What is Realism?
The attitude or practice of accepting a situation as it is and being prepared to deal with it accordingly. Realism was an artistic movement that began in France in the 1850's after the 1848 Revolution. It is recognized as the first modern movement in art, which rejected traditional forms of art, literature, and social organization as outmoded in the wake of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
What are the qualities of your movement?
It gives attention to detail and its descriptive words are based on knowledge or experience. Characters in a realism book are usually motivated by real-life urges like greed, lust, confusion, chivalry, service, and other world problems that many people can relate to. Unlike Romanticism, the story line and choices of the characters are very predictable. Speech in realism is more spoken in that particular country or region and is very idiomatic.
Music
Around the late 19th century and early 20th century there was a popular movement called Verismo. In Italian this means "reality". This movement was well-known in Italian opera, they had artists like Pietro Mascagni, Ruggero Leoncavallo, and Umberto Giordano who compose unique music.
Literature
This part of the realist art movement began with mid nineteenth-century with French literature, Stendhal, and Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin. This type of writing style extended all the way to the early twentieth century. Literary realism, in contrast to idealism, attempts to represent familiar things. Realist authors chose to illustrate everyday problems and experiences, instead of using a romanticized or similarly stylized demonstration.
Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850)
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Fun Facts
- Realism is a literary style that is used to be best understood in comparison or contrast with Romanticism.
- Realism is both a recurring style in literature and the name for a particular period of American literature in the late 1800's-early 1900's when writers intentionally developed this style in reaction against Romanticism.
- Realism revolted against the exotic subject matter and exaggerated emotionalism and drama of the Romantic movement. Instead it wanted to interpret real and typical contemporary people and situations with truth and accuracy, and not avoiding unpleasant or vile aspects of life.
- Realist painters replaced the idealistic images and literary conceits of traditional art with real-life events, giving the border of society similar weight to grand history paintings and symbolism. Their choice to bring everyday life into their canvases was an early manifestation of the progressive desire to merge art and life, and their rejection of painterly techniques, like perspective, prefigured the many twentieth-century definitions and redefinition's of modernism.
- Social Realism is an international art movement that includes the work of painters, print makers, photographers, and filmmakers who draw attention to the everyday conditions of the working classes and the poor, and who are critical of social structures that maintain these conditions.
Credits:
Created with images by PublicDomainPictures - "paintbrush outdoor flower" • MissVine - "classical music notes mozart" • DariuszSankowski - "knowledge book library"