Word: realisms
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...Realism, from its outset, was a didactic art, created in the still extant belief that painting was one of the prime channels of social discourse...
Their work, after all, was precisely what the founders of modern art - Cezanne, Seurat, Van Gogh, Matisse " - had set themselves against: | pompier realism, with its gleaners, nuns and goosegirls, its moralizing illusionism, heavy sentiment and lentil-soup colors. It was "photo graphic" - a single word, damnation enough. But in 1 98 1 taste in such matters has not merely shifted, it has come full circle. The exhibition now on view at the Brooklyn Museum, "The Realist Tradition: French Painting and Drawing, 1830-1900," would not even have been attempted by an American museum 15 years ago; the subject...
...invented." By this, Thoré (like the artists he spoke for) meant man as political creature, man seen in his manifest social relations-not the decorative peasants of Boucher or the squalid, undifferentiated social lump the French bourgeois imagined the proletariat to be. The task of realism was therefore to record, in Weisberg's phrase, "human needs and social symptoms" -contemporary life, arts, tensions, suffering...
There were, of course, many degrees of intensity under the wide shadow of realism. Painters of rural life, like Jules Breton, idealized rather more than their urban counterparts. There was a lengthy tradition of peasant decor in French art, and artists tended to see the country as a happy escape from the grinding realities of the city-the great exception being Millet, with his unfaltering sense of the earth and its rigors, and the stupors it enforced on those who worked it. One may doubt whether the women's work of gleaning after harvest was normally as dignified...
...conspectus of styles, manners and approaches in the show is somewhat muffled by the lack of key paintings by fundamental masters of realism like Courbet or Honore Daumier. Moreover, there is no way of drawing a hard-and-fast line between the realist enterprise and that of the impressionists. Although artists like Degas and Manet are represented, and although there are some exquisite paintings by figures on the edge of the impressionist group-like Henri Fantin-Latour, whose portrait of his two sisters embroidering and reading is one of the most affecting icons of intimacy in all 19th century...