Caravaggio (1571–1610)Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1598–9, Oil on canvas, 57 1/8 × 76 3/8 in (145 × 195 cm)
CLAIMING AN OBJECTIVE VIEW OF THE WORLD
More than simply representation, realism is the idea that the artwork presents a neutral and inclusive view of the world. The viewer is persuaded that he is being shown the world as it actually is. This is an idea that emerges perennially in art. In the late sixteenth century, Caravaggio (1571–1610) shocked and galvanized his viewers by using common people as models and including such realistic details as dirty fingernails and soiled clothing. Realism emerged again in the mid-nineteenth century as a powerful antidote to the foregoing Romantic movement. Artists such as Gustave Courbet (1819–77) began to paint the life of French peasants in an unadorned and matter-of-fact manner, belying previous idealized stereotypes and, to some extent, shocking their audience. The advent of photography in the latter half of the nineteenth century gave a new authority to the idea of a neutrally “real” image of the world.
The adoption of a realist stance was particularly strong in American painting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when many artists began their careers as illustrators for newspapers and magazines. Winslow Homer (1836–1910) covered the Civil War for Harper’s Magazine before launching on a career as a painter in which he projected a new sense of clarity and unfiltered seeing. Early twentieth-century artists such as John Sloane (1871–1951), Everett Shinn (1876–1953), and George Bellows (1882–1925) began as newspaper illustrators and went on to paint the life of common people. Dubbed the “Ashcan School,” they used realist techniques to further the idea that art could be used as part of the political and social discussion about poverty and the conditions under which the poor were obliged to live.
Realism again appeared powerfully in the late 1960s and early ’70s with the emergence of so-called “superreal” painting. Inspired by the foregoing Pop Art movement, painters such as Richard Estes (1932–), Malcolm Morley (1931–), and Chuck Close (1940–) made pictures that sought to outdo the dazzling richness and specificity of large-scale color photographs.
The idea that realist art presents a non-selective, non-filtered view of the world is rarely borne out in fact. Choice of viewpoint, subject matter, scale, and medium, allow an artist considerable opportunity to skew the sense of an image, promote a particular point of view, or orchestrate other expressive qualities. As such, claims of neutral realism are often deceptive.
Caravaggio (1571–1610)
Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1598–9, Oil on canvas, 57 1/8 × 76 3/8 in (145 × 195 cm)
George Bellows (1882–1925)
New York, 1911, Oil on canvas, 42 × 60 in (106.7 × 152.4 cm)
