Social Realism (painting)
Social Realism is an artistic movement that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and gained prominence throughout the twentieth century, characterized by its focus on the everyday lives and struggles of the working class. Rooted in earlier realist traditions from France and Russia, Social Realism was a response to the prevailing bourgeois styles of the time, seeking to portray social and political realities without romantic embellishment. It drew inspiration from significant social movements, industrial advancements, and philosophical ideas, notably those of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which emphasized the dignity and plight of workers.
Throughout the twentieth century, Social Realism became a powerful vehicle for social critique, particularly in contexts like post-World War I Germany and revolutionary Mexico, where artists such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco depicted the hardships faced by peasants and laborers. In the United States, the movement reflected the struggles of the Great Depression, challenging traditional artistic themes by highlighting the lives of common people and their environments.
The movement also encompassed various styles, from expressionistic distortions to naturalistic portrayals, and while it aimed to bring visibility to marginalized communities, critics noted that it sometimes romanticized the very subjects it sought to represent. Social Realism ultimately reshaped artistic representation, placing the working class at the forefront and encouraging a new understanding of their roles as active contributors to society.
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Social Realism (painting)
Social realism is a global movement in the arts and letters that began in mid-nineteenth century Europe and peaked in the twentieth century. As a movement, social realism spread worldwide. Its roots can be traced to the tradition of French and Russian realist literature and mid-nineteenth century realist painting. Social realism was also sparked as a reaction against bourgeois styles, such as romanticism, in fashion before the French revolution of 1848.
Background
Social realism was born from the convergence of social and cultural events of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which included a rise in workers movements, the theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and the expansion of industrial technology. Political and social philosophies, such as socialism and positivism, had a profound impact on the art world and inspired a new vision of representing working people naturally and objectively. By the mid-nineteenth century, various schools of realism had already arisen, in which artists and writers represented the world around them just as they perceived it. Writers such as Leó Tolstoy, Honoré Balzac, and Emile Zola, sought to describe and critique bourgeois society, although not necessarily from the standpoint of a particular or clearly defined political ideology.
Gustave Courbet was an early French realist painter who startled critics with unromantic portrayals of peasants in the 1840s. Courbet had been preceded, however, by the radical painters of the Barbizon school, who found inspiration in the natural beauty of French forests and village life, without romantic overtones or classical artificiality. Winslow Homer brought the Barbizon aesthetic home to the United States, where the Barbizon artists’ realist techniques also found expression in the Hudson River school.
Realist painting schools developed in many countries, including Italy, Germany, Mexico, and China, and each developed its own aesthetic within the framework of their culture and history. Regardless of the country, however, the movement contained a political commitment and retained the working class as the object of the artwork. In this manner, the needs and realities of the working classes, previously made invisible or rendered picturesque in conventional works of art, were brought to the awareness of other social classes.
Overview
In the twentieth century, realism aimed to use art to uncover the social and political realities of society. The New Objectivity movement offered a stark depiction of Germany ravaged by World War I. In Mexico, realism developed intense forms, highlighting the oppression of the peasantry, factory workers, and indigenous groups, and gave way to a golden age of printmaking and muralist art. Artists such as Diego Rivera (1886–1957), Jose Clemente Orozco (1883–1949), and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1898–1972) rose to international fame, particularly as muralists. These artists worked extensively in Mexico, Europe, and the United States, with social justice as the core theme of their work.
Social realism was a particularly American school of realism that expressed the hardship and despair of the Depression era. At its core, social realism is an act of protest and denouncement. By placing miners, factory workers, and common laborers in the central figures of art and literature, artists not only represent the dignity of the common people, but also attack oppressive bourgeois or middle class conventions. Therefore, social realist artists, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and writers, among others, turned away from traditional themes such as heroic historical events, religious stories, or grandiose representations of nature.
Realism was also related to representing the technological progress fueled by the Industrial Revolution. Thus, mines, transoceanic ships, dams, and other images of industrialization began to appear in the visual arts, drastically changing conventional notions of aesthetics. Social realism continued this concern with everyday, manufactured objects and the products of an industrialized society. The Ashcan School refers to a substantial number of artists interested in the pedestrian lives of ordinary people, their occupations, and squalid environments.
Realism does not necessarily refer to a painting technique that seeks to approximate a photographic image. Like many other schools of realism, social realism was often expressionistic. Painters such as Jack Levine used distortion and exaggeration in his human figures. Jacob Lawrence’s subjects were simple, almost cartoonish in their outlines, but intensely colored and full of movement, set off by straining perspectives. Isabel Bishop, however, developed a naturalistic style, influenced by the Old Masters, which concentrated on women in non-domestic settings, such as at work, often in conversation. Tidying Up (1941) is an unglamorous close-in portrait of a woman checking her teeth, presumably after lunch, in a compact mirror.
Critics have pointed out that this movement, despite itself, romanticized the working classes. Other critics of social realism argued that the art highlighted that which is unattractive and common, such as factories, downtrodden people, and industrial equipment. Nevertheless, social realism did open a new art vision in which the working poor are represented as decision makers and creators of their own reality, rather than as quaint or stereotypical characters in the picturesque background of the bourgeoisie and upper classes.
Bibliography
Adams, Jeff. Documentary Graphic Novels and Social Realism. Bern: Lang, 2008. Print.
Chen, John Z. M., and Yuhua Ji. Marxism and 20th-Century English-Canadian Novels: A New Approach to Social Realism. New York: Springer, 2015. Print.
Forrest, David. Social Realism: Art, Nationhood and Politics. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013. Print.
Helm, McKinney. Mexican Painters: Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros and Other Artists of the Social Realist School. Mineola: Dover, 2012. Print.
Hemingway, Andrew. Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the New Left. London: Pluto, 2006. Print.
Korda, Andrea. Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: The Graphic and Social Realism, 1869–1891. Burlington: Ashgate, 2015. Print.
Morgan, Stacy. Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930–1953. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2004. Print.
Shapiro, David; Irving Perkins. Social Realism: Art as a Weapon. New York: Ungar, 1973. Print.
"Social Realism Art Movement: 5 Famous Social Realist Artists." MasterClass, 9 July 2021, www.masterclass.com/articles/social-realism-art-guide. Accessed 29 Oct. 2024.