REALISM IN EUROPE.
By introducing the worker and the peasant into the subject of fine arts, realism brings progress, and even revolutionary content. In the art of the second half of the 19th century,. he embraces painting, both Polish, like French and German, and in tsarist Russia it storms the seemingly impregnable bastions of imitative academicism (manners of the most correct painting learned from school).
In France, where progressive republican thought, accepting the inheritance of the great revolution, in the field of ideology, it successfully opposed the dictatorships of the monarchies of Louis Philippe and Napoleon III, he was the initiator and leader of the realist school GUSTAVE COURBET (1819—1877). When the conservative authorities of the Paris Academy prevented him from. 1855 organizing an exhibition of works in the official salon, Courbet held his show in a separate pavilion, hanging a sign above the entrance: „G. Courbet. Realism". A few years later Courbet's realistic program was taken up by a large number of eminent and less eminent French painters.
Courbet's painting is not uniform in terms of its subject matter. Next to landscapes, often animated with animal figures, the artist creates many works about social issues, progressive content. In probably his most famous painting Stonecutters, making the main characters of the works of ordinary workers paving the road, it does so not only because, that he suddenly discovered the painterly qualities of the subject, but in experience, that you just have to talk about everyday, everyday life in all its manifestations. Courbet for a reason, after the fall of the empire, as the chairman of the Federation of Komuny Artists, was one of the main instigators of the conspiracy, aimed at demolishing the Vendóme column in Paris - a symbol of the empire and autocracy. In his paintings, Courbet renounces the allurements of color: he paints in a muted range, hard, in greens, grays and browns, clearly defines the characters in their experiences expressed by face and gesture.
The idea of realism found its adherent in France also in a person HONOR DAUMIERA (1808—1897), ardent Republican and patriot, who in his countless satirical drawings, reproduced by lithography in the popular magazines "Caricature” i "Charivari", stigmatized the dark, the gloomy machinations of the official representatives of the monarchy hated by the nation: bribed judges, senior officials, industrialists. He did not hesitate to attack King Louis Philippe himself. As a draftsman, Daumier used an expressive form, he often emphasized the caricatured features of the figure with a strong contour line. He composed the scenes brilliantly, thanks to which the main idea of his works is visible at a glance. Daumier — also known as an ally of Polish military action during the January Uprising — may be regarded as the father of modern political satire.
As a painter, Daumier dealt mainly with the lives of people from working-class and petty-bourgeois backgrounds. In your paintings, such as Laundrywoman or 3rd Class Wagon, combined realistic, expressive characteristics with a penchant for bright chiaroscuro and vivid texture inherited from Romanticism, fixative on elemental canvas, wide, nervous brushstrokes.
He was the third great French realist painter JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET (1814—1875), like Courbet, a socialist by conviction, author of works on peasant themes (Sower, Ear pickers), in which the topic of farming, almost unnoticed by modern painting, was shown in a poetic and painterly perfect way.
Millet was associated with the plein air school (outdoor artists, tj. outdoor) in the village of Barbizon in the forests of Fontainebleau, called "Barbizon School". representatives of this school, such great painters, jak Theodore Rousseau i Charles Daubigny (called "barbizonians"), in his paintings, painted quite meticulously, realistic technique, captured the beauty of the French landscape, its vast horizons, it is again dense forests with fresh, sunlit green.
Realism in tsarist Russia was the subject of a number of excellent works, where from. 1870 worked the so-called. Traveling Exhibition Society. Members of this organization were called pieredwiżniks. Thirteen artists formed this society (m. in.
Iwan Kramska 1837—1887), who left the walls of the St. Petersburg Academy as a sign of protest against the academic, ossified education system, based on copying ancient models. The Pieredwiżniks were primarily interested in the life of their own nation and the beauty of their native landscape. For the main subject of his paintings, transported to the farthest corners of Russia, they recognized the everyday life of an ordinary inhabitant of the country, his fight against tsarism, views of native nature, as well as heroic episodes from the distant history of Russia.
In year 1878 the greatest Russian realist ILIA JEFIMOWICZ REPIN joined the group of peredvizhniks (1844—1930), author of a previously painted realistic and dramatic canvas entitled. Burlaks on the Volga. It shows the inhuman effort of Russian peasants harnessed like draft animals to a barge, which, walking along the shore, they drag against the current of the river. The realism of this work consists both in the choice as the main theme of only the figures dragging the peasants to the exclusion of everything else, what is less important, as well as boring, expressive characteristics of the characters in their simple, tired faces and gestures.
In his later paintings, Repin would react directly to the revolutionary events of his time. Such works include. in. Tryst of revolutionaries and Arrest of an agitator.