20^th Century Realisms

Dr. Rachel Perry

Fall Semester

Monday 12-14:00

Undergraduate elective course

Course Description

Realism was arguably the first explicitly anti-institutional, nonconformist art movement. From its origins with Courbet in the mid 19^th century, the pursuit of the “real” captivated artists. In the 20^th century, even as abstraction, Cubism, Surrealism, Constructivism and Dada emerged, a host of artists remained committed to Realism. After WWI, artists returned to figuration, withdrawing from modernist experimentation in favor of realistic, often Neo-Classical depictions of the body. This interwar “Retour à l’ordre” has traditionally been characterized as conservative and retardataire. In this course we will explore the many different realist strategies artists adopted throughout the 20^th century, from Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) in Germany, the “querelle du realisme” in the mid 1930s Paris, Socialist Realism in Russia, as well as the muralists of the New Deal and the Ashcan School in the United States. In the postwar period, we will examine the magical realism of Renato Guttuso in Italy, the Socialist Realist critique of André Fougeron, Sidney Janis’s 1962 The New Realists exhibition, Pierre Restany’s grouping of Yves Klein, Arman, and others as part of “Nouveau Réalisme” (New Realism), Gerhard Richter’s formulation of a “Capitalist Realism” in West Germany and the photorealism of Estes and Close. Throughout, we will consider the politics and aesthetics of realism as means to engage with the everyday and communicate with a wide audience. 

Course Requirements and Grade Distribution:

• 2 short response papers                                                      20%
• Midterm Exam                                                                     40%
• Final Exam                                                                            40%

Attendance and Class participation: Regular and punctual attendance is crucial.  Because this class only meets once a week, you should come to class having completed all of the required reading and ready to discuss new concepts and arguments.  PDF files of assigned articles may be downloaded or printed directly from the Moodle website. Cell phones should be turned off before class begins. Please notify me by e-mail if you cannot be present in class.

The lectures cover information that is largely additional to the readings. Both the midterm and final exam will test your knowledge and understanding of the material covered during lectures as well as in the required readings.

Midterm Exam

The midterm exam will consist of slide identifications, comparisons and short essay questions to be selected from a list of options. A powerpoint with the slides and terms you are responsible for will be uploaded to the Moodle two weeks prior to the exam. You will receive a study guide one week prior to the exam.

Final Exam

The final exam will consist of slide identifications and comparisons from the second half of the course. In other words, the first part of the final exam is non-cumulative. The short essay question section will address topics from the entire semester.

Studying for Exams

Exam questions are drawn from both textbook and lecture content. You will be asked to identify the name of the artist, title of work, date, medium and movement, but even more significantly, you will be tested on your understanding of the larger art historical and cultural context in which these works of art are situated. In your answers:

• Be specific (names, dates, terminology, etc.)
• Use relevant terminology, identifying the authors of the concepts you use
• Address the question asked—not some other facet of the works shown
• Include factual information about the works and issues in question (ie, the political context)

Office Hours: By appointment.  I can be reached at 054-772-1169. 

Email: perryrub@bezeqint.net

Course Schedule

Week 1: Introduction: Keeping it Real or Defining our Terms

• Roland Barthes, “The reality effect” in The Rustle of Language, trans. R. Howard (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984)

Week 2 : Origins : Courbet, History Painting, the Academy, Photography

• Linda Nochlin, Realism: Style and Civilization (Penguin, 1972)
• Linda Nochlin, ed. Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848-1900. Sources and Documents, 1966. Selected texts
• Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (University of Chicago Press, 1992).
• Stephen Eisenman, “The Rhetoric of Realism: Courbet and the Origins of the Avant Garde,” in Eisenman, Nineteenth Century Art, pp. 206-212; 212-20.
• Linda Nochlin, “The Invention of the Avant Garde” in The Politics of Vision, pp. 1-18.

Week 3 : Realism as Social Critique (Daumier, Courbet, Millet)

• Timothy J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-51 (Greenwich: NYGS, 1973).
• Jules Champfleury, “Review of Burial at Ornans” in Charles Harrison, Art in Theory
• Max Buchon, “Courbet’s Stonebreakers” in Charles Harrison, Art in Theory
• Judith Weschler, “Honore Daumier” in The Human Comedy, pp. 132-172.

Week 4 : Realism as a Painting of Modern Life

• Timothy J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.
• Emile Zola, “A New Manner of Painting,” in Charles Harrison, Art in Theory
• Gustave Geoffroy, “Manet the Initiator,” in Charles Harrison, Art in Theory
• Robert Herbert, Impressionism, pp. 33-47; 59-65.
• Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863).
• Charles Harrison, Modernism and Modernity, pp. 80-103.

Week 5 :American Realism : Ashcan School, Precisionism

• Edward Lucie-Smith , American Realism (Thames and Hudson, 2002).
• Alex Potts, Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar European and American Art (Yale, 2013).

Week 6 : Retour à L’ordre in France : the Interwar Period

• Realism, Rationalism and Surrealism: Art Between the Wars. Briony Fer, Paul Wood and David Batchelor (London: Open University, 1993).
• Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (Yale University, 1995).
• Kenneth Silver, Esprit de corps: the art of the Parisian avant-garde and the First World War (Yale University Press, 1983).
• Louis Aragon, Querelle du realisme, « Réalisme socialiste, réalisme français » In: Europe, 183, 15 March 1938, pp. 289-303, Reprinted in La Nouvelle Critique, 6, May 1949, pp. 27-39. 

Week 7: Neue Sachlichkeit/New Objectivity in Germany

• Devin Fore, Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (October Books, 2017.) 
• Matthew Gale, Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919-33 
• Realism, Rationalism and Surrealism. Briony Fer, Paul Wood and David Batchelor, (London: Open University, 1993).
• Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism: 1945 to the Present (Second Edition), Volume 2, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and David Joselit (Thames and Hudson, 2011)

Recommended: https://vimeo.com/146430633

Week 8: Midterm Exam

Week 9: Socialist Realism in Russia and National Socialism in Germany

• Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism: 1945 to the Present. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and David Joselit (Thames and Hudson, 2011), pp. 348-359. 
• Peter Adam, The Arts of the Third Reich (London, 1992). 
• Stephanie Barron, Degenerate Art: Fate of the Avant-garde in Nazi Germany (LACMA, 1991). 
• Shearer West, Utopia and Despair: The Visual Arts in Germany 1890 - 1937, (Manchester 2001). 
   

Week 10: Realism as International Style: the Postwar, Renato Guttuso, Andre Fougeron, Boris Taslitzky, Fernand Leger

• Nikolas Drosos and Romy Golan, “Realism as International Style,” in Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965 (Haus der Kunst, 2017).
• Sarah Wilson, “Hasty, gross and scornful?” André Fougeron’s Atlantic Civilisation,1953 in Postwar (Haus der Kunst, 2017).
• Frances K. Pohl, “An American in Venice: Ben Shahn and United States foreign Policy at the 1949 Venice Biennale or Portrait of the Artist as an American Liberal,” Art History Vol. 4 No. 1 March 1981.
• Susan E. Reid, “Toward a New (Socialist) Realism: The Re-engagement with Western Modernism in the Khrushchev Thaw” in Postwar (Haus der Kunst, 2017).
• Ekaterina Degot, “Commitment to Humility,” in Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965 (Haus der Kunst, 2017).
• Jérome Bazin, “The Crippled Working Class: Wróblewski’s Socialist Realism in Nowa Huta,” Wróblewski Retro/Verso
• Barbara McCloskey, “Dialectic at a Standstill: East German Socialist Realism in the Stalin Era,” in Art of Two Germanies
• Greg Castillo, “Marshal Plan Modernism in Divided Germany,” in Cold War Modern
• Antoine Baudin, “Why is Soviet Painting Hidden From Us?: Zhdanov Art and Its International Relations and Fallout, 1947-53,” Socialism Without Shores, pp. 227-55
• Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, “How the West Corroborated Socialist Realism in the East: Fougeron, Taslitzky, and Picasso in Warsaw,”Biuletyn Historii sztuki 65, no. 2 (2003)
• Anneka Lenssen, “Exchangeable Realism,” in Postwar (Haus der Kunst, 2017).

Week 11: Nouveau Réalisme c. 1960 (Klein, Spoerri, Cesar, Arman) and New Images of Man

• James Hyman,The Battle for Realism: Figurative Art in Britain during the Cold War, 1945–1960 (2001). Auerbach, Bacon, Freud, Kossoff, Moore, and Sutherland Kitchen Sink Painters
• Peter Seitz, New Images of Man (Moma, 1959).

• Pierre Restany, Manifesto, 1961.
• Jill Carrick, Nouveau Réalisme, 1960s France, and the Neo-avant-garde: 
• Topographies of Chance and Return (Routledge, 2010).
• Art since 1900, pp. 345-62.  
• Benjamin Buchloh, “Plenty or Nothing: From Yves Klein's Le Vide to Arman's Le Plein (1998),” in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art, 1955-1975 (MIT Press, 2000), pp. 257-83.

Week 12: Capitalist Realism? Gerhardt Richter to Neo-Expressionism, Art of the GDR and New German Painting

• John J. Curley, Global Art and the Cold War (Laurence King Publishing Ltd, 2018).
• John J. Curley, “Gerhardt Richter’s Cold War Vision,” in Gerhardt Richter’s Early Work, 1952-1972, ed. Christine Mehring (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Jetty Museum), pp. 11-35.
• Christian Weikop, “Just how new is 'New' German Painting?” Art Book, 14/3 (2007): pp. 8-10.

• Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting” October Vol. 16 (Spring, 1981), pp. 39-68.
• Art since 1900, pp. 478-96.
• Peter Plagens, “The Academy of the Bad,” Art in America , November, 1981.

Week 13: The Return of the Real. Photorealism and the Simulacrum

• Hal Foster, The Return of the Real:  The Avant-garde at the End of the Century (MIT Press, 1996).
• Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (MIT Press, 1996).
• Louis K. Meisel, Photorealism 
• Linda Chase, Photorealism: 50 Years of Hyperrealistic Painting 

FINAL EXAM

In addition to the weekly readings, there are two surveys worth consulting:

• James Malpas, Realism (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
• Brendan Prendeville, Realism in 20th Century Painting (Thames and Hudson, 2000).