Realism was a cultural and artistic movement from France, which considerably influenced each of the fields of culture and knowledge of the XNUMXth century. The main objective of this was to return art to reality and distance it from the romanticized perception of other currents. In this article we will talk about the Characteristics of realism, its historical context and its greatest exponents, among other things.
What is Realism?
Realism is an aesthetic and artistic current, mainly in the literary, pictorial and sculptural spheres, which evaluates the most exact resemblance or correlation between the different forms of art, their respective representations and the reality that they inspire.
In other words, it is a trend that is responsible for assessing the possible similarities between a work of art and the real story it is representing. On many occasions, it is also called "naturalism", because it seeks to accurately capture what the nature of the world we inhabit is like.
For this reason, it is believed that it is a movement that rejects abstractionism, idealism, neoclassicism, and in the particular case of literature, romanticism and other similar currents. This current was formally born in France in the mid-nineteenth century. He appeared surrounded by a sociopolitical environment of great progress and scientific advances, which meant a certain religious freedom for the movement, which, until then, a large number of artists had not been able to count on.
Even at that time, the church and religion exercised an important weight in all the fine arts. For this reason, realism is strongly influenced by other previous movements such as rationalism and the famous illustration, where the intellect and realistic perspective were rewarded over any kind of subjectivity and feeling.
At the same time, in this century the entire region would be experiencing an impressive revolution in the way societies were formed. According to many historians, realism originated specifically in the year 1850, a date that was also marked by the arrival of Stendhal, a novelist of great importance within the genre.
In fact, he is considered the father of realism, because the characters he created for his works had wonderfully constructed psychological profiles. For the author, novels should be a reflection of the real world. Thanks to him and his works, other novelists began to implement realism in their texts, to the point that it managed to become the most followed and characteristic current of the time.
Authors like; Charles Baudelaire, Alexandre Dumas, Gustave Flaubert and Balzac belong to the realist legacy left by the movement. From Spain, other exceptional royalist writers also come, who were in charge of following what the French had started. Among the most important we could highlight Leopoldo Alas Clarín, Emilia Pardo Bazán and Benito Pérez Galdós.
All three developed as writing professionals reading the literature of the Spanish Golden Age, since Miguel de Cervantes or the classic picaresque novel "El Lazarillo de Tormes" served as the basis for the creation of an innovative literary belief like this one. Such was the importance of the movement, that even several decades later, it is still used in much younger forms of artistic expression such as cinema and photography.
Keep in mind that realistic art is easily identified regardless of its discipline, because it tries to capture reality in the most credible way possible, avoiding fanciful and heroic stories, and sticking more to the mundane and everyday. Nowadays, it is thought that it is the way in which the artist criticizes how contemporary societies work, but from an objective point of view.
Characteristics of realism
As we have already mentioned, realism was a movement of great importance for France and the rest of Europe during the XNUMXth century. It represented a fundamental change in the way social and cultural reality was perceived. Among the most notable characteristics of realism we can find:
The man as the central theme
The method in which the themes were approached in realistic art proposed a much more focused approach on man and on what the existence of the human being was like throughout his life. Only on a few occasions, the topics were less deep and simply talked about everyday life.
If we talk about generalities, here it was not allowed to deal with topics related to mythology, religion or fantasy, since they represented the opposite of what the realistic doctrine defended. Realism was seriously compromised with Enlightenment thought and, consequently, with social and political denunciations.
High levels of details
As a consequence of the desire to reproduce reality exactly as it was perceived, extremely high levels of detail and precision were required in this trend, since these were responsible for providing the desired effect to the work. It should be noted that the methods of creation were used both in literature and in painting, only in different ways. In the texts, the authors sought punctually, through fictitious stories, to protest about what was happening in their closest environment.
For its part, fantastic representations were made in painting, as part of the characteristics of realism, such as dragons, exhibited with realistic-type techniques; light effects, details, verisimilitude, etc. Although unreal beings are portrayed, they made the public perceive the works as believable and very attractive.
appearance of naturalism
It was an innovative current considered as a step "beyond" literary realism, since it possessed a secular and rationalist thought. It was from naturalism that the term "deterministic novel" came from, a type of literature in which the lives of the characters were defined by a fairly marked social context. In other words, the fate of the protagonists was simply written and they could not do anything to change it, due to their genetic heritage and the strong influence of their social environment.
The most famous author of this trend was Émile Zola, who was even in charge of explaining the theoretical principles of the current at that time. Naturalism is surrounded by much pessimism, poverty and violence, its authors almost became scientists or journalists when telling the stories, as they were very objective and tried to avoid the use of emotions in their characters.
Creation of Hyperrealism
Hyperrealism is a movement resulting from the emergence of photography. This movement was established in the middle of the XNUMXth century in Europe and the United States. As a result of the rise of photography among the public, painters decided to invent a new modality that could achieve, or at least recreate, the excellent clarity that its opponent offered.
For this reason, they began to use methods that were capable of doing such a wonder, but that, in the same way, could get along with traditional painting. Hyperrealism was also used in other areas such as sculpture and comics.
New aspect: Magical Realism
It is basically a slope of original realism, it is thus called a literary school of the 1982th century from Latin America. The main exponent of magical realism was the Colombian writer, Gabriel García Márquez, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in XNUMX. In this literary current, the realistic representation of peculiar and equally wonderful events is committed, which, although they sound unreal, do not provoke no kind of astonishment within the fictional universe of the work.
It is simply an extraordinary approach between the everyday and the fantastic. Like his predecessor, he manifests a political position, but in this case of the Latin American peoples. It was initially formulated by the Cuban author, Alejo Carpentier, who described it as "real wonderful." However, later it was the Venezuelan Arturo Úslar Pietri, who attributed the name "magical realism" to it.
Historical context of the characteristics of realism
In France and other nearby towns, the XNUMXth century was marked by serious political and social conflicts, which led to great changes in different areas. Similarly, a class society is created, in which the bourgeoisie achieves total supremacy. In parallel, there is an industrial development and an impressive demographic increase, specifically in the main cities of the nation, where misery, social inequalities and unemployment are the order of the day.
In this sense, the economic and, above all, social context did not help the romanticism that was exhibited in art to be well seen. For this reason, many artists decided to agree to reflect the reality of the time in their works and criticize them.
Sales Representative
The realistic current had a large number of representatives, distributed in the various disciplines that existed at that time, that is, literature, painting and sculpture. Among the most important are:
- Literatura: From this branch of art we could highlight the French Stendhal (1783-1842), Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) and Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880); the British Charles Dickens (1812-1870); the Spanish Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-1920) and the Russians Fiódor Dostoevski (1821-1881), founder of psychological novels, and Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910).
- Painting: The greatest exponents of realistic painting were the French Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875), Thomas Couture (1815-1879), Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) and Jules Breton (1827-1906). Similarly, there were many other representatives from the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany and the United States.
- Sculpture: the most famous realist sculptors are the French Honoré Daumier (1808-1879), Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875), Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), as well as the Belgian Constantin Meunier (1831-1905) and the Italian Medardo Rosso ( 1858-1928).
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