were aspiring to create ‘ultimate beauty’ and ‘truer art’. The paintings were remarkable for their use of bright colours, which made them stand out among other works in the exhibition. Like their French Realist colleagues, the Pre-Raphaelites sought attention and courted controversy.

Further East, Ukrainian artist Ilya Repin adapted the concepts of realism to Russian themes. His paintings represent aspects of nineteenth-century Russian society, from rural poverty to the corruption of the elite. His best-known painting, Barge Haulers on the Volga (1873), depicts the suffering and the resignation of the exhausted haulers. Among the bent-overmen, a youthful figure stands out: the young man, standing tall and wearing a torn red shirt, seems to foretell the Revolution.

Peredvizhniki

Repin was a member of the society of Peredvizhniki (The Itinerants), a group of artists who rebelled against the Academy’s formal training. They formed an independent cooperative of artists and organised mobile exhibitions in the provinces with the aim of giving people outside the big cities a chance to explore and appreciate art. The paintings of the Itinerants were non-conformist, anti-establishment, with a heightened social focus. The style they adopted was similar to Western realism but with profound Slavic undertones: contrition, guilt, social and moral responsibility, pathos. While the French Realists were working independently, the Itinerants were a coherent group. They formed an association with a board and a charter, following a common artistic and philosophical path. The depiction of nature and everyday life in accurate detail was just as important to realist artists as the ideas of democracy, education, and art in the service of the people.

During the troubled twentieth century, branches of the Social Realism movement flourished in the USA and Mexico, while the super-optimistic, realist style painting akin to propaganda was widely practiced in the Soviet Union. Growing interest in psychoanalysis, mythology, dreams, and semiology led to a series of art styles still inspired by, but moving further away from, Realism: Fantastic Realism, Surrealism, and Photo Realism.