Back when all art was “realism” in the sense that contemporary realists use the term, “Realism” meant more than representing a subject naturalistically (the way it appears to observation as free as possible from distortion or embellishment).
As a specific art movement invented in mid-19th century France, Realism was an aesthetic choice that like-minded artists were making in their work. Their brand of Realism was implicitly a rejection of the supernaturalism of the Romantic movement and a challenge to the idealized “big budget” Biblical and mythological themes in the self-satisfied halls of preachy academic art.
Sir Luke Fields, The Widower, 1876
The Realists pointedly took a hard look at the reality of daily life, the unsmiling daily routines of the working and “peasant” classes, what today we’d call the “bottom 90 percent.” The upper-class art world of the time considered such things too ugly, sordid, or mundane for “real” fine art. The Barbizon painters set out to prove them wrong.
Jean-Francois Millet, The Sower, 1850, 101.6 cm × 82.6 cm (40.0 in × 32.5 in). Museum of Fine Arts Boston
Jean-Francois Millet was among the mid-century artists living in Barbizon, the town south of Paris that gave its name to the group of painters working there. Despite its raising up of “the common man” to the level of archetypal, Shakespearean seriousness and dignity, Millet could not sell The Sower in Paris. Now enshrined in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, it took an American, Willian Morris Hunt, to see its value. He purchased The Sower from the artist for today’s equivalent of around $60 and established it as the cornerstone of what became the American discovery of the innovative French 19th century landscape painting, including Impressionism.
Though it’s not always as obvious, the clear-eyed look at a world falling away before the wheels of industrialism increasingly appears in the landscapes of the Barbizon painters and others who followed. At first glance, the plein air landscape below by Jean-Francois Raffaelli, titled Outskirts of Paris (below), looks like a benign “regular” depiction. But think about what is and what is NOT in this painting.
Jean-François Raffaëlli, Outskirts of Paris, 1880s
The subject of Outskirts of Paris is basically a scruffy bit of ground stripped of everything except a broken fence and a few chickens pecking around on it. There’s a farm worker way off to the right, just about cropped out, as if to emphasize that this painter is not even going to stoop to elevating blue collar work to the level of art (is this a faint echo of The Sower?). Everything is subordinate to the far off but sharply in-focus smokestack spewing pollution into a muddled and vacuous sky.
I see an interesting parallel between works like Outskirts of Paris and the paintings of Rackstraw Downes. As featured in this ad for a current show in NYC (below) Downes too gives us a naturalistic rendering of a wide-open vacant foreground and sky flanked by industrial architecture – yet how the landscape and the artistic interpretation has changed.
Contemporary artist Matt Bollinger is putting realism at the service of a similar sense of the real human costs of industrialized society. In Uncle Dave, his painting in flashe and acrylic (below), Bollinger shows us three “working-class” men in a moment of “leisure.” An older garbage (?) truck driver, a younger landscaper and a construction crew flagger (but if so why is he wearing a camouflage sweatshirt and why does his flag have a cross on it?) stand together looking lost, apprehensive, despondent, and isolated, each cut off from the others.
Critic John Yao writes of this work:
“None of the artist’s figures come close to fitting the ideals of physical beauty upheld by Hollywood, fashion designers, or fitness and beauty magazines. In contrast to Claude Monet and other Impressionists, who focused on leisure time, which was a new phenomenon in mid-19th-century France, Bollinger recognizes how the desire for cheap labor and profit has degraded that possibility. Staring blankly as they perform the necessary duties of an unfulfilling job, the men and women in his paintings are afflicted by an unnamable malaise. They know that what they are doing is fruitless.”
“Bollinger has his finger on the pulse of something that is disquieting: the simmering discontent of a wide swath of the US population. Another difference is that he deals with class, which few in the art world address. His subject is the White working class that our celebrity-obsessed art world has largely forgotten or denigrates.” But don’t mistake Bollinger’s work for “leftist propaganda”; like Millet’s sower, his figures are painted with an empathy and insight into the human condition that transcends the political.
Jean Pederson, The Calming Time
This is an important strand of painting – realism at the service of the way real people live and the way things really are. Of course, it is not the only purpose that realism serves – in fact, it is very far from it.
The subjects of mixed-media artist Jean Pederson’s portrait paintings reflect varied walks of life as well as diverse cultural and religious backgrounds. “We are hard-pressed to find,” she says, “a period in time when the human figure wasn’t represented. Finding a way to express the subject in a language that reflects the twenty-first century is perhaps the greatest challenge in figurative work today.”
Read more about Pederson’s work at American Watercolor, and if you’d like to delve into Jean’s process and the painting techniques that make realism of any stripe doable, look into Jean’s teaching video, Mixed Media Portraits: Beyond Realism.
Plein Airwaves: Rich Gallego on Close Calls and More |
| Rich Gallego is the guest in episode number 240 of the Plein Air Podcast with Eric Rhoads. Listen as they discuss:
– Being a plein air painter instead of being a rendering device  Rich Gallego, The Color of November, 16″ x 12″ Bonus! In this week’s Art Marketing Minute, Eric Rhoads, author of Make More Money Selling Your Art, shares advice on how to build a body of work; and thoughts on paying to advertise on Facebook. Listen to the Plein Air Podcast with Eric Rhoads and Rich Gallego here: |
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