Realism (art)

“ Real art, whether ideal or realistic, addresses precisely the same feeling, and seeks the same qualities - significance or charm. And the same - very same - inspiration is only methodically differentiated according as the artist is an arrant realist or an arrant idealist. Each, by his own method, seeks to save and perpetuate the same significance or charm; the one by suppressing, the other by forcing, detail. All other idealism is the brown foreground over again, and hence only art in the sense of a game, like cup and ball. All other realism is not art at all - but not at all. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It is not necessary to live, but it is necessary to preserve one’s type unharmed, to remain faithful to one’s idea, to protect one’s monad against alteration and degradation.
November 7, 1878.—To-day we have been talking of realism in painting, and, in connection with it, of that poetical and artistic illusion which does not aim at being confounded with reality itself. Realism wishes to entrap sensation; the object of true art is only to charm the imagination, not to deceive the eye. When we see a good portrait we say, “It is alive!”—in other words, our imagination lends it life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Reject realism in art if you please, and accept realism in conduct. For the first time in my life I am comfortable: my mind, having worn out its walking-shoes, is now enjoying the luxury of slippers. Who can deny the realism of comfort? ”

“ My senses and my consciousness give me only a practical simplification of reality.
Thus, whether it be painting, sculpture, poetry or music, art has no other object than to dissipate the practically useful symbols, the generalities conventionally and socially accepted, in short all that masks reality for us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself. It is a misunderstanding on this point that has given rise to the debate between realism and idealism in art. Art is certainly only a more direct vision of reality. ”

“ The ideal, for the man who is quite coarsely realistic in his figures, exists in the air, light, colour; and in saying this I have, so to speak, turned over the page too quickly, forestalled the expression of what I can prove only later: the disconnection of such comparative realism and idealism as this (the only kind of realism, let us remember, which can exist in great art) with any personal bias of the artist, its intimate dependence upon the constitution and tendency of art, upon its preoccupations about form, or colour, or light, in a given country and at a given moment. ”

“ 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 ”

“ For just now realism in art seems more of a desideratum than ever. And from the way the word “truth” is bandied about studio and gallery, one might think it the only thing worth having in artistic equipment. But we need not necessarily become either brow-beaten or bewildered by all this volume 4of talk about the real. For, bluntly stated, there is no such thing as absolute realism in art. The “real” is nature itself, and “truth” is merely the report of nature made by man. ”

“ This kind of realism, where only the model is ugly, while the portrait is beautiful; which seeks decorative value by other means than the intrinsic excellence of form in the object represented, this kind of realism is quite different in sort from the realisms of immature art, which, aiming at nothing beyond a faithful copy, is content with producing an ugly picture of an ugly thing. Now this latter kind of realism endured in painting some time after decorative realism such as I have described had reached perfection in sculpture. ”

“ Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art. The tendency of the movement is to simplify away all this mess of detail which painters have introduced into pictures in order to state facts. ”

“ This question of realism, let it then be clearly understood, regards not in the least degree the fundamental truth, but only the technical method, of a work of art. Be as ideal or as abstract as you please, you will be none the less veracious; but if you be weak, you run the risk of being tedious and inexpressive; and if you be very strong and honest, you may chance upon a masterpiece. ”

“ Any work of art which represents or realizes a material object, is, in the primary sense of the term, unideal.
Ideal works of art, therefore, in this first sense, represent the result of an act of imagination, and are good or bad in proportion to the healthy condition and general power of the imagination, whose acts they represent.
Unideal works of art (the studious production of which is termed realism) represent actual existing things, and are good or bad in proportion to the perfection of the representation. ”

“ The deeper the penetration into the life-force and shaping principle of nature, the greater is the measure of truth.
In representative art the truth of nature is the work's objective base. What the artist finally expresses is the relation of the object to his own experience. A work of art is the statement of the artist's insight into nature, moulded and suffused by the emotion attending his perception. Of the object, he uses that aspect and that degree of truth which serve him for the expression of his feeling toward it. What is called "realism" is one order of truth, one way of seeing. ”

“ Now the fact of the case is that the question of realism and idealism, which we calmly assume as already settled or easy to settle by our own sense of right and wrong, is one of the tangled questions of art-philosophy; and one, moreover, which no amount of theory, but only historic fact, can ever set right. For, to begin with, we find realism and idealism coming before us in different ways and with different meaning and importance. ”

“ Preraphaelitism in art, Realism in literature, might be all very well if they would keep their place—which is in the kitchen. Some may want pots and pans, and scullions, and pigs' feet, and ribs of beef described. I don't myself; but it is a free country, and vivid and accurate portraiture of these delicacies may constitute the main charm of literature for some readers, possibly. But Realism wants to take its pots and pans into the parlor: it always overdoes things. "A daisy by the river's brim a yellow daisy was to him, and it was nothing more." ”

“ 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. ”

“ But that does not in any way disturb the poise of the realist. He is ready to answer you that “beauty is truth and truth beauty”—an aphorism that sounds like argument and yet is only assumption. But let us look into the matter a little farther and ask: What is the truth which they claim to have? Is it the vital truth or the only truth, and are there not varieties, grades, and degrees of truth in painting as in the other departments of art and life? I have no wish to deny that realism, so-called, makes up one kind of art ”

“ But a moment's considerate analysis shows that realism is only a label for one manner of handling, and in the end comes no nearer the object as it "really" is. In its essence realism is the artist's personal vision of the fact, exactly as idealism or romanticism or impressionism is personal. For after all, what is the reality? A chance newsboy is offering his papers on a crowded street corner. The fine lady recoils from his filth and from all contact with him; the philanthropist sees in him a human being to help and to redeem ”

“ We find as a result of such an insistence on the principle of realism that in many dramas, which hail from this time, the outcry of emotion, with all the exclamatory signs and hyphens which may render its nudity more visible, takes the place of a noble and dignified diction, rich in image and simile. ”

“ The amount of realism in any work of art is largely a matter of tacit convention. An artist may, if he wishes, use color with no pretense at giving back the real colors of objects, but for purely expressive purposes alone, relying on line for purposes of representation. ”

“ I cannot here enter into the interesting question of Realism and Idealism in Art, which must be debated in a future chapter; but I wish to call special attention to the psychological fact, that fairies and demons, remote as they are from experience, are not created by a more vigorous effort of imagination than milk maids and poachers. The intensity of vision in the artist and of vividness in his creations are the sole tests of his imaginative power. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So thoroughly has the spirit of realism fastened upon the artistic effort of the present that temperaments least inclined toward interest in the actual feel its influences, and show the effects of these. ”

“ But beyond the argument for cadenced prose as an aid to illusion, employed in the proper places,—that is, where intensity of imagery or feeling can benefit by it,—is the higher plea for sheer lingual beauty for its own sake. Shall realism preclude all other effects of artistic creation? Because the men on our streets, the women in our homes, talk sloppily, shall all our books be written in their idiom, all our stage characters reproduce their commonplaceness, nearly all our magazines and newspapers give no attention to the graces of style? ”

“ Form, however, without content would be empty; it should be rather, as it were, the blossoming of the idea, and a great subject, unless, indeed, it surpass the powers of the artist, gives his genius an impulse towards the highest possible expression. Realism brings into prominence only the truth and palpable actuality of this content. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ So then, the disparity between the so-called idealist and the so-called realist is a matter, not of æsthetic philosophy, but of individual temperament. Each is at work, according to the especial bent of his genius, within precisely the same limits. Realism, as a creed, is as ridiculous as any other literary creed. ”