Art Chowder September | October 2017, Issue 11 | Page 41
Gustave Courbet
A Burial At Ornans
1849-1850
Oil on canvas
124 x 260”
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
these must have been traced from photo-
graphs projected onto the canvas. While
I have not been able to find any of the
reference photos from which the paint-
ings were derived, a workshop given
by the artist earlier this year offered “a
start-to-finish guide to painting hyper-
realism…including a LIVE pouring of
honey on a fashion model and photo-
shoot by Mike Dargas!” There wouldn’t
be a photoshoot if the photograph wasn’t
integral to the process.
But all this begs the question of whether
a painting derived from highly enlarged
high-definition photography should be
counted as more “real” than very lifelike
traditional paintings. Since we are all
surrounded by bus wrap advertising and
HD television, one may understandably
find it exciting to discover that what
looks like another big digital print is
really a painting. The hyperrealist art-
works of Dargas (among others) display
formidable skill and a startling degree of
detail, in his case fine nuances of sheen
and texture on the skin, lips, and tongue.
But the scale is greatly exaggerated:
these portraits can be as much as ten
times the size of a human head and one
can normally only see these details with
a magnifying glass. And it should be
borne in mind that the “hyper” in hyper-
realism means over, above, and beyond
real: super-real, an exaggerated reality.
There is another, wider problem with
the term “Realism,” which is often used
loosely to distinguish any type of more
or less realistic representational art from
abstract art or any of the many “isms”
of Modern Art, e.g. Cubism, Futurism,
Expressionism, and so on. In this regard
Realism is often used as synonymous
with verisimilitude. The trouble, for
me at least, is that this broad lumping
together of all sorts of representational
art under this name ignores the fact that
Realism was a very important and well
defined movement, style, and theory
in French art in the middle of the 19 th
century, not only in painting but also in
literature, and not only in France. Far
beyond its incipient era, the theoretical
underpinnings of this Realism have had
an enduring legacy throughout the 20 th
century and into the new millennium.
In her highly insightful and compre-
hensive work on the subject, Realism 3 ,
art historian Linda Nochlin carefully
sets the movement within the complex
social, political, economic, cultural, and
technological context and currents of
the period. Rapid advances in science
and technology, industrialization,
democratization, secularization, the
aftermath of the Revolution of 1848,
the rise of Socialism—all these factors
served as agents of change. Modernity
was replacing the old order. “Il faut être
de son temps” - “one must be of one’s
own time” - was the rallying cry for the
Realist artists and authors. The “real”
was the here and now of the new world
order that was on the march, and it was
in the immediate world around them that
the beautiful and the heroic were to be
found, not in the past but in the present.
Truth was to be sought with sincerity of
heart in the representation of the humble
and the ordinary without affectation.
Chief among painters who strictly
embodied this philosophy was Gustave
Courbet (1819-1877), the leading light
and icon of the Realist movement. He
had no use for history painting, clas-
sicism, or idealization. His aim was to
depict the pure truth of the world around
him, without sentimentality or moraliz-
ing. Two works that especially exhibit
this approach appeared at the Salon of
1850, his Burial at Ornans and The
Stone Breakers. Friend of Courbet and
leading Socialist in France at the time,
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865),
had this to say about the latter:
September | October 2017 41