Word: realism
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...first really significant American portraitist, John Singleton Copley (1738-1815), appealed to these values. The hard, uningratiating realism of his portraits of Boston's notables--not just the prosperous Tories but dissenters like Samuel Adams and Paul Revere--was more like some French neoclassical painting than like English portraiture of the time. His clients liked Copley in part because everything in his work, from a nailhead in a chair to the exact gleam on red mahogany, was earnestly weighed and measured. In his candor and curiosity, he refused to edit out the warts and wens, the pinched New England lips...
Copley's sense of empirical realism would be carried forward by other painters. It wasn't so long ago that people thought of John James Audubon (1785-1851) as a gifted illustrator, an "ornithological artist"--but he was far more than that. He was a great formal painter with (almost literally, one might say) an eagle eye. To create his great work The Birds of America, four volumes showing 497 species, life-size and engraved in full color on the largest sheets of paper then available, he would shoot each bird and wire up its corpse on a board...
...really seems to take over as the central figure--the former Southern belle whose husband went AWOL long ago, and who is forced to inhabit a world of straightened means and two children as entrapped as herself. She confronts these facts with a mixture of illusions and hard-headed realism, indulging liberally in memories of the past but desperately aware of the present and obsessively crafting would-be practical "plans and provisions" for the future...
...late in 1995, their grudging talks ended in two messy government shutdowns. This time it resulted in an agreement to balance the budget for the first time since 1969, the year the Beatles crossed Abbey Road. What made the difference between then and now was a dose of political realism and a last-minute avalanche of projected cash that undid Democratic sticking points on Medicare caps, domestic spending and cost of living adjustments on Social Security. As recently as last Wednesday, nearly three months into the budget talks, a settlement was just within reach and just out of reach. Republicans...
...then, Halmi isn't aiming to see his productions deconstructed in Western Civ classes. In an era when TV is steeped in realism, Halmi's intent is to create lavish spectacles. Like his endlessly hyped 1994 mini-series Scarlett, the non-Margaret Mitchell-written sequel to Gone With the Wind, for which he conducted a $1 million worldwide search to find a star (ultimately actress Joanne Whalley-Kilmer), The Odyssey has been promoted with endless TV ads, a tie-in book and a Website game. The movie's budget went largely to transporting hundreds of cast and crew members...