by Jon Lackman | 16 February 2007 | Conferences, Modern, News
“Now Really: Art and Theory of Realist Art in the 19th Century” has drawn about 150 people to another overstuffed room. Sura Levine sets about “redefining realism from a Belgian perspective.” Realism was coined to describe Courbet’s art, nonetheless it’s instructive to examine Belgium. Courbet called Belgium “my country,” befriended numerous individuals. Realism was a dominant force in Belgium from 1848. It often generally taking up low- and middle-class subjects. Belgium had suffered disastrous crop losses from 1845 on, which created massive poverty. At the 1848 triennial salon in Brussels, this social-realist imagery erupted onto the scene. “Misery in Flanders” for example showed seven paupers before a deteriorating wall, wrapped in rags, sharing small amounts of food, none of them artificially prettified or generalized, each rendered in a personalized manner that suggests the artist had witnessed their misery firsthand. Critics argued that the figures were poorly executed and thus unworthy of sympathy. Realists constituted the Belgian avant-garde for the next two decades. Most were politically progressive if not militant. Some remained in academic establishment, others worked entirely outside it. Profits of some of their shows were given to Chicago fire victims and other charities. In an important turning point, the sculptor Constantin Meunier reconceived the poor and working class not as victims, but rather as historical agents. This coincided with the formation of Belgian workers party. An interesting body of work all told. So how should realism be redefined in the light of it?
Stéphane Laurent is preparing a study of Courbet’s influence on artists in various locales outside France, even Finland and the United States – in other words, a study on the spread and mutation of realism. Here he speaks of Courbet’s influence on German, Polish and Hungarian artists, which was considerable. Contrary to popular assumptions, realism had more of an influence on the direction of modern art in these countries than impressionism, he argues.
Linda Nochlin is the discussant for this session. She found the papers most interesting for “their displacement of mid-nineteenth-century realism from France and Courbet and his circle” to other countries. She summarizes the position of Michelle Facos, a panelist who failed to get to New York in time to present today, who calls for a redefinition of realism in direction of greater “lucidity and elegance.” Nochlin says, “I’m not sure I agree with her. In her excellent and provocative paper, she points out that in mathematics elegance refers to simplicity. In art, there’s no point in defining it this way. In art, I want my styles expansive, messy and edgy.”
Nochlin then turns to the question: What has the fate of realism been since the nineteenth century? Perhaps this can tell us something about realism generally. At its origins, it was tied to leftist politics or at least socially conscious politics, the quarante-huitard spirit, interested in forging a new artistic tradition with precedents in such artists such as the Le Nain brothers, whom Champfleury (“Courbet’s publicist”) hailed as visionary peasant painters. The Le Nain brothers then became in the early twentieth century, after the first world war, something rather different – the exemplars of the timeless values of the French countryside and rural way of life. The controversial international 1980-81 exhibition “Les réalismes entre révolution et réaction, 1919-1939” examined this period – which included a “retour á l’ordre.” At a time when conceptualism and minimalism still held sway, this exhibition did not fare well with critics.It’s an important chapter in realism nonetheless, if an often perverse one.
A final question: Is realism masculine, as Théophile Thoré and others have argued? Or is it (the “detail” in particular) feminine, as many others have argued before and since Thoré? Naomi Schor and Svetlana Alpers have examined the history of this idea. It is neither essentially masculine or essentially feminine of course, though individual works can take on particular valences in the gender dynamics of their time. Sylvia Mangold explored floors, hyper-realistically accurate floors littered with laundry – the site of “women’s work,” in other words, transmuted into art – which contrasted visually with the hard-edge, color-field and Pop works celebrated by the patriarchal art-world of the time. Sylvia Sleigh and Alice Neel in the 1960s and 1970s transvaluated the traditional nude, taking a stand against contemporary abstraction and Pop reliance on the media for imagery, also staging a feminist assault on the sacred representations of the body advanced so long by male artists. In Sleigh and Neel we find a marked lack of classical elegance, decorum, and universalization. Witness for example the lack of contrapposto.
Nochlin concludes that “realism is surprisingly malleable, not bound to nationality or gender. No doubt it will continue to surprise us in the future.”
In Q&A, someone asks, What about the association of realism with academic kitsch that one finds for example chez Clement Greenberg? Nochlin replies that realism does lend itself to certain forms of kitsch, that’s part of its malleability. On the other hand, “I’d like to remove such art from my particular definition … True realism rises up against passé, inauthentic, used-up style.” It’s easy to associate it with “the popular” and “populism,” but not necessarily correct.
Chair Therese Dolan sends the audience packing: “It’s been real.”
