Realist Painting Style: Courbet, Millet, and Daumier

The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Realism

"Realism is democracy in art," Courbet believed (Nochlin, xiii). Taking that as the credo upon which artists constructed their work, the Realist style could be nothing if not anti-academic, anti-historical, and anti-conservative. Indeed, whether brushstrokes, pen markings, or etchings into stone or metal form the image, the underlying attitude is one of freedom, attention to the gross characteristics of form, dismissal of mere decoration for its own sake, and an unashamed celebration of the ordinary. The self-consciousness of the finely chosen brushstroke is gone, replaced by a mark that favors expression of the interplay between what is seen and the seer. Gone is any demand from outside the artist to make things appear lovelier, grander, or more stately than they perhaps really are. It is, in short, art with the warts painted in — the "attempt to render in paint that which exists in three dimensions." It is, moreover, a less light-filled art than what had gone before in the Romantic style, and what would come after in Impressionism. It used the colors of the palette that corresponded to the nature of the subject matter, and that subject matter had changed from nobility in shining satins to the peasantry in rough and dirty woolens and linens. It might be fair to say that Realism was a portrait of reality gone down market one full step, for the painters themselves were, by and large, firmly bourgeois. Realism might therefore also be described as a style depicting "what is" from a viewpoint that could easily look down were it not rooted in an egalitarian philosophy and a compassionate attitude.

Because the peasantry has no history, and the bourgeoisie has little — certainly not the illustrious family trees of the nobility nominally deposed in the revolutions across Europe in 1848 — the concept of time as a locus for Realist paintings was far different from how time had been used in all the movements that had come before. Classicism was timeless in that it was a self-involved ethos imagining that events which had occurred two thousand years earlier still had lasting value for the viewer and were fit subjects for art. Romanticism was timeless in that it celebrated the enduring noble qualities of mankind in an imaginary, color-washed palette that could, to a Realist, only be the stuff of dreams. But Realism took on the nature of the eternal now. How Courbet himself expressed it was this: "Il faut être de son temps" (Nochlin, 19). Translated, the slogan — "It is necessary to be of your own time" — was the rallying cry of all Realists.

But exactly what did it mean? It was a call to what the artists saw as authenticity: to express and inform about the actual events and people of the day, month, year, and decade — always changing, never mired in a particularly admired era, as they accused the classical academicians of being. It is entirely possible that the introduction of photography — an "instant painting" — may have informed this viewpoint as much as did the 1848 Revolution and its destruction of much of the remaining Bonapartist elitism and the previous noble stratification of French society. By anchoring the subject matter of art in its own time, the eternal present, the way was opened for the invention of the avant-garde, meaning that something is in advance of one's own time (Nochlin, 7). In attempting to bring about social change — which would happen sometime in the future — art was necessarily and perennially in advance of its own time, although it often lagged behind technically.

Charles Baudelaire, author and eloquent spokesman of Realism, had fought on the barricades in the 1848 Revolution and later wrote extensively on art. In one work he condemned the "puerile utopia of the art-for-art's sake school" (Nochlin, 3). As an egalitarian, Baudelaire wanted art, as much as anything else in life, to both reflect and engage the greatest number of people — the working class. He decried that even when workers did walk through a great treasure house of art such as the Louvre, they would come away having seen objects but not having been moved at any elemental level. His call for "painters of modern life" was, viewed through twenty-first-century glasses, as self-defining and limiting as any other demand for a particular attitude in art had ever been. It was simply different because it celebrated not the nobility, but the serf.

Realism did focus on the serf — or, as they were called by that time, the worker. But even a brief look at the depictions of workers in Courbet's paintings makes it clear that these people have nothing: their clothes are minimal and untidy, their surroundings unlovely, their expressions unhappy. Celebrating the worker becomes literally a paean to the heroism of the millions who toil — a refreshing change from celebrating the solipsism of the classes who had always caused them to toil. It is worth remembering that the concept of time had changed, no longer mired in the past but rather avant-garde, looking toward the future. It would have to be: the "now" that Courbet and his contemporaries painted was certainly nothing to aspire to. It was, however, a reflection of a certain segment of what actually was.