Artistic realism

“ We are widening the esthetic canvas to admit of the test of life, and are coming to realize that, obsessed for a time by the attraction of that lower truth which makes so much of external realities, realism lost sight of the larger demands of art which include selection, adaptation, and that enlargement of effect marking the distinction between art and so-called reality. ”

“ Why is it that the poems that have lived for centuries, and the masterpieces of the world's great painters and sculptors are not being equaled in the dawn of the twentieth century? The answer lies in the widespread devotion to realism instead of idealism. ”

“ All attempts to define absolute beauty in itself—whether as an imitation of nature, or as suitability to its object, or as a correspondence of parts, or as symmetry, or as harmony, or as unity in variety, etc.—either define nothing at all, or define only some traits of some artistic productions, and are far from including all that everybody has always held, and still holds, to be art. ”

“ By the originality and vigour of the spiritual life and of the emotion of which the work is an expression, together with its power of impressing these characteristics on the reader. All art is the expression of some emotion, and has for its object the production of emotions. The deeper a signet gem is cut, the sharper, the clearer are the outlines in wax. The deeper the impression in the soul of the artist, the clearer, the more forcible is its artistic expression. ”

“ What then is realism in art—this drawing of eyes that follow you about the room, lips that seem parted as if to speak, and hands that you could shake? What is this painting of pots and pans to be picked up, and cows that walk out of the canvas? ”

“ When the beauty of realism shall be truly known, we shall read the book, or look upon the work of art, and in the light of all we know of life, shall ask our beings whether the picture that the author or the painter creates for us is like the image that 114is born of the consciousness that moves our soul, and the experiences that have made us know. ”

“ This is supplemented from still another source of value. Through artistic expression pent-up emotions find a welcome release. No matter how poignant be the experience expressed, the weight, the sting of it disappears through expression. For through expression, as we have seen, the experience is drawn from the dark depths of the self to the clear and orderly surface of the work of art; the emotions that weighed are lifted out and up into color and line and sound, where the mind can view and master them. ”

“ The painter expresses his feelings through the representation of the visible world of Nature, and through the representation of those combinations of form and colour inspired in his imagination, that were all originally derived from visible nature. If he fails from lack of skill to make his representation convincing to reasonable people, no matter how sublime has been his artistic intention, he will probably have landed in the ridiculous. ”

“ In the compositional painting which is developing today we see the signs of the attainment of the higher step of pure art, in which the remains of the practical desire (all evidences of objectivity) can be perfectly separated, which can speak from soul to soul in purely artistic language. ”

“ The realism here is understood to be such as developed traditionally into the nineteenth century—the practical desire to exhibit objective realities—portraits, landscapes, historical paintings, etc., in the direct sense. ”

“ The painter must study more from nature than the man of words. By why? Because literature deals with men’s business and passions which, in the game of life, we are irresistibly obliged to study; but painting with relations of light, and colour, and significances, and form, which, from the immemorial habit of the race, we pass over with an unregardful eye. Hence this crouching upon camp-stools, and these crusts.6 But neither one nor other is a part of art, only preliminary studies.
I want you to help me to get people to understand that realism is a method, and only methodic in its consequences ”

“ The novelist who in the course of his work changes his characters; the dramatic author who, in deference to public sentiment, substitutes a happy denoûement in place of a catastrophe, furnish naïve testimony of this freedom of imagination. Moreover, artistic creation, expressing itself in words, sounds, lines, forms, colors, is cast in a mould that allows it only a feeble "material" reality. ”

“ How crude and shallow is the whole theory of modern realism: a theory of art by the average man for the average man! It makes art intelligible by simplifying or popularizing it; in short, as Nietzsche would say, by vulgarizing it. The average man perceives, for instance, that there is in great drama an element of representation. ”

“ By what art or mystery, what craft of selection, omission or commission, does a given picture of life appear to us to surround its theme, its figures and images, with the air of romance while another picture close beside it may affect us as steeping the whole matter in the element of reality? It is a question, no doubt, on the painter's part, very much more of perceived effect, effect after the fact, than of conscious design—though indeed I have ever failed to see how a coherent picture of anything is producible save by a complex of fine measurements. ”

“ It is that element which artistic imitation adds to actuality, the difference between its created concrete and the original out of which that was developed, which gives the special delight of art to the mind. ”

“ Art, breaking from the prison-house of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style ”

“ This inversion of the question is worth inquiring into, because, like the analogous paradox about the pictorial "realisation" of cubic existence, it affords an illustration of some of the psychological intricacies of the relation between Art and the Beautiful. This is how I propose to explain it.
The task to which an artist is set varies from one work to another, while the shapes employed for the purpose are, as already said, limited by his powers and especially by the precise moment in artistic evolution. ”

“ So art, whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music, has no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself. It is from a misunderstanding on this point that the dispute between realism and idealism in art has arisen. ”

“ Their difficulties of execution arise from the necessities of artistic expression, and such difficulties will be found in all the truest and best art, the art that lives beyond the fashion of the hour. ”

“ If the work is artistic, the spectator's interest will center in feeling the life in the color and line or sculptured form; that it happens to be an imitation of something else will become of secondary importance. ”

“ Whether the medium be the painter's color, the musician's tones, or the poet's words, the purpose of the representation is fulfilled in so far as the work expresses the emotion which the artist has felt in the presence of this spectacle. He, the artist, more than I or another, has thrilled to its mystery, its tumult, its power. It is this effect, received as a unity of impression, that he wants to communicate. This power of the object over him, and consequently the content of his work, is beauty. ”

“ But all this does not of necessity constitute realism, because its effect is not of necessity the creation of illusion, however truthful the artist's purpose. Of what avail, in the drama, for example, are solid rooms and conversational vernacular if the characters do not come to life in our imaginations, so that we share their joys and sorrows? Of what effect are the realistic details of a novel, whether of incident or language, if we do not re-live its story as we read? ”

“ Each one of his paintings is the coefficient of the impressions that form has performed in his spirit, and in these paintings the public must see the realization of an artistic ideal, and must judge them by the abstract sensation they produce, without trying to look for the factors that entered into the composition of the final result. ”

“ But when we come to study the rudimentary forms of artistic expression,—an artist’s sketches and studies—we begin to discover the shortcomings of the merely statical or morphological point of view. Works of art, we find, are something more than the fossil remains or dead bodies of artistic activity. They are factors in the living process by which the artist’s thought and emotion are kindled afresh in the bosom of the spectator. ”

“ All æsthetic categories of realistic and idealistic art are scattered like dust before these creations, in which the most fantastic ideas are embodied with the whole force of the realistic power of our days. ”

“ The realism of modern art is due partly to a greater knowledge of, and a greater attention to, costume, architecture, furniture, and all the properties of the stage on which we place our personages, but it is also due to our making truth a primary object. ”

“ Each art has its own medium of expression and to this medium it absolutely adheres in its periods of greatness, adapting itself to its limitations, working within them, and even making them tributary to its excellence. ”

“ Pure landscape-painting into which no light or shade enters, pure portrait-painting into which no expression enters, are phrases less at variance with sound criticism than pure comedy into which no moral enters. ”

“ To sum up shortly—truth of form, and colour, and expression, will make a fine, perhaps even an impressive picture, but hardly a great one; in order to do that the artist must be possessed of the power of seizing the essence of the scene, of penetrating beneath the first commonplace view of the subject, and finding every element of true meaning and beauty which lies in his subject. ”

“ This manner is in reality, in painting, what language is in poetry; we are all sensible how differently the imagination is affected by the same sentiment expressed in different words, and how mean or how grand the same object appears when presented to us by different painters. Whether it is the human figure, an animal, or even inanimate objects, there is nothing, however unpromising in appearance, but may be raised into dignity, convey sentiment, and produce emotion, in the hands of a painter of genius. ”

“ The beauteous appearance of the dream-worlds, in the production of which every man is a perfect artist, is the presupposition of all plastic art, and in fact, as we shall see, of an important half of poetry also. ”

“ Those critics who, in modern times, have the most thoughtfully analyzed the laws of æsthetic beauty, concur in maintaining that the real truthfulness of all works of imagination—sculpture, painting, written fiction—is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent the positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth.—Bulwer-Lytton. ”

“ Even thus the spirit, immersed in things of sense presented to us by the figurative arts, is still spirit, though diminished in its intellectual clearness and invested with hues not its own. To fashion that alabaster form of art with utmost skill, to make it beautiful, to render it transparent, is the artist's function. ”

“ Before we can come to a true initiation into, and an abiding enjoyment of, the domains of representative art, we must have a keen, clear, settled, and contented view of its limitations. Far less of the fruitlessness of discontent enters into poetry and literature than into the subject of painting and sculpture. ”

“ They are not, indeed, so properly said to turn reality into fiction, as fiction into reality. Their paintings are so bold, their colors so strong, that everything they touch seems to exist in the very manner they represent it ”

“ The actual transfer to the stage of the drawing-room and its occupants, with the behavior common in well-bred society, would no doubt fail of the intended dramatic effect, and the spectators would declare the representation unnatural.
However our jargon of criticism may confound terms, we do not need to be reminded that art and nature are distinct; that art, though dependent on nature, is a separate creation; that art is selection and idealization, with a view to impressing the mind with human, or even higher than human, sentiments and ideas. ”

“ But literature is a progressive art, and soon the writers of the age developed two marked tendencies of their own,--the tendency to realism, and the tendency to that preciseness and elegance of expression which marks our literature for the next hundred years.
RealismIn realism--that is, the representation of men exactly as they are, the expression of the plain, unvarnished truth without regard to ideals or romance--the tendency was at first thoroughly bad. ”

“ Consequently the method of realism, which they soon began to apply to the life of the spirit, produced a literature that is mystic and symbolic in essential direction, but which finds its symbols in the life about it, a life in which there is a fusion of the romantic, enigmatic past and the industrial present to which the character inherited from the past is seeking to adjust itself. ”

“ The painter therefore influences, through the medium of his art, only so far as he agreeably excites the sense of colour, gives to the mind an illusion of reality, together with the consciousness that it is an illusion, and, through his deeper, more penetrating vision, discloses to the spectator the hidden treasures of the phenomenal world. ”

“ But we demand that the conclusions shall follow from the premises, that the whole be consistent. We cannot tolerate miracle in a realistic novel or drama, or glaring inaccuracy of fact in a historical novel, because they are in contradiction to the laws of reality tacitly assumed. The final demand which we make of any work, of art is that it live. What can be made to live for us may be beautiful to us. But nothing can draw our life into itself which has not drawn the artist's, or which is untrue to its own inner logic.
One of the most life-creating elements of a work of art is imagery. ”