Realism in art: characteristics, origins and examples

Art is an intrinsically human expression. Precisely for this reason, and because of the extraordinary cultural diversity that has always existed, each era and each community has exercised artistic creation in different ways, adapting art to their own needs for expression and communication.

Art has not always sought to imitate reality; not only in the avant-garde of the 20th century did it experience a considerable departure from it, but it also did not we find realism in the artistic expression of civilizations such as ancient Egypt or the West medieval. However, there have been cultures and historical moments in which the imitation of nature was the most important thing, and the idea was completely subordinated to the representation of reality.

How has realism emerged in art? What has been your evolution? In this article we will try to draw a tour through the different artistic manifestations and their degree of realism.

What is realism in art?

It is important to distinguish between two concepts: Realism as an artistic trend and Realism as a characteristic of a work of art.

. Thus, while the first is a plastic and literary movement that is limited to the decades that go from 1840 to 1880, realism in terms of characteristic of a work of art has to do with the degree of realism that the work presents, namely: perspective, proportion, volumes, space, etc

In this way, not all realistic works belong to the current of Realism, as well as a framed work in this movement it does not have to present realistic characteristics (although the latter is not the most usual).

Characteristics of Realism as an artistic current of the 19th century

The Realism movement arose in France and meant a clear response to its predecessor, Romanticism. In this way, while the latter was inspired by legendary themes and brought human emotions to their paroxysm, Realism proposed a radical turn and directed its gaze to the surrounding reality of day to day. This realistic vision of the subjects became, with Naturalism (the "dark" son of realism), a sordid exploration of the underworld and the darkest situations of humanity. Some of the most important pictorial representatives of this current are Jean-François Millet and, in the literary sphere, Émile Zola, considered the father of Naturalism.

So, we have that Realism and Naturalism, in terms of artistic currents of the XIX, explore themes related to everyday life and move away from motives that are not based on an empirical observation of the environment of the artist. That is why both one and the other (especially Naturalism) often represent an acid denunciation of the social precariousness that came with the Industrial Revolution.

On the other hand, realism as a characteristic of a work of art is related, as we have already said, to its formal characteristics. With this example it will be quite clear: a Renaissance work that boasts a mathematical perspective and respects the volumes of figures is a formally realistic work, but it is by no means circumscribed to the current 19th century realist

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Since when does realism exist in art?

Already in the first artistic manifestations (the so-called rock art) we find characteristics that we could consider realistic. Because, despite the fact that in the bison of Altamira and in the horses represented in the caves of Lascaux (France) we do not find any indication of perspective or an authentic desire to represent a real scene, we do find unusual detail in the representation of the animals.

Despite this, we cannot yet speak of realistic art, since cave paintings In general, they present an evident schematization and would be related to an art rather conceptual. Actually, broadly speaking, the art of mankind was never strictly realistic until the advent of the Renaissance, with the exception, of course, of Greek and Roman art.

In Egypt we once again find an eminently conceptual art: attempts are made to express concepts and ideas, and even scenes daily activities follow marked conventions that have nothing to do with a mimetic representation of reality surrounding. In the art of ancient Egypt, the scenes are organized in horizontal bands, and there is no realistic order of the elements of the representation.. In addition, the most significant parts of each element were chosen, so the face was represented in profile, the eyes and torso in front, and the legs to the side. This did not obey any reality and was subordinated exclusively to the desire to represent the most recognizable parts of each element.

That is, the Egyptians "shaped" reality in their own way. The Nile Valley artists strictly followed a system of scale related to the importance of the individual represented. Thus, in the same scene and on the same plane, we find some figures much larger than others. This size difference is not due to any attempt at perspective, but rather is linked to the (by the way, very strict) hierarchy of the Egyptians: a god will always be represented much larger than a pharaoh, this will always be much larger than his wife and children, etc

This conceptual representation will be recovered in medieval art, as we will see later. But between the art of ancient civilizations and the Middle Ages there was a brief parenthesis of realistic art: Greek art and Roman art, which we will discuss below.

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The “realist” parenthesis: Greece and Rome

Archaic Greek art was closely related to the way of representation of the peoples of the East, especially Egypt. However, towards the VI century a. c. something started to change. It is the so-called classical Greek period, in which a type of plastic representations more consistent with reality is encouraged.

The growing interest of the Greeks in human anatomy originates a sculptural production that strictly imitates nature. is the greek mimesis, the attempt to capture reality as it is, therefore following criteria of proportion, volume and symmetry.

However, despite capturing tremendously realistic anatomies in marble and bronze, let us not forget that, at the same time, these works obeyed what they understood as “ideal beauty”. In other words, while anatomically perfect, the gods and goddesses in Greek sculpture represent prototypes, not concrete, identifiable persons.

To do this, we must wait for Rome, where individualization reaches unsuspected heights through the portrait. On the other hand, the frescoes found in Pompeii, especially those corresponding to the so-called second and fourth Pompeian style, show a realism that will not be found again in Western painting until the XV century.

These paintings remained hidden for centuries, buried by the remains of the ash produced by the eruption of Vesuvius. Paradoxically, the disaster allowed the remains to be preserved practically intact until the discovery of the ruins in the 18th century. The surprise of the discoverers was huge, because before their eyes some paintings of exquisite quality and an even more surprising realism were displayed.

Indeed, in the frescoes of the so-called second Pompeian style, they are shown through a window fictitious highly elaborate architectural perspectives, which really seem to "open" a space in Wall. The same technique was used many centuries later by Masaccio in his fresco of the Trinity, from the Florentine Santa Maria Novella, which astonished his contemporaries because it seemed to open a hole in the wall of the church.

medieval plastic

Masaccio's work was very innovative for his time; Let us think that since the Pompeian frescoes no attempt had been made to create a space of such pronounced realism. The medieval art that followed the last years of the Roman Empire is, in general (we cannot dwell here on all the styles and manifestations) schematic and eminently conceptual.

In the same way as the Egyptians, medieval artists did not represent real spaces and elements, but rather expressed, through painting and sculpture, a series of concepts and ideas. Elements such as symmetry and volume are lost in this type of work., but not, as many have maintained (and unfortunately, still maintain) because "they did not know how to paint", but because their objective when representing these works was not to imitate nature.

There are many topics about Romanesque "inexpressiveness"; inexpressiveness that is not such, as can be quickly appreciated if one carefully contemplates some of the reliefs that have been preserved. Because although Romanesque plastic art (and medieval art in general) is eminently conceptual (just like Egyptian plastic art), it is not true that it lacks expression. The problem is that their form of expression is not ours, so many of the ways that Romanesque artists had to capture feelings and emotions do not correspond to our current language.

On the other hand, many of the works of art of the Romanesque are loaded with details, which can be manifested in the fall of the folds of a tunic (schematic, but often very detailed) or in the borders that decorate a tablecloth from the Last Dinner.

The achievement of perspective

At the beginning of the fifteenth century, Filippo Brunelleschi marked a milestone in the history of art by establishing the procedure for mathematical or linear perspective. A little later, Alberti wrote down Brunelleschi's new theories in his work of pictura (1435). From then on, Western art will be built on these precepts, which will be considered the basis of "good" painting.

So, During the entire 15th century and part of the 16th century, the Italian Renaissance tried to reproduce linear perspective in its pictorial works.. This perspective is achieved through the establishment of a vanishing point, from where all the lines that build the space of the painting emerge. This produces an optical illusion that gives the brain the sensation of depth.

The so-called Flemish Renaissance coexists with the Renaissance of the Italian peninsula, another of the great revolutions in painting that, in this case, were carried out by the artists of Flanders in the 18th century. XV. These “Flemish primitives” endowed their works with depth through the succession of planes and, Above all, they set a milestone in pictorial realism by reproducing all the details of the objects. It is said that, in Jan van Eyck's paintings, all the plant species that appear can be cataloged thanks to the profusion of details.

The Italian mathematical perspective, however, was the great winner of Western art of the modern era and, from the 16th century, realism marked European painting. Baroque art is an eminently realistic art because, despite having (fairly) fame of being an exalted and highly emotional art, it also reserves a place for the representation of reality: old men with wrinkles, toothless faces, children with dirty feet, still lifes of fruit captured with extraordinary realism…

Return to the origins of artistic realism

Realist art dominated the Western art scene until the mid-19th century, when the first breaks with “traditional” art appeared.. Impressionists, aesthetic currents, and, later, fauves, questioned what, since the fifteenth century, had been established as the indisputable basis of "good" art.

The avant-garde of the 20th century constitutes, then, a kind of return to the origins. Avant-garde artists, in their eagerness to distance themselves from academic and official art, seek new ways of expression, and find them in the destruction of "realism"; that is to say, the perspective, the proportion, the compositional coherence. In a word, the strict imitation of reality.

Known is the case of Picasso, whose drawings are often reminiscent of Mozarabic miniatures, or the cubists who, in a similar way to what the Egyptians more than two millennia before, broke the realistic vision of objects and reproduced them in an absolutely subjective.

Hyperrealism and the new realistic currents

Often, the different currents and artistic expressions respond to each other. We have already mentioned in the introduction how the realist movement of the 19th century was a response to the Romanticism of the previous decades. Well, currently we find in the artistic panorama a current that elevates pictorial realism to unsuspected limits; we refer to the so-called hyperrealist current.

Hyperrealism was born at the end of the 20th century, partly as a response to the conceptual and abstract tendency of the plastic arts.. This current takes the imitation of nature to its maximum expression, which turns its paintings into photographic reproductions (in fact, it is also called photorealism). The sharpness of the compositions is such that it is often really overwhelming for the viewer; Of course, there is no shortage of detractors, who call it a simple imitator of reality.

The question is: should art copy nature, as the ancient Greeks argued with their mimesis, or does it have an "obligation" to contribute something new? If we start from the base that an imitation is never an exact reproduction of the real thing (since it always passes through the artist's sieve), perhaps what we should ask ourselves is whether "art realistic".