Word: realist
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What raised the banal to art was, among other things, social commitment. Few of the realist painters were actually the children of workers, but many of them responded to an inescapable subject matter: the making of the French working class, from city coal heaver to country peasant, in the aftermath of the revolutions...
...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 was too grossly out of sync with opinion. It was mandatory, for instance, to see an artist like Manet-with his dandyism and blague, his risky spontaneity...
...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...
...realizes, as she does not, that the Christian epoch will have no room for a necromancer - or an ironic realist. Mer lin's time has come again in the post-Christian 20th century; it is fitting, then, that Williamson expresses both the juicy effluence of hoary ham acting and the quizzical underplaying of the Method. His Merlin is also a perfect avatar of the sorcerer behind the camera. Love Excalibur or hate it, but give Boorman credit for the loopy grandeur of his imagery and imaginings, for the sweet smell of excess, for his heroic gamble that a movie...
...granted that "movements" are more a dealer's spiel than a real feature of current art, there are still affinities among artists. What are the main ones here? To begin with, realist painting-but with a twist. The plain declarative style of tonal realism, whose American master is Philip Pearlstein, is hardly in evidence, although there are some exquisitely rendered pastel studies of gray, tumblng Midwestern skies by William Beckman at the Hirshhorn, and the Whitney has some beautifully observed images by William Bailey (still life) and Rackstraw Downes (panoramic landscape). The best figurative work at the Guggenheim...