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Socialist theory
In his writings, the French thinker and social theorist Henri de Saint-Simon incorporated the idea of artistic avant-gardism into his socialist concept as he believed that is the most effective means of spreading the new ideology. -
Beginning of the movement
International artists in Paris begin to devise new methods of pictorial representation. They are focused on scientific concepts of vision and the study of optical effects of light. The Realists express both a taste for democracy and rejection of the inherent old artistic tradition. The Realists felt that painters should work from the life around them. Indisputable honest, the Realists desecrated rules of artistic propriety with their new realistic portrayals of modern life. -
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Barbizon School
Barbizon School was a group of French landscape artists one of first formed outside the Academy. They attempted to paint nature directly; Constable who pioneered in making landscape painting a faithful depiction of nature was their model.
The Barbizon painters helped establish landscape and motif of country life as vital subjects for French artists. -
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Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
The Pre-Raphaelite Brothers condemned this art of idealization, and promoted works based on real landscapes and models, and paid intense attention to accuracy of detail and color. They advocated as well a moral approach to art, in keeping with a long British tradition established by Hogarth. The combination of didacticism and realism characterized the first phase of the movement. The landscape compositions were painted outdoors, what was an innovative approach at the time. -
Courbet's The Stonebreakers
The importance of The Stonebreakers lies in that its subject matter and technique correspond to the original concept of artistic avant-gardism where radical art and radical politics define each other. In contrast to the contemporary academic art, in The Stonebreakers one can sense the intensity of the artist's defiance of the current status quo and his determination to change it -
Thomas Eakins
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins was a painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator. Misunderstood and ignored in his lifetime, his posthumous reputation places him as "the strongest, most profound realist in nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century American art". He was an innovating teacher, and an uncompromising realist. He was also the most neglected major painter of his era in the United States. -
Norman Rockwell "Freedom From Want"
Norman Rockwell in his illustrations exagerated the concept of Realism. -
Realisms role today
Photography takes a snap shot of reality and captures a true moment in time. With the invention of this art form over a hundred years ago today we are using it for propaganda and advertisement.
