Why Realism

Most art movements begin in a studio. This one begins in a riot. In February 1848 the people of Paris threw out a king. The monarchy fell, a republic was declared, and for a few intoxicating months it looked as though France was going to be remade from the ground up — and then, just as fast, the hope soured into fear, repression and, by 1851, a new emperor. That whiplash year is the ground Realism grows out of, and you cannot understand the paintings without it. A generation of artists had just watched ordinary people — workers, peasants, the poor — step out of the background of history and briefly seize the foreground. The question that followed was almost rude in its simplicity: if these people can topple a throne, why are they good enough to paint only as scenery?

Because scenery is what they had always been. Remember the system the rest of this era runs on (the “Lay of the land” read, one level up): a single State-run ladder, topped by the Salon (the official annual exhibition, the one show in France where a painter’s career was made or buried), policed by a jury that prized history painting — grand scenes from myth, scripture and ancient history, the human body at heroic size — as the only subject serious enough to earn a man real glory. At the very bottom of that ranked menu of approved subjects, the hierarchy of genres, sat plain modern life: a field, a workshop, a bowl of fruit. Gods at the top, greengrocers at the bottom. To paint a peasant was permitted; to paint a peasant the size of a god was not done.

The Realists’ answer was to do exactly the thing that wasn’t done, and to do it on purpose. Their program — though “program” makes it sound tidier than it was — came down to a single defiant instruction: paint the real, ordinary, contemporary world. Not gods. Not Roman senators in togas. Not a goddess rising poreless from a poreless sea. The thing actually in front of you, in the year you are actually standing in: laborers, peasants, the urban poor, animals, work, dirt, the present tense.

That instruction had two enemies, not one. The academy was the obvious target — gods and kings at heroic scale. But Realism was also a revolt against Romanticism, the generation just before it, which had answered the academy’s stiff antiquity with the opposite excess: exotic settings, heaving drama, shipwrecks and harems and battlefield agony, feeling cranked to the ceiling. The Realists wanted neither the museum’s gods nor the Romantics’ fever dreams. They wanted the ordinary thing, observed cold.

It sounds obvious now. That obviousness is the surest sign of how completely they won. But set it against what the Salon was rewarding in these very years — its most celebrated painter, Alexandre Cabanel (the academy’s reigning star), and his Birth of Venus, a nude deity sliding along a wave with a finish so licked-smooth the paint disappears (as the era overview shows) — and you see the size of the heresy. The Realists wanted paint that looked like paint, surfaces with the trowel marks left in, and they wanted to point that rough, honest handling at the least heroic subjects available. It was, in the Western tradition, the first time a band of painters made a deliberate movement out of insisting on the unglamorous now. That makes Realism a fair candidate for the first modern movement — the first shot in the long argument with the jury that runs through the rest of this era — with one honest caveat: “first” here means first in Western painting, the only world this story claims to map.

There was also a machine making the demand harder to ignore. The daguerreotype — the first practical photograph, public from 1839 — was barely a decade old and already turning out portraits by the thousand. If a small mirrored plate could now capture a face cheaply and exactly, what was left for a painter to do that a camera could not? Part of the answer Realism arrived at was rough, handmade paint, real human presence, and political content: precisely the things no daguerreotype could give you.

A word the era keeps using fits Realism better than almost anyone. The avant-garde is a borrowed military term — the scouts who ride out ahead of the main army — pressed into service for the artists who got somewhere first. Realism is where that idea gets its first real face in modern painting: a small group running out ahead of respectable taste, taking the abuse, and dragging the rest of art behind them. The man riding point was a barrel-chested provincial with an ego the size of a cathedral, and the next chapter is mostly his.