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