Realism and Cubism, Essay Example

In sheer contrast to earlier Western artistic styles, realism came about as a result of global social changes that were created via the Industrial Revolution of the early 1800’s in Europe. For artists, there was a great desire to move away from tradition and focus instead on reality and subject matter that existed outside of the high art tradition, dating back to the days of the European Renaissance (Realism in Art, 2015). By definition, realism was first promoted by French novelist Champfleury in the 1840s and by the mid 1850’s had become highly popular with French artists like Gustave Courbet (1819-77) who attempted to exhibit one of his paintings called “The Painter’s Studio.” After the painting was rejected by the proprietors of the Universal Exhibition, “Courbet set up his own marquee nearby and issued a manifesto to accompany his personal exhibition” called “Le Realisme” (Realism in Art, 2015).

Courbet’s influence then reached down to other French painters, especially landscape artists who “went out to the provinces in search of the “real France” and then established artistic colonies in Barbizon, Grez-Sur-Loing, Pont-Aven, and Concarneau. Some of the genres included scenes of urban and country life, urban streets, cafes, and night clubs, “as well as increasing frankness in the treatment of the body, nudity and sensual subjects” (Realism in Art, 2015). Some people were shocked by this style of painting, while others supported and encouraged it as a new type of artistic expression in France.

As might be suspected, the Realists wished to distance themselves from the “ideal” as found in Classical statuary and renditions of the human figure during the Renaissance and mover closer to the ordinary or what is found in everyday life. Therefore, in painting, their figures tended to reflect real people as did their situations based on real life events and circumstances. This trend continued for many years with artists feeling “increasingly free to depict real-life situations stripped of aesthetics and universal truths.” Since the history of art is merely a progression of ideas and styles, Realism basically served the same function by influencing the artists of the Impression Period and into the years of Post-Impressionism. To this day, the Realist style of depicting the “real” world has not waned, for it can be found in many modern artistic styles (Realism in Art, 2015).

The artistic style known as Cubism has vital connections with the Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne whose works were familiar to Cubist painters like Matisse and other members of the Fauve group. These artists admired Cezanne’s style most for its use of color and expressive linear distortions. When Cezanne died in 1906, a retrospective exhibition of his work, held at the Salon d’Atomne, enabled painters like Matisse to recognize Cezanne’s principal intention as a painter–to create substantial forms within a space in which the actual properties of the two-dimensional picture surface (i.e., the canvas) and the illusionary effects of three dimensions were consciously and subtly realized. This new approach to color and form became known as Cubism and the Cubist movement, “one of the first truly modern movements to emerge in art” which evolved into a period of “heroic and rapid innovation between Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque” (Cubism, 2015).

The foundation of Cubism is the shifting viewpoint in which Cubists painters attempted to present the total and essential reality of forms and figures as they exist in space and time. Since objects on a canvas appear not only as they are viewed from a single viewpoint at one time, Cubists found it necessary to introduce multiple angles of vision and distortion via discontinuous planes and surfaces, thus the idea of cubism. What this approach did was do away with continuity and replace it with a sort of ambiguous movement of color, form, and style that often appeared very angular and optically distorted (Cubism, 2015).

The overall relationship between the Realism and Cubism periods is simply a matter of transition which came about because of the artist’s constantly shifting beliefs and practices in painting and sculpture. Philosophically, this transition was based on the idea that reality as with the Realists is at best ambiguous and often uncertain. The fundamental question was “What is real?” as it exists in space and time. Without a doubt, artists of the 20th century were skeptical about “What is real?” and constantly questioned the ideals of the past in relation to their ability to reveal the “real.” Thus, the Realists came to the conclusion that reality is highly complex and elusive. Then, when the Cubists arrived toward the end of the 19th century with Picasso and Braque, the old axiom of “Seeing is believing” flew out of the proverbial window and was replaced with new viewpoints on the perceived nature of reality.

Stylistically, the Realists based their paintings and sculptures on everyday, common reality, such as sitting inside of a house and looking out through a window at the scenes on the street which often influenced a Realist painter to put brush to canvas to create a pseudo-image of reality. But when the Cubists arrived on the scene, they experimented and investigated the possibilities of new forms both uniform in appearance and irregular. As Cubist Juan Gris once remarked, “My aim as a painter is to create new objects which cannot be compared to any object in actuality” (Dawtrey, 1996, p. 216). What truly drove the Cubists to move away from the Realist style was the realization that attempting to create a painting or sculpture that replicates reality is almost impossible. Thus, new forms had to be discovered and created in order to project the profound imagery in the minds of the Cubists.

A prime example of a Realist rendering is Gustave Courbet’s Burial at Ornans (1849) which presents a funeral in a bleak, provincial landscape populated by mourners who are unidentified yet obviously related in some way to the deceased. This representation is truly a scene from common reality and expresses Courbet’s interest with his own personal environment as subject matter. It is people, common ordinary people that Courbet is interested in, rather than human beings restricted to a stage of sorts. This painting also reflects the Realist fascination with life, “the drab facts of undramatized life and death” (Dawtrey, 1996, p. 216) which in this example is symbolized by a common group of people attending the funeral of an unknown person who obviously had strong religious beliefs, due to the gathering of priests and clergy at the graveside and the crucifix in the background.

In stark contrast, Jean Metzinger’s La Femme au Cheval (Woman with a Horse, 1912) represents the ultimate fabrication of the Cubist movement through its use of sharp and angular planes as if the subject, being in this case a somewhat classical figure of a nude woman, was reflected through a prism that breaks up the image into angular pieces or units. In fact, the angularity is so dominant that it is difficult to make out the horse on the right and especially the background. To further stress this angularity, Metzinger chose to place the woman on what appears to be a block of stone upon which she is sitting while holding the horse’s reins in her lefty hand. Thus, the only similarities between this painting and Courbet’s is the presence of a human being but in a very different artistic atmosphere (Dawtrey, 1996, p. 240).

Certainly, the Cubist style has greatly influenced many other artistic styles that have come into being since the early 20th century. One of the most influenced is undoubtedly “Pop Art” with its focus upon abstract figures and objects. The most obvious influence via Cubism is the architecture of the 20th century with its angular and sharp-edged buildings, some of which could be described as right out of a painting by Metzinger. Also, the Cubist influence can be strongly seen in the works of Picasso whose paintings often “emphasized interpenetrating planes and violent linear distortions” (Dawtrey, 1996, p. 245) that paved the way for later incarnations in the world of “Pop Art.”

References

Cubism. (2015). Retrieved from http://www.theartstory.org/movement-cubism.htm

Dawtrey, L. (1996). Investigating Modern Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Realism in art. (2015). Encyclopedia of Art History. Retrieved from http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/realism.htm