Realism

Today we're going to be talking about the movement that takes over from Romanticism in the mid-19th century, which is Realism. And in order to talk about Realism, we have to talk about the difference between Realism and Naturalism. Just like we talked about the difference between Naturalism and Classicism earlier in the class, these ideas are related. They're similar to each other, but they're not identical. Realism means to depict actual events or actual situations to the best of your ability, and Naturalism means to represent things as they appear or as they see them, but not necessarily as they are in the real world. So if we look at the picture on the right hand side, this pig with wings is naturalistic. It's actually a composite of a photograph of a and a photograph of birds' wings. So those are both objects or items that appear in the real world, but obviously pigs don't have wings, so it's Naturalist, not Realist. The artist who begins the Realist movement is Gustave Courbet, and Courbet really wants to paint the people he knows and the situations and things that he knows. He does exhibit some of his early work in the Fairly Conventional, in terms of the career path we've been talking about with artists over the last century or so. He trains, he enters into the French Academy of Fine Arts, but he's not really all that interested in mythological or historical subjects, and he's much more interested in common everyday people. And that's exactly what we see in works like the Stonebreakers. These are the poorest of the poor in French society. This boy and this man are working long hours at back-breaking labor every day. We can see from the state of their clothing that they are extremely poor. The clothing is in tatters, they're dirty. And this kind of subject matter was not typically considered to be acceptable for artists in the mid-19th century. This painting is one of a group of paintings that Courbet includes in an exhibit that he sets up after some of his paintings are excluded from the Paris Salon that he calls the Pavilion of Realism. After his paintings are rejected, he rents a small pavilion or a small exhibition space near the official salon, and he puts on what we would call today a one-man show. This was a revolutionary idea at this time. Artists were only very rarely showing their work independent of official venues like the salon, and most of the artists and viewers who came to this Pavilion of Realism came more to laugh at Courbet than really to appreciate his works. But a number of young artists were inspired by his style, his work, and his daring. Probably his most famous painting is the Burial at Ornans, and like the Stone Breakers, this shows the simple country life that Courbet is familiar with. We see a burial in the graveside service here, and even more than the Stone Breakers, the Burial at Ornans really shows why Courbet is successful as a realist, and in large part that is close observation of human behavior and human quirks and foibles. So the Burial at Ornans is a very large painting, but we can see the complex mixture of human emotions and human motivations in this picture. So if we look starting on the right-hand side, the vast majority of these people have done their social duty. They are already turning away from this graveside service. They're turning towards home, thinking about dinner to prepare, food to make for their children, cows to milk, all of those daily chores of lower-class French peasantry in the mid-19th century. A few people, including these women here with the handkerchiefs over their faces, are still in tears listening to the graveside service. These two women on the right-hand side who cover their faces with handkerchiefs are actually modeled on Courbet's sisters. So again, we see this connection to people and places he knew. And if we look further over, we can see the grave here in the center. The grave isn't romanticized, or it isn't elegant in any way. It's very clearly just a hole in the ground. We can also see some of these more important, more individualized people. The deacons here, and we notice that they have quite red noses and faces, maybe suggesting they've had a little too much to drink. The priest with his nose buried in the Bible, he hasn't even flinched or looked up as people start to turn away. And probably my favorite person in this painting, these altar boys. The altar boys are so bored, and unlike the adults around them, they still have that childhood openness or innocence where all of their emotions show on their face. And we can kind of empathize. We've all been in a situation like this, I think, where you're in uncomfortable clothes, you're dressed up, you can't run around or play or have a good time, you're the boring grown-up thing. And we see all of that on his face. And this really close observation of human behavior and human feelings from that childhood all the way up through adulthood is really what makes Courbet so good at realism and really sets him apart from his contemporaries.