art and reality essay

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Modernisms 1900-1980

Course: modernisms 1900-1980 > unit 1, modern art and reality.

Expression and modern art
Primitivism and Modern Art
Formalism I: Formal Harmony
Formalism II: Truth to Materials

Impressionism and optical realism

Discarding artificial conventions, is naturalism true to nature, correcting for perceptual distortion, modernism and science, modernism and spiritualism, want to join the conversation.

Modern art and reality

Left: Umberto Boccioni, States of Mind: The Farewells , 1911, oil on canvas, 70.5 x 96.2 cm (MoMA); Right: Norman Rockwell, Breaking Home Ties , 1954, oil on canvas, 112 x 112 cm (private collection)

If asked, most people would probably say that modern art is not true to reality. Indeed, modern art is practically defined by its bizarre distortions of reality; this is one reason why Norman Rockwell, whose work is more recent than Umberto Boccioni’s, is not considered a modern artist. But looking like reality — what art historians call “naturalism” — is only one way of being true to reality. As we shall see, the attempt to create art that was more true to reality than traditional naturalism was the motivation for some of the most radical modern art, even including Boccioni’s States of Mind: The Farewells .

Impressionism and optical realism

When the Impressionist style first appeared on the art scene of the 1870s, many hostile viewers dismissed it as art by “lunatics” whose color perception was questionable and who did not have the technical skills to properly finish their paintings. Some critics claimed, however, that Impressionist paintings were more accurate than traditional naturalistic representations. Their argument was that the Impressionists represented their perception of objects rather than the objects themselves, and that the colors we perceive are often not identical to an object’s actual or “local” color.

Left: Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral (The Portal and the Tour d’Albane in full Sunlight) also called Harmony in Blue and Gold , painted 1893, dated 1894, oil on canvas, 107 x 73 cm (Musée d’Orsay); Right: Rouen Cathedral, Portal, Morning sun , 1893, oil on canvas, 92.2 x 63.0 (Musée d’Orsay)

In the 1890s, Monet created dozens of paintings of Rouen Cathedral at different times of day and in different weather. At dawn, the cathedral was tinged with blue light; in the late-afternoon, it was radiant with oranges and yellows; while on cloudy days it was a duller grayish tan. By recording how the appearances of objects are affected by different lighting conditions, the Impressionists argued that their paintings were more accurate representations of the way we see the world. What appears at first sight to be a radically unrealistic style is in fact more true to the way things actually look.

Top: Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii , 1784, oil on canvas, 3.3 x 4.25 m (Musée du Louvre); Bottom: Edgar Degas, The Race Track: Amateur Jockeys near a Carriage , between 1876 and 1887, oil on canvas, 66 × 81 cm (Musée d’Orsay)

Discarding artificial conventions

The Impressionists recognized that much traditional art was accepted as true to reality only because it was familiar, not because it was accurate. For example, methods of composition taught in Academies tended to emphasize a central focus, equal balance on both sides, and a clear depiction of spatial recession, as in David’s Oath of the Horatii . Such compositions are, in fact, very artificially staged. When we move through the world, we are more likely to encounter scenes like the one represented in Degas’s The Race Track : awkwardly unbalanced, abruptly cropped, and spatially ambiguous. Critics who supported the Impressionists argued that artists like Degas were correcting artificial conventions and making art more true to reality.

Although the Impressionist style was new, this form of argument was not. In the sixteenth century artists and critics tried to draw a distinction between a true naturalism and a false naturalism (often derogatorily called “ Mannerism “). False naturalism involved copying the work of other artists, and thus understanding nature only at second hand. The solution, some felt, was to discard the conventions of art and return to a more careful study of the original source, nature itself, just as the Impressionists did.

Is naturalism true to nature?

Impressionist artists sought greater truth to nature through more careful observation, but there is a sense in which our eyes inevitably distort the objects they perceive. Three ways they do so are embodied in the artistic techniques of linear perspective, diminution, and foreshortening.

Left: Pieter Saenredam, St Antoniuskapel in St Janskerk, Utrecht , 1645, oil on panel, 41.7 x 23 cm, (Centraal Museum, Utrecht); Right: Anton von Maron, Academic nude study , late 18th or early 19th century, black and white chalk on paper, 52.7 x 39.4 cm (private collection)

In linear perspective , what are actually parallel lines in real life (such as railroad tracks or the edges of floor tiles) converge in the representation. This effect, seen above in the Saenredam painting of a church interior, is integral to what is popularly considered a realistic style, but it is obviously not true to reality. Each of the tiles on the floor is in fact square. Similarly, with diminution, objects appear to get smaller the farther away they are, but this is just an optical trick; each of those windows is in reality the same size.

Foreshortening occurs when we view an object from an angle at which it recedes away from us, so that the object appears to be contracted, shorter than its actual length. In the Academic figure study above on the right, the two thighs appear to be of different lengths and shapes simply because one is viewed parallel to the picture plane while the other is receding sharply away from it. In actual reality, of course, both thighs are very similar (mirror images) in length and shape.

Correcting for perceptual distortion

The style we colloquially call “realistic” is not literally true to reality, then. It is only a record of our perception of reality, from one angle, at one distance, at one moment in time, and in one kind of light, and all of these factors can distort the object. Some Modern art movements sought a representational system that would be more accurate to the true shapes of objects, rather than representing them deformed by perception.

Jean Metzinger, Le Goûter , 1911, oil on cardboard, 29 7/8 x 27 5/8 inches (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

Cubist paintings seem at first sight to be even more bizarrely distorted and unrealistic than Impressionist paintings. In the Salon Cubist Jean Metzinger’s Le Goûter , objects appear to be twisted and broken up, but this is done in order to correct the distortions of perspective and foreshortening. Metzinger shows things from multiple perspectives so we can better understand their true shapes. The left side of the tea cup on the table is seen from the side at eye level, but from that angle you wouldn’t be able to tell that the cup has a round opening, so the right side is seen from above to complete our understanding of the round lip and concave shape of the cup. Similarly, one of the woman’s eyes is viewed in profile, while the other is seen facing us, and her left shoulder is seen from above, while the right is more straight on. Cubism doesn’t “distort” objects; it shows them from multiple angles in order to give us more information about their true shapes than would be visible in traditional naturalistic representation.

Modernism and science

Another way of justifying the apparent distortions of modern art came in the form of appeals to science. Modern science provided a stream of new images that sparked artists’ imaginations, as well as new theories that radically altered people’s understanding of reality.

Left: Wilhelm Röntgen, X-ray photograph of the hand of Albert von Kölliker, from Eine Neue Art von Strahlen (Würzburg, 1895); Right: Étienne-Jules Marey, photographs showing human locomotion, c. 1895

Beginning in the seventeenth century, new technologies based on the use of optical lenses provided evidence of microscopic and macroscopic worlds hitherto unsuspected. The discovery of wavelengths beyond the visible spectrum, including infrared and ultraviolet light as well as x-rays, gamma rays, and radio waves, made it clear that the human senses are very limited instruments for understanding the objective world. The visual culture of modern science provided new ways of representing and understanding reality. Stop-motion photography made rapid actions visible for study, and x-ray photography allowed peeks into the interior of solid forms, resulting in visions of reality beyond traditional naturalism.

Diagram of the electromagnetic spectrum (image: Philip Ronan, Gringer , CC BY-SA 3.0)

One work that attempted to represent this new super-sensory reality was Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni’s States of Mind: The Farewells (1911). The only clearly legible feature in the painting is the number 6943 stenciled on what we gradually discern is the engine of a dark-gray train engine spewing steam in a station. The train is represented, Cubist-fashion, from multiple perspectives. The nose cone is in profile, while the body of the train recedes in a zig-zag toward the upper right then upper center of the canvas. In front of the train in green are a series of a couples saying goodbye (their two heads and embracing arms are clearest in the lower left) — or perhaps they are one couple, viewed multiple times in the manner of stop-action photography in order to show motion through time.

Umberto Boccioni, States of Mind: The Farewells , 1911, oil on canvas, 70.5 x 96.2 cm (MoMA)

Two truss structures on the left suggest the radio towers that were constructed across Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century after the Italian Guglielmo Marconi harnessed radio waves for wireless communication. Correspondingly, the remainder of the composition is permeated with wave-forms in bright colors to suggest their high energy. Many forms of electromagnetic energy such as radio waves are invisible to the eye, but nonetheless permeate the world. Altogether, the work makes visible the new understanding of nature achieved by modern physics and presents a glimpse of reality beyond the limitations of the human senses.

Modernism and spiritualism

Modern artists’ quest for truth to realities beyond human perception was also influenced by the explicitly non-scientific approaches of spiritualism . Although spiritual visions and discoveries are often seen as subjective, many modern artists saw them as revealing objective truths. They claimed their depictions of these discoveries were glimpses of a higher reality than that available to the human senses.

Left: Hilma af Klint, Group X, No. 1, Altarpiece (Altarbild) , 1915. Oil and metal leaf on canvas, 93 1/2 x 70 11/16 inches (237.5 x 179.5 cm); Right: Piet Mondrian, Composition , 1929, oil on canvas, 45.1 x 45.3 cm (Guggenheim Museum)

The Swedish artist Hilma af Klint painted a series of works called The Paintings for the Temple between 1905 and 1915 based in part on mystical visions she received from a spiritual guide. Around the same time, the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian undertook a close study of nature to eventually discover what he felt were the basic “building blocks” of all natural and artistic form: the primary colors red, yellow, and blue; the primary values black and white, and horizontal and vertical lines. Although both of these artists produced some artworks that are entirely non-representational in the sense that they do not look like nature, both argued that their spiritual quest revealed a higher reality than that available to the senses.

These artists all remind us that what is popularly considered ”realistic” in art is in fact only based on sense perceptions, which are inevitably partial, and which in many cases distort reality. By observing nature more closely, discarding artificial conventions, correcting for perceptual distortions, absorbing new scientific theories, and engaging in spiritual investigations, many modern artists rejected traditional naturalism in order to seek higher truths.

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The Artist’s Reality: Mark Rothko’s Little-Known Writings on Art, Artists, and What the Notion of Plasticity Reveals about Storytelling

By maria popova.

Few artists create work that embodies Leo Tolstoy’s notion of “emotional infectiousness” more perfectly than Mark Rothko (September 25, 1903–February 25, 1970). People frequently weep before his paintings — something Rothko saw as the same spiritual experience he was having while painting them, the ultimate act of understanding. And yet he knew all too well the other side of this coin, which he articulated beautifully in a 1947 interview in Tiger’s Eye magazine: “A painting lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world.”

Unbeknownst to the world, and rather contrary to the Abstract Expressionist notion that paintings should speak for themselves, Rothko had begun crafting his own hedge against this death-by-misunderstanding several years earlier, in a series of philosophical reflections on art. Even his children were only vaguely aware of the manuscript, which was written sometime in 1940 and 1941 — long before Rothko reached critical acclaim — but wasn’t discovered until after his death three decades later. It was eventually published as The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art ( public library ) — a remarkable and revelatory catalog of the ideas that preoccupied the legendary artist’s mind, setting forth his views on beauty, reality, myth, sensuality, the artist’s dilemma, the role of unconscious processes in creative work, and more. What makes these writings especially interesting is that Rothko produced them more than a decade before the paintings for which he is best known, at a time when he was still swirling around his own center and finding his voice as an artist — and yet the seeds for what he would blossom into are so strikingly evident in these texts.

Christopher Rothko — the artist’s son, who was six at the time of his father’s death — considers the book’s significance in the introduction:

Like music, my father’s artwork seeks to express the inexpressible — we are far removed from the realm of words… The written word would only disrupt the experience of these paintings; it cannot enter their universe. And yet these writings compel and fascinate us in a way that my father surely would have wanted… His words might be outside his artwork, but they communicate philosophies he still held dear even after paint became his sole vehicle for expression.

Although Rothko was “explicitly a painter of ideas” and his works held “only the most general clues,” his son likens the magic of this book to “being given the keys to a mystical city that one has been able to admire only from afar.” And yet he cautions that these writings were never intended, nor should they be interpreted, as a guide to understanding Rothko’s own art:

Divining meaning from a painting is not so simple that it can be codified in a book, and Rothko certainly would not have wanted such a guide to his work. So much of understanding his work is personal, and so much of it is made up of the process of getting inside the work… He cannot tell you what his paintings, or anyone else’s, are about. You have to experience them. Ultimately, if he could have expressed the truth — the essence of these works — in words, he probably would not have bothered to paint them. As his works exemplify, writing and painting involve different kinds of knowing. […] I think he kept the book to himself because he feared that by offering people the beginning of an answer, or the illusion of an answer, to his artwork, they would never find a more complete one, perhaps never even ask the necessary questions. Regarding his own work, at least, he would have been concerned that he could set people running down the wrong paths, moving blindly with their little bit of knowledge, when ultimately, if carefully regarded, his painting spoke for itself. He knew of this danger and was therefore guarded in discussing his work, often finding that, the more he said, the more misunderstanding he generated. He did not wish to short-circuit the process by which people came to know the work [because] he knew just how rewarding the process could prove when one was fully engaged in it.

This might explain why the artist never made the manuscript public in his lifetime, although he did promise it to his chosen biographer — an expression of Rothko’s ambivalence, which his son captures elegantly:

Even as he feared the public, he desperately needed them to bring meaning to his paintings. [And yet] even after he had received significant adulation, he still feared, constantly, that his painting would be misunderstood and ultimately violated by an uncaring public.

That is perhaps why one of the book’s strongest undercurrents is Rothko’s nostalgia for Renaissance art, coupled with almost an envy for the veneration conferred upon those artists by their culture and “the way in which [they] could draw upon a cosmos ordered by its own internal logic.” His son writes:

This is what Rothko wished for: to paint the truth as one feels it and to win love and respect in one’s own time. He, too, wanted, a world where the artist is king and his output a matter of great expectation and excitement. […] My father was first and last a painter… His painting always was, and would remain, about ideas. The writing of the book was simply a different way to get them out into the world. […] He discusses art as an observer, not as one actively engaged in the processes he describes. And yet the book is all about his artwork.

In the first essay, titled “The Artist’s Dilemma,” he considers the cultural stereotypes surrounding the artist:

What is the popular conception of the artist? Gather a thousand descriptions, and the resulting composite is the portrait of a moron: he is held to be childish, irresponsible, and ignorant or stupid in everyday affairs. The picture does not necessarily involve censure or unkindness. These deficiencies are attributed to the intensity of the artist’s preoccupation with his particular kind of fantasy and to the unworldly nature of the fantastic itself. The bantering tolerance granted to the absentminded professor is extended to the artist. […] This myth, like all myths, has many reasonable foundations. First, it attests to the common belief in the laws of compensation: that one sense will gain in sensitivity by the deficiency in another. Homer was blind, and Beethoven deaf. Too bad for them, but fortunate for us in the increased vividness of their art. But more importantly it attests to the persistent belief in the irrational quality of inspiration, finding between the innocence of childhood and the derangements of madness that true insight which is not accorded to normal man.

Of course, based on what the decades since Rothko’s writings have revealed about the relationship between creativity and mental illness , we now know that behind society’s “persistent belief in the irrational quality of inspiration” is a more complex reality. But Rothko’s most urgent point has to do with a different kind of myth surrounding the artist — society’s often ungenerous assessment of the artist’s legitimacy as a worthy member of it, which Jeanette Winterson touched on in her brilliant remarks about “the arrogance of the audience” and which Amanda Palmer captured in asserting that “when you’re an artist, nobody ever tells you or hits you with the magic wand of legitimacy.” Rothko writes:

The constant repetition of falsehood is more convincing than the demonstration of truth. It is understandable, then, how the artist might actually cultivate this moronic appearance, this deafness, this inarticulateness, in an effort to evade the million irrelevancies which daily accumulate concerning his work. For, while the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.

Reflecting on his previous eras — particularly his beloved Renaissance period, which he saw as “an age when the rapport between the artist and the world seemed to have been ideal” — Rothko considers how the role and status of the artist differed then:

What abetted the artist in his little game was the dogmatic unity of his civilization. For all dogmatic societies have this in common: they know what they want. Whatever the contentions behind the scenes, society is allowed only one Official Truth. The demands made upon the artist, therefore, issued from a single source, and the specifications for art were definite and unmistakable. That, at least, was something … one master is better than ten, and it is better to know the size and shape of the hand that holds the whip. In a master, definiteness and stability are preferable to caprice.

In a remark doubly poignant today, amid our culture of countless self-appointed critics broadcasting their individual dogmas from countless platforms, Rothko contrasts this uncapricious unity with the schizophrenic truths to which contemporary art is held accountable:

Today, instead of one voice, we have dozens issuing demands. There is no longer one truth, no single authority — instead there is a score of would-be masters who would usurp their place. All are full of histories, statistics, proofs, demonstrations, facts, and quotations… Each pulls the artist this way and that, telling him what he must do if he is to fill his belly and save his soul. For the artist, now, there can be neither compliance nor circumvention. It is the misfortune of free conscience that it cannot be neglectful of means in the pursuit of ends. Ironically enough, compliance would not help, for even if the artist should decide to subvert this conscience, where could he find peace in this Babel? To please one is to antagonize the others. And what security is there in any of these wrangling contenders?

This explains much of our modern people-pleasing epidemic and its soul-crushing effects . Two decades earlier, Georgia O’Keeffe touched on this toxic aspect of public opinion in her exquisite letter to Sherwood Anderson , as did composer Aaron Copland the year of Rothko’s death. But Rothko points to one particularly perilous side effect to our culture’s fracturing of artistic and moral truth:

In matters of art our society has substituted taste for truth, which she finds more amusing and less of a responsibility, and changes her tastes as frequently as she changes her hats and shoes.

In another of the essays, Rothko’s reflections on plasticity — which he defines as a sense of movement, a quality that “gives the sense of things going back and coming forward in space” — actually offer a potent analogy for the key to great storytelling in all forms. More than half a century before what we now know about the psychology of flow in everything from writing to game design , Rothko writes:

In painting, plasticity is achieved by a sensation of movement both into the canvas and out from the space anterior to the surface of the canvas. Actually, the artist invites the spectator to take a journey within the realm of the canvas. The spectator must move with the artist’s shapes in and out, under and above, diagonally and horizontally; he must curve around spheres, pass through tunnels, glide down inclines, at times perform an aerial feat of flying from point to point, attracted by some irresistible magnet across space, entering into mysterious recesses — and, if the painting is felicitous, do so at varying and related intervals. This journey is the skeleton, the framework of the idea. In itself it must be sufficiently interesting, robust, and invigorating. That the artist will have the spectator pause at certain points and will regale him with especial seductions at others is an additional factor helping to maintain interest. In fact, the journey might not be undertaken at all were it not for the promise of these especial favors… It is these movements that constitute the special essentialness of the plastic experience. Without taking the journey, the spectator has really missed the essential experience of the picture.

The Artist’s Reality is a magnificent journey from beginning to end. Complement it with this rare interview with Rothko on the transcendent power of art, then revisit other timeless reflections on art by Jeanette Winterson , Vincent van Gogh , Oscar Wilde , Henry Miller , Leo Tolstoy , Susan Sontag , E.E. Cummings , and Georgia O’Keeffe .

— Published February 17, 2015 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/02/17/the-artists-reality-mark-rothko/ —

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What is Realism in Art — Examples & Characteristics Explained

W e often describe a movie we’ve seen, a novel we’ve read, or even a video game we’ve played (such as Red Dead Redemption ) based on how “realistic” it seems — how closely it hews to real life experiences or feelings. But movies, novels, and games are by their definition not real. They are fictional creations imagined by writers and filmmakers. So what, then, do we actually mean when we claim that something is realistic?

As with most things, it helps to first understand the origins of the Realism art period, which presaged the idea of Realism in literature, drama, and film. In this article, we define Realism as both a style and as a movement; explain its historical and contemporary purpose; and give examples of Realism painting and realism in cinema.

Realism Art Movement

First, let’s define realism in art.

The Realism movement is one of the key art periods in human history, during which artists engineered a profound shift in the way that art was created, defined, and conceptualized.

Here's a quick backstory before we get to the examples.

REALISM ART DEFINITION

What is realism in art.

The Realism art period was a stylistic and social movement that began in France in the mid-nineteenth century. The Realism movement rejected the artistic approach of the Romantic period that had preceded it, which glorified nature and heroic figures. Before Realism, painting and sculpture had been concerned with rendering Biblical and mythological figures that exalted the best of humanity. Human figures were presented as Classical Greek ideals, with perfect bodies and beautiful, unblemished faces.

Realism artists, on the other hand, began to paint human subjects as they really existed in all their flaws, suffering, and imperfections. They wanted to hold up “regular” people as worthy of artistic representation. The Realism movement grew out of the 1848 Revolution in France that established people’s “right to work” and focused on worker’s rights. In this way, it was as much a political as an aesthetic movement.

Realism Art Characteristics:

Rejected Romantic ideals
Represented subjects “as they were”
Focused on everyday people, settings, and situations
Responded to a new national emphasis on workers

Romantic Art and Realism

The Realism artistic movement rejected Romanticism — the art, literature, music, architecture and philosophy movement which had preceded it in the first half of the 19th century.

As this video explains, Romanticism was a reaction to the birth of the modern world and processes such as industrialization, urbanization, and secularization.

Romanticism Preceded the Realism Movement

Famous painters of the Romantic period included Eugene Delacroix, whose masterpiece “Liberty Leading the People” (1830) embodies the Romantic ideals of heroism, suffering and the Classical Greek form. Many of the details are not realistic, but meant to be allegories for political ideas.

“Liberty Leading the People” • Eugene Delacroix

The contrast of light and dark in the figure is known as chiaroscuro , a lighting effect also used commonly in cinema.

Check out this tutorial for a more in-depth explanation.

What is Chiaroscuro? Cinematic Lighting 101 • Subscribe on YouTube

Another key artist of the Romantic period was the painter Caspar David Friedrich, known for his masterpiece “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” (1818).

“Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" • Caspar David Friedrich

Friedrich’s painting embodies the Romantic ideal of the place of the individual within the majesty of the natural world.

What is Realism Painting

Realism art examples.

As we defined above, Realism art characteristics included:

Rejecting Romantic ideals
Representing subjects “as they were”
Focusing on everyday people, settings, and situations
Responding to a new national emphasis on French workers

This video does a great job of summarizing key features, dates, and figures of the Realism art movement.

What is Realism in Art

One of the most important early Realism artists was Gustave Courbet, whose work, “The Stone Breakers” (1850) depicts many of the features of Realism painting, such as a focus on everyday workers and settings.

Realism Art Examples • “The Stone Breakers”

Another example in the same vein is “The Gleaners” (1857) by Jean-François Millet, which depicts women picking up loose grain in the field. Like “The Stone Breakers,” the painting is meant to depict both the hardships and the dignity of regular people at work, bringing empathy and recognition to their difficult station in life.

Realism Art Examples • “The Gleaners”

A famous example of American Realism painting is “The Gross Clinic” (1875) by the influential Philadelphia artist, Thomas Eakins. Because of its realistic depiction of blood and viscera on the operating table, the painting was originally considered too graphic for exhibition — a powerful testament to its Realism art characteristics.

Art and Realism • “The Gross Clinic”

One final example is “Ploughing in the Nivernais” (1849), by Realism artist Rosa Bonheur, one of the most prolific female painters of the 19th century. Bonheur specialized in realistic depictions of animals.

Define Realism in Art • “The Ploughing in the Nivernais”

Realism Art Definition

What is realism in art post-1800s.

Many 20th century artistic movements — including Abstract Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism , among others — rejected Realism in favor of new modes of depicting human experience and emotion. This video summarizes Abstract Expressionism and presents a number of prominent examples.

Abstract Expressionism in Painting

However, while many movements rejected Realism, other movements pushed 19th century Realism even further. Their aim was to use new techniques and technologies to make paintings look as real as possible, like photographs. These contemporary art movements include Photorealism and Hyperrealism.

Israeli painter Yigal Ozeri is considered a master of Photorealism. Painting on oil, Ozeri often takes women posing in nature as his subject:

Art and Realism: Photorealism

Hyperrealism builds on Photorealism and Realism art characteristics. Photorealism aims to present a painting that looks exactly like a photograph. But Hyperrealism often combines realistic images with an element of something that is unreal but still looks real because of the techniques with which it has been rendered.

Hyperrealism tends to make more of a pointed statement about its subject and is not typically as literal a representation. Here are examples of Hyperrealism, by Ron Mueck and Johannes Wessmark:

Realism Art Definition: Hyperrealism

In this video, the artist provides a tutorial on how to use drawing techniques to create Hyperrealism.

Creating Hyperrealism

Realism has evolved greatly since the 19th century, but it has the same basic philosophical approach — to convey subjects so that they look true to life. In the next section, we'll see how this same approach has been adopted in film.

What is Realism in Art Cinema

Realism in cinema movements.

Realism took root in many art forms in the 19th and 2oth centuries beyond painting, as various movements emerged within literature, drama, and film.

As with painting, the expression of Realism in these arts was both aesthetic and ideological.

Realism in cinema can refer to a number of film modes and movements. But historically Realism movements have been a reaction against the artificiality and fantasy of commercial film eras that preceded them. As with Realism in painting, a historical shift has usually prompted the cinematic shift.

One of the most famous cinematic Realism movements is Italian Neorealism , a group of low-budget films shot on location in post-War Italy. These included films by Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, and Vittorio De Sica.

The historical shift was World War II and the end of Mussolini’s fascism in Italy. Neorealist films such as Ladri di Bicicletti ( The Bicycle Thief ), Roma Citta Aperta ( Rome, Open City ), and Ossessione were a reaction against Italy’s highly stylized fascist propaganda films. And their aim was to show the reality of poor and working class people through a new generation of filmmakers.

Italian Neorealism

Other famous film movements that have tried to present realistic scenarios of people, places, and eras include the French New Wave of the late 1950s and ‘60s, the New Hollywood movement of the early 1970s, and the late 1990s Danish film movement, Dogme 95 .

A Brief History of Dogme 95

What is the Studio System? →
What is Italian Neorealism in Film? →
A History of Film Censorship in America →

What is Italian Neorealism?

We have explored the question of what is realism in art, and given examples of Realism in painting from the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as today. We have also briefly explored how Realism manifested in various cinema movements. Next, take a more thorough look at one of the most famous and important of those movements: Italian Neorealism.

Up Next: Italian Neorealism →

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Essay on the Concept of Art and Reality

Art shows something of reality as a whole, a reality that exists above or below the directly perceptible world. There is a first reality, or empirical reality, which can be mapped and captured through sense perception and is characterized by immediacy; and then there is a second or imagined reality that unfolds beyond direct empirical and experiential observation. While the animal intellect is attracted to the surface, to mere appearances, the human intellect is drawn to what lies beyond the surface. The ability to imagine is a condition of human intellect, being characterized, in Schopenhauer's terms, by a power of "seeing in things not what nature has actually formed but what she endeavored to form, yet did not bring about" (Schopenhauer, 1969, pp. 186-187). For Schopenhauer, this capacity can be fully engaged not by the "ordinary man, that manufactured article of nature" (ibid., p. 187), but by the man of genius. In contrast, John Ruskin holds that the pow...

Art as a Reflection of Reality in Thoreau’s Walden Essay

Introduction, thoreau concepts in the book, conclusions, works cited.

Whether it is presented in a painted image or presented in a several hundred page novel, art can provide a profound reflection of the realities of life not only at the time that the novel is written, but also for future generations able to find meaning and knowledge within the text. Thoreau’s book Walden is basically a reaction to the increasing industrialization and materialism Thoreau saw occurring around him. As a result, he addresses issues of ownership, slavery and success in definitions that are opposed to the common conceptions held by his contemporaries and in ways that are still relevant today.

One of the first modern conceptions regarding the world that Thoreau questions in his book Walden is the concept of materialism or ownership as it exists in economic terms. He recognizes the conventional view of possession as being some form of ownership, “The nearest that I came to actual possession was when I bought the Hollowell place, … but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife … changed her mind and wished to keep it” (68). As he discusses the process of handing the farm back over to its owner, he illustrates the transcendental approach to the concept of possession. “But I retained the landscape, and I have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow … I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only” (68).

In detailing the costs associated with building his home, including such notes as the use of refuse shingles for the roof and sides and the purchase of two second hand windows, he rails against the inflated prices and costs of living found within the town or city as a part of the capitalistic process. “I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually” (40). Thoreau then indicates the unnecessary extravagance of the homes of others: “Many of our houses, both public and private, with their almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls and their cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of peace, appear to be extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be only vermin which infest them” (116). He also indicates how living space isn’t just the empty rooms and built spaces of human creation, but should include the shared spaces of the outdoors, the connection with nature and the consideration of the ultimate creation.

While it was one of the more common causes of the transcendentalists, Thoreau’s position against slavery again illustrates a much wider view. As he discusses the slavery of mankind to the labors of the fields, “How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot!” (5). Consumed by the need to keep the property going or to earn the money necessary to pay off old debts, the individual becomes a slave to those to whom they are indebted and begin to lose their integrity, their souls becoming little more than compost to till in their land. However, Thoreau takes the concept of slavery even another step further, indicating that “worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself … See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion” (7). This being the case, Thoreau suggests one of the first steps necessary for men to live truly free lives is for them to realize that there isn’t simply one prescribed ‘right’ way to live a life. Obtaining one’s freedom not only from social constructions of the ‘right’ way to live but also from our own constraints of self-opinion to know our inner road to freedom is thus one of the most important steps toward a successful life.

Finally, Thoreau defines success in terms of a life fully lived. He acknowledges the traditional concepts of success as being material wealth, large homes and religious adherence but continues to point out the unfulfilling nature of such pursuits to the inner man. “I know of many systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame, and provoke him to new endeavors, though it be to the performance of rites merely” (184). Rather than following an externally ordered course of prescribed actions toward success, such as the modern world’s insistence that children go to school, attend university, get married, follow a career, have children and make lots of money all while faithfully attending Sunday morning church services and the obligatory rounds of soccer and piano lessons, Thoreau indicates the only true way to successfully live a life is by following one’s dreams. This is in spite of the fact that following one’s dreams may mean working all night and sleeping half the day, living in a remote rural area where there aren’t enough children around to field a soccer team or choosing not to get married. Thus, Thoreau’s definition of the truly successful life is one in which the individual has dared to follow their own inner voice as it responded to the natural world around them.

While Thoreau was responding to the major social issues of his own time, his arguments are as valid today as they were then. It is still important that people figure out a means of redefining their ideas regarding the necessity of material possessions and what it means to be a slave versus what it means to be a success. Today, the constant pursuit of material wealth has led the world to the brink of destruction. Many people are just starting down the road to economic ruin after having purchased homes they can’t really afford and running up credit card debt to pay for all the other symbols of prosperity they see displayed by their neighbors. This is shown as many homes are now being foreclosed on, sending thousands of people into the streets and into massive debt with little or nothing to show for their efforts. In an attempt to hold onto these things that they can’t really afford, these people have now become slaves to the massive corporate giants, many of whom, in their own bid to display the greatest material wealth, struggle as hard as they can to keep as many dollars out of the pockets of their workers as they can.

For most of these people, they are forced to live lives of quiet desperation, having never fulfilled even the smallest of their dreams. By contrast, those able to resist the temptation of purchasing more than they need or can reasonably afford, not extending themselves to such heights that they are required to maintain a specific salary only attainable in their present occupation, are able to enjoy life to a much greater level. Because their expenses are kept small and their needs are provided for within this limit, they are able to use anything extra to help them in their pursuit of their dreams, which is the direction they’re working in anyway. They are not slaves to the corporate giant and are not as concerned about maintaining exorbitant monthly expenses should they happen to lose their position. With this knowledge comes the advantage of flexibility. If a person doesn’t like the way their company is moving, its business practices or simply cannot abide a new policy that goes against his moral fiber, he has the real option of leaving and finding another position elsewhere rather than being trapped in the position until or if he can find another one of comparable wages. Having real options is what makes a man free and a free man is a successful man because he can follow his heart.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1993.

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IvyPanda. (2021, September 15). Art as a Reflection of Reality in Thoreau’s Walden. https://ivypanda.com/essays/art-as-a-reflection-of-reality-in-thoreaus-walden/

"Art as a Reflection of Reality in Thoreau’s Walden." IvyPanda , 15 Sept. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/art-as-a-reflection-of-reality-in-thoreaus-walden/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Art as a Reflection of Reality in Thoreau’s Walden'. 15 September.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Art as a Reflection of Reality in Thoreau’s Walden." September 15, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/art-as-a-reflection-of-reality-in-thoreaus-walden/.

1. IvyPanda . "Art as a Reflection of Reality in Thoreau’s Walden." September 15, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/art-as-a-reflection-of-reality-in-thoreaus-walden/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Art as a Reflection of Reality in Thoreau’s Walden." September 15, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/art-as-a-reflection-of-reality-in-thoreaus-walden/.

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By Will Fenstermaker

June 14, 2017

The 10 Essays That Changed Art Criticism Forever

There has never been a time when art critics held more power than during the second half of the twentieth century. Following the Second World War, with the relocation of the world’s artistic epicenter from Paris to New York, a different kind of war was waged in the pages of magazines across the country. As part of the larger “culture wars” of the mid-century, art critics began to take on greater influence than they’d ever held before. For a time, two critics in particular—who began as friends, and remained in the same social circles for much of their lives—set the stakes of the debates surrounding the maturation of American art that would continue for decades. The ideas about art outlined by Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg are still debated today, and the extent to which they were debated in the past has shaped entire movements of the arts. Below are ten works of criticism through which one can trace the mainstreaming of Clement Greenberg’s formalist theory, and how its dismantling led us into institutional critique and conceptual art today.

The American Action Painters

Harold Rosenberg

Harold Rosenberg, a poet who came to art through his involvement with the Artist’s Union and the WPA, was introduced to Jean-Paul Sartre as the “first American existentialist.” Soon, Rosenberg became a contributor to Sartre’s publication in France, for which he first drafted his influential essay. However, when Sartre supported Soviet aggression against Korea, Rosenberg brought his essay to Elaine de Kooning , then the editor of ARTnews , who ran “The American Action Painters” in December, 1952.

RELATED: What Did Harold Rosenberg Do? An Introduction to the Champion of “Action Painting”

Rosenberg’s essay on the emerging school of American Painters omitted particular names—because they’d have been unfamiliar to its original French audience—but it was nonetheless extraordinarily influential for the burgeoning scene of post-WWII American artists. Jackson Pollock claimed to be the influence of “action painting,” despite Rosenberg’s rumored lack of respect for the artist because Pollock wasn’t particularly well-read. Influenced by Marxist theory and French existentialism, Rosenberg conceives of a painting as an “arena,” in which the artist acts upon, wrestles, or otherwise engages with the canvas, in what ultimately amounts to an expressive record of a struggle. “What was to go on the canvas,” Rosenberg wrote, “was not a picture but an event.”

Notable Quote

Weak mysticism, the “Christian Science” side of the new movement, tends … toward easy painting—never so many unearned masterpieces! Works of this sort lack the dialectical tension of a genuine act, associated with risk and will. When a tube of paint is squeezed by the Absolute, the result can only be a Success. The painter need keep himself on hand solely to collect the benefits of an endless series of strokes of luck. His gesture completes itself without arousing either an opposing movement within itself nor the desire in the artist to make the act more fully his own. Satisfied with wonders that remain safely inside the canvas, the artist accepts the permanence of the commonplace and decorates it with his own daily annihilation. The result is an apocalyptic wallpaper.

‘American-Type’ Painting

Clement Greenberg

Throughout the preceding decade, Clement Greenberg, also a former poet, had established a reputation as a leftist critic through his writings with The Partisan Review —a publication run by the John Reed Club, a New York City-centered organization affiliated with the American Communist Party—and his time as an art critic with The Nation . In 1955, The Partisan Review published Greenberg’s “‘American-Type’ Painting,” in which the critic defined the now-ubiquitous term “abstract expressionism.”

RELATED: What Did Clement Greenberg Do? A Primer on the Powerful AbEx Theorist’s Key Ideas

In contrast to Rosenberg’s conception of painting as a performative act, Greenberg’s theory, influenced by Clive Bell and T. S. Eliot, was essentially a formal one—in fact, it eventually evolved into what would be called “formalism.” Greenberg argued that the evolution of painting was one of historical determinacy—that ever since the Renaissance, pictures moved toward flatness, and the painted line moved away from representation. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were two of the landmarks of this view. Pollock, who exhibited his drip paintings in 1951, freeing the line from figuration, was for Greenberg the pinnacle of American Modernism, the most important artist since Picasso. (Pollock’s paintings exhibited in 1954, with which he returned to semi-representational form, were regarded by Greenberg as a regression. This lead him to adopt Barnett Newman as his new poster-boy, despite the artist’s possessing vastly different ideas on the nature of painting. For one, Greenberg mostly ignored the Biblical titles of Newman’s paintings.)

Greenberg’s formalist theories were immensely influential over the subsequent decades. Artforum in particular grew into a locus for formalist discourse, which had the early effect of providing an aesthetic toolkit divorced from politic. Certain curators of the Museum of Modern Art, particularly William Rubin, Kirk Varnedoe, and to an extent Alfred Barr are credited for steering the museum in an essentially formalist direction. Some painters, such as Frank Stella , Helen Frankenthaler , and Kenneth Noland, had even been accused of illustrating Greenberg’s theories (and those of Michael Fried, a prominent Greenbergian disciple) in attempt to embody the theory, which was restrictive in its failure to account for narrative content, figuration, identity, politics, and more. In addition, Greenberg’s theories proved well-suited for a burgeoning art market, which found connoisseurship an easy sell. (As the writer Mary McCarthy said, “You can’t hang an event on your wall.”) In fact, the dominance of the term “abstract expressionism” over “action painting,” which seemed more applicable to Pollock and Willem de Kooning than any other members of the New York School, is emblematic of the influence of formalist discourse.

The justification for the term, “abstract expressionist,” lies in the fact that most of the painters covered by it took their lead from German, Russian, or Jewish expressionism in breaking away from late Cubist abstract art. But they all started from French painting, for their fundamental sense of style from it, and still maintain some sort of continuity with it. Not least of all, they got from it their most vivid notion of an ambitious, major art, and of the general direction in which it had to go in their time.

Barbara Rose

Like many critics in the 1950s and 60s, Barbara Rose had clearly staked her allegiance to one camp or the other. She was, firmly, a formalist, and along with Fried and Rosalind Krauss is largely credited with expanding the theory beyond abstract expressionist painting. By 1965, however, Rose recognized a limitation of the theory as outlined by Greenberg—that it was reductionist and only capable of account for a certain style of painting, and not much at all in other mediums.

RELATED: The Intellectual Origins Of Minimalism

In “ABC Art,” published in Art in America where Rose was a contributing editor, Rose opens up formalism to encompass sculpture, which Greenberg was largely unable to account for. The simple idea that art moves toward flatness and abstraction leads, for Rose, into Minimalism, and “ABC Art” is often considered the first landmark essay on Minimalist art. By linking the Minimalist sculptures of artists like Donald Judd to the Russian supremacist paintings of Kasimir Malevich and readymades of Duchamp, she extends the determinist history that formalism relies on into sculpture and movements beyond abstract expressionism.

I do not agree with critic Michael Fried’s view that Duchamp, at any rate, was a failed Cubist. Rather, the inevitability of a logical evolution toward a reductive art was obvious to them already. For Malevich, the poetic Slav, this realization forced a turning inward toward an inspirational mysticism, whereas for Duchamp, the rational Frenchman, it meant a fatigue so enervating that finally the wish to paint at all was killed. Both the yearnings of Malevich’s Slavic soul and the deductions of Duchamp’s rationalist mind led both men ultimately to reject and exclude from their work many of the most cherished premises of Western art in favor of an art stripped to its bare, irreducible minimum.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Philip Leider

Despite the rhetorical tendency to suggest the social upheaval of the '60s ended with the actual decade, 1970 remained a year of unrest. And Artforum was still the locus of formalist criticism, which was proving increasingly unable to account for art that contributed to larger cultural movements, like Civil Rights, women’s liberation, anti-war protests, and more. (Tellingly, The Partisan Review , which birthed formalism, had by then distanced itself from its communist associations and, as an editorial body, was supportive of American Interventionism in Vietnam. Greenberg was a vocal hawk.) Subtitled “Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco, and Utah,” the editor’s note to the September 1970 issue of Artforum , written by Philip Leider, ostensibly recounts a road trip undertaken with Richard Serra and Abbie Hoffman to see Michael Heizer’s Double Negative in the Nevada desert.

RELATED: A City of Art in the Desert: Behind Michael Heizer’s Monumental Visions for Nevada

However, the essay is also an account of an onsetting disillusion with formalism, which Leider found left him woefully unequipped to process the protests that had erupted surrounding an exhibition of prints by Paul Wunderlich at the Phoenix Gallery in Berkeley. Wunderlich’s depictions of nude women were shown concurrently to an exhibition of drawings sold to raise money for Vietnamese orphans. The juxtaposition of a canonical, patriarchal form of representation and liberal posturing, to which the protestors objected, showcased the limitations of a methodology that placed the aesthetic elements of a picture plane far above the actual world in which it existed. Less than a year later, Leider stepped down as editor-in-chief and Artforum began to lose its emphasis on late Modernism.

I thought the women were probably with me—if they were, I was with them. I thought the women were picketing the show because it was reactionary art. To the women, [Piet] Mondrian must be a great revolutionary artist. Abstract art broke all of those chains thirty years ago! What is a Movement gallery showing dumb stuff like this for? But if it were just a matter of reactionary art , why would the women picket it? Why not? Women care as much about art as men do—maybe more. The question is, why weren’t the men right there with them?

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

Linda Nochlin

While Artforum , in its early history, had established a reputation as a generator for formalist theory, ARTnews had followed a decidedly more Rosenberg-ian course, emphasizing art as a practice for investigating the world. The January 1971 issue of the magazine was dedicated to “Women’s Liberation, Woman Artists, and Art History” and included an iconoclastic essay by Linda Nochlin titled “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

RELATED: An Introduction to Feminist Art

Nochlin notes that it’s tempting to answer the question “why have there been no great women artists?” by listing examples of those overlooked by critical and institutional organizations (a labor that Nochlin admits has great merit). However, she notes, “by attempting to answer it, they tacitly reinforce its negative implications,” namely that women are intrinsically less capable of achieving artistic merit than men. Instead, Nochlin’s essay functions as a critique of art institutions, beginning with European salons, which were structured in such a way as to deter women from rising to the highest echelons. Nochlin’s essay is considered the beginning of modern feminist art history and a textbook example of institutional critique.

There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol, any more than there are black American equivalents for the same. If there actually were large numbers of “hidden” great women artists, or if there really should be different standards for women’s art as opposed to men’s—and one can’t have it both ways—then what are feminists fighting for? If women have in fact achieved the same status as men in the arts, then the status quo is fine as it is. But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and above all, male. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education.

Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief

Thomas McEvilley

One of the many extrapolations of Nochlin’s essay is that contemporary museum institutions continue to reflect the gendered and racist biases of preceding centuries by reinforcing the supremacy of specific master artists. In a 1984 Artforum review, Thomas McEvilley, a classicist new to the world of contemporary art, made the case that the Museum of Modern Art in New York served as an exclusionary temple to certain high-minded Modernists—namely, Picasso, Matisse, and Pollock—who, in fact, took many of their innovations from native cultures.

RELATED: MoMA Curator Laura Hoptman on How to Tell a Good Painting From a “Bogus” Painting

In 1984, MoMA organized a blockbuster exhibition. Curated by William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe, both of whom were avowed formalists, “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” collected works by European painters like Paul Gaugin and Picasso with cultural artifacts from Zaire, arctic communities, and elsewhere. McEvilley takes aim at the “the absolutist view of formalist Modernism” in which MoMA is rooted. He argues that the removal tribal artifacts from their contexts (for example, many were ritual items intended for ceremonies, not display) and placement of them, unattributed, near works by European artists, censors the cultural contributions of non-Western civilizations in deference to an idealized European genius.

The fact that the primitive “looks like” the Modern is interpreted as validating the Modern by showing that its values are universal, while at the same time projecting it—and with it MoMA—into the future as a permanent canon. A counter view is possible: that primitivism on the contrary invalidates Modernism by showing it to be derivative and subject to external causation. At one level this show undertakes precisely to coopt that question by answering it before it has really been asked, and by burying it under a mass of information.

Please Wait By the Coatroom

Not content to let MoMA and the last vestiges of formalism off the hook yet, John Yau wrote in 1988 an essay on Wifredo Lam, a Cuban painter who lived and worked in Paris among Picasso, Matisse, Georges Braque, and others. Noting Lam’s many influences—his Afro-Cuban mother, Chinese father, and Yoruba godmother—Yau laments the placement of Lam’s The Jungle near the coatroom in the Museum of Modern Art, as opposed to within the Modernist galleries several floors above. The painting was accompanied by a brief entry written by former curator William Rubin, who, Yau argues, adopted Greenberg’s theories because they endowed him with “a connoisseur’s lens with which one can scan all art.”

RELATED: From Cuba With Love: Artist Bill Claps on the Island’s DIY Art Scene

Here, as with with McEvilley’s essay, Yau illustrates how formalism, as adapted by museum institutions, became a (perhaps unintentional) method for reinforcing the exclusionary framework that Nochlin argued excluded women and black artists for centuries.

Rubin sees in Lam only what is in his own eyes: colorless or white artists. For Lam to have achieved the status of unique individual, he would have had to successfully adapt to the conditions of imprisonment (the aesthetic standards of a fixed tradition) Rubin and others both construct and watch over. To enter this prison, which takes the alluring form of museums, art history textbooks, galleries, and magazines, an individual must suppress his cultural differences and become a colorless ghost. The bind every hybrid American artist finds themselves in is this: should they try and deal with the constantly changing polymorphous conditions effecting identity, tradition, and reality? Or should they assimilate into the mainstream art world by focusing on approved-of aesthetic issues? Lam’s response to this bind sets an important precedent. Instead of assimilating, Lam infiltrates the syntactical rules of “the exploiters” with his own specific language. He becomes, as he says, “a Trojan horse.”

Black Culture and Postmodernism

Cornel West

The opening up of cultural discourse did not mean that it immediately made room for voices of all dimensions. Cornel West notes as much in his 1989 essay “Black Culture and Postmodernism,” in which he argues that postmodernism, much like Modernism before it, remains primarily ahistorical, which makes it difficult for “oppressed peoples to exercise their opposition to hierarchies of power.” West’s position is that the proliferation of theory and criticism that accompanied the rise of postmodernism provided mechanisms by which black culture could “be conversant with and, to a degree, participants in the debate.” Without their voices, postmodernism would remain yet another exclusionary movements.

RELATED: Kerry James Marshall on Painting Blackness as a Noun Vs. Verb

As the consumption cycle of advanced multinational corporate capitalism was sped up in order to sustain the production of luxury goods, cultural production became more and more mass-commodity production. The stress here is not simply on the new and fashionable but also on the exotic and primitive. Black cultural products have historically served as a major source for European and Euro-American exotic interests—interests that issue from a healthy critique of the mechanistic, puritanical, utilitarian, and productivity aspects of modern life.

Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power

Anna C. Chave

In recent years, formalist analysis has been deployed as a single tool within a more varied approach to art. Its methodology—that of analyzing a picture as an isolated phenomena—remains prevalent, and has its uses. Yet, many of the works and movements that rose to prominence under formalist critics and curators, in no small part because of their institutional acceptance, have since become part of the rearguard rather than the vanguard.

In a 1990 essay for Arts Magazine , Anna Chave analyzes how Minimalist sculpture possesses a “domineering, sometimes brutal rhetoric” that was aligned with “both the American military in Vietnam, and the police at home in the streets and on university campuses across the country.” In particular, Chave is concerned with the way Minimalist sculptures define themselves through a process of negation. Of particular relevance to Chave’s argument are the massive steel sculptures by Minimalist artist Richard Serra.

Tilted Arc was installed in Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan in 1981. Chave describes the work as a “mammoth, perilously tilted steel arc [that] formed a divisive barrier too tall to see over, and a protracted trip to walk around.” She writes, “it is more often the case with Serra that his work doesn’t simply exemplify aggression or domination, but acts it out.” Tilted Arc was so controversial upon its erecting that the General Services Administration, which commissioned the work, held hearings in response to petitions demanding the work be removed. Worth quoting at length, Chave writes:

A predictable defense of Serra’s work was mounted by critics, curators, dealers, collectors, and some fellow artists…. The principle arguments mustered on Serra’s behalf were old ones concerning the nature and function of the avant-garde…. What Rubin and Serra’s other supporters declined to ask is whether the sculptor really is, in the most meaningful sense of the term, an avant-garde artist. Being avant-garde implies being ahead of, outside, or against the dominant culture; proffering a vision that implicitly stands (at least when it is conceived) as a critique of entrenched forms and structures…. But Serra’s work is securely embedded within the system: when the brouhaha over Arc was at its height, he was enjoying a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art…. [The defense’s] arguments locate Serra not with the vanguard but with the standing army or “status quo.” … More thoughtful, sensible, and eloquent testimony at the hearing came instead from some of the uncouth:

My name is Danny Katz and I work in this building as a clerk. My friend Vito told me this morning that I am a philistine. Despite that I am getting up to speak…. I don’t think this issue should be elevated into a dispute between the forces of ignorance and art, or art versus government. I really blame government less because it has long ago outgrown its human dimension. But from the artists I expected a lot more. I didn’t expect to hear them rely on the tired and dangerous reasoning that the government has made a deal, so let the rabble live with the steel because it’s a deal. That kind of mentality leads to wars. We had a deal with Vietnam. I didn’t expect to hear the arrogant position that art justifies interference with the simple joys of human activity in a plaza. It’s not a great plaza by international standards, but it is a small refuge and place of revival for people who ride to work in steel containers, work in sealed rooms, and breathe recirculated air all day. Is the purpose of art in public places to seal off a route of escape, to stress the absence of joy and hope? I can’t believe this was the artistic intention, yet to my sadness this for me has become the dominant effect of the work, and it’s all the fault of its position and location. I can accept anything in art, but I can’t accept physical assault and complete destruction of pathetic human activity. No work of art created with a contempt for ordinary humanity and without respect for the common element of human experience can be great. It will always lack dimension.

The terms Katz associated with Serra’s project include arrogance and contempt, assault, and destruction; he saw the Minimalist idiom, in other words, as continuous with the master discourse of our imperious and violent technocracy.

The End of Art

Arthur Danto

Like Greenberg, Arthur Danto was an art critic for The Nation . However, Danto was overtly critical of Greenberg’s ideology and the influence he wielded over Modern and contemporary art. Nor was he a follower of Harold Rosenberg, though they shared influences, among them the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Danto’s chief contribution to contemporary art was his advancing of Pop Artists, particularly Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein .

In “The End of Art” Danto argues that society at large determines and accepts art, which no longer progresses linearly, categorized by movements. Instead, viewers each possess a theory or two, which they use to interpret works, and art institutions are largely tasked with developing, testing, and modifying various interpretive methods. In this way, art differs little from philosophy. After decades of infighting regarding the proper way to interpret works of art, Danto essentially sanctioned each approach and the institutions that gave rise to them. He came to call this “pluralism.”

RELATED: What Was the Pictures Generation?

Similarly, in “Painting, Politics, and Post-Historical Art,” Danto makes the case for an armistice between formalism and the various theories that arose in opposition, noting that postmodern critics like Douglas Crimp in the 1980s, who positioned themselves against formalism, nonetheless adopted the same constrictive air, minus the revolutionary beginnings.

Modernist critical practice was out of phase with what was happening in the art world itself in the late 60s and through the 1970s. It remained the basis for most critical practice, especially on the part of the curatoriat, and the art-history professoriat as well, to the degree that it descended to criticism. It became the language of the museum panel, the catalog essay, the article in the art periodical. It was a daunting paradigm, and it was the counterpart in discourse to the “broadening of taste” which reduced art of all cultures and times to its formalist skeleton, and thus, as I phrased it, transformed every museum into a Museum of Modern Art, whatever that museum’s contents. It was the stable of the docent’s gallery talk and the art appreciation course—and it was replaced, not totally but massively, by the postmodernist discourse that was imported from Paris in the late 70s, in the texts of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Lacan, and of the French feminists Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. That is the discourse [Douglas] Crimp internalizes, and it came to be lingua artspeak everywhere. Like modernist discourse, it applied to everything, so that there was room for deconstructive and “archeological” discussion of art of every period.

Editor’s Note: This list was drawn in part from a 2014 seminar taught by Debra Bricker Balken in the MFA program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts titled Critical Strategies: Late Modernism/Postmodernism. Additional sources can be found here , here , here (paywall), and here . Also relevant are reviews of the 2008 exhibition at the Jewish Museum, “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976,” notably those by Roberta Smith , Peter Schjeldahl , and Martha Schwendener .

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Open access
Published: 31 October 2017

The visual essay and the place of artistic research in the humanities

Remco Roes 1 &
Kris Pint 1

Palgrave Communications volume 3 , Article number: 8 ( 2017 ) Cite this article

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What could be the place of artistic research in current contemporary scholarship in the humanities? The following essay addresses this question while using as a case study a collaborative artistic project undertaken by two artists, Remco Roes (Belgium) and Alis Garlick (Australia). We argue that the recent integration of arts into academia requires a hybrid discourse, which has to be distinguished both from the artwork itself and from more conventional forms of academic research. This hybrid discourse explores the whole continuum of possible ways to address our existential relationship with the environment: ranging from aesthetic, multi-sensorial, associative, affective, spatial and visual modes of ‘knowledge’ to more discursive, analytical, contextualised ones. Here, we set out to defend the visual essay as a useful tool to explore the non-conceptual, yet meaningful bodily aspects of human culture, both in the still developing field of artistic research and in more established fields of research. It is a genre that enables us to articulate this knowledge, as a transformative process of meaning-making, supplementing other modes of inquiry in the humanities.

Introduction

In Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (2011), Tim Ingold defines anthropology as ‘a sustained and disciplined inquiry into the conditions and potentials of human life’ (Ingold, 2011 , p. 9). For Ingold, artistic practice plays a crucial part in this inquiry. He considers art not merely as a potential object of historical, sociological or ethnographic research, but also as a valuable form of anthropological inquiry itself, providing supplementary methods to understand what it is ‘to be human’.

In a similar vein, Mark Johnson’s The meaning of the body: aesthetics of human understanding (2007) offers a revaluation of art ‘as an essential mode of human engagement with and understanding of the world’ (Johnson, 2007 , p. 10). Johnson argues that art is a useful epistemological instrument because of its ability to intensify the ordinary experience of our environment. Images Footnote 1 are the expression of our on-going, complex relation with an inner and outer environment. In the process of making images of our environment, different bodily experiences, like affects, emotions, feelings and movements are mobilised in the creation of meaning. As Johnson argues, this happens in every process of meaning-making, which is always based on ‘deep-seated bodily sources of human meaning that go beyond the merely conceptual and propositional’ (Ibid., p. 11). The specificity of art simply resides in the fact that it actively engages with those non-conceptual, non-propositional forms of ‘making sense’ of our environment. Art is thus able to take into account (and to explore) many other different meaningful aspects of our human relationship with the environment and thus provide us with a supplementary form of knowledge. Hence Ingold’s remark in the introduction of Making: anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture (2013): ‘Could certain practices of art, for example, suggest new ways of doing anthropology? If there are similarities between the ways in which artists and anthropologists study the world, then could we not regard the artwork as a result of something like an anthropological study, rather than as an object of such study? […] could works of art not be regarded as forms of anthropology, albeit ‘written’ in non-verbal media?’ (Ingold, 2013 , p. 8, italics in original).

And yet we would hesitate to unreservedly answer yes to these rhetorical questions. For instance, it is true that one can consider the works of Francis Bacon as an anthropological study of violence and fear, or the works of John Cage as a study in indeterminacy and chance. But while they can indeed be seen as explorations of the ‘conditions and potentials of human life’, the artworks themselves do not make this knowledge explicit. What is lacking here is the logos of anthropology, logos in the sense of discourse, a line of reasoning. Therefore, while we agree with Ingold and Johnson, the problem remains how to explicate and communicate the knowledge that is contained within works of art, how to make it discursive ? How to articulate artistic practice as an alternative, yet valid form of scholarly research?

Here, we believe that a clear distinction between art and artistic research is necessary. The artistic imaginary is a reaction to the environment in which the artist finds himself: this reaction does not have to be conscious and deliberate. The artist has every right to shrug his shoulders when he is asked for the ‘meaning’ of his work, to provide a ‘discourse’. He can simply reply: ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I do not want to know’, as a refusal to engage with the step of articulating what his work might be exploring. Likewise, the beholder or the reader of a work of art does not need to learn from it to appreciate it. No doubt, he may have gained some understanding about ‘human existence’ after reading a novel or visiting an exhibition, but without the need to spell out this knowledge or to further explore it.

In contrast, artistic research as a specific, inquisitive mode of dealing with the environment requires an explicit articulation of what is at stake, the formulation of a specific problem that determines the focus of the research. ‘Problem’ is used here in the neutral, etymological sense of the word: something ‘thrown forward’, a ‘hindrance, obstacle’ (cf. probleima , Liddell-Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon). A body-in-an-environment finds something thrown before him or her, an issue that grabs the attention. A problem is something that urges us to explore a field of experiences, the ‘potentials of human life’ that are opened up by a work of art. It is often only retroactively, during a second, reflective phase of the artistic research, that a formulation of a problem becomes possible, by a selection of elements that strikes one as meaningful (again, in the sense Johnson defines meaningful, thus including bodily perceptions, movements, affects, feelings as meaningful elements of human understanding of reality). This process opens up, to borrow a term used by Aby Warburg, a ‘Denkraum’ (cf. Gombrich, 1986 , p. 224): it creates a critical distance from the environment, including the environment of the artwork itself: this ‘space for thought’ allows one to consciously explore a specific problem. Consciously here does not equal cerebral: the problem is explored not only in its intellectual, but also in its sensual and emotional, affective aspects. It is projected along different lines in this virtual Denkraum , lines that cross and influence each other: an existential line turns into a line of form and composition; a conceptual line merges into a narrative line, a technical line echoes an autobiographical line. There is no strict hierarchy in the different ‘emanations’ of a problem. These are just different lines contained within the work that interact with each other, and the problem can ‘move’ from one line to another, develop and transform itself along these lines, comparable perhaps to the way a melody develops itself when it is transposed to a different musical scale, a different musical instrument, or even to a different musical genre. But, however, abstract or technical one formulates a problem, following Johnson we argue that a problem is always a translation of a basic existential problem, emerging from a specific environment. We fully agree with Johnson when he argues that ‘philosophy becomes relevant to human life only by reconnecting with, and grounding itself in, bodily dimensions of human meaning and value. Philosophy needs a visceral connection to lived experience’ (Johnson, 2007 , p. 263). The same goes for artistic research. It too finds its relevance in the ‘visceral connection’ with a specific body, a specific situation.

Words are one way of disclosing this lived experience, but within the context of an artistic practice one can hardly ignore the potential for images to provide us with an equally valuable account. In fact, they may even prove most suited to establish the kind of space that comes close to this multi-threaded, embodied Denkraum . In order to illustrate this, we would like to present a case study, a short visual ‘essay’ (however, since the scope of four spreads offers only limited space, it is better to consider it as the image-equivalent of a short research note).

Case study: step by step reading of a visual essay

The images (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) form a short visual essay based on a collaborative artistic project 'Exercises of the man (v)' that Remco Roes and Alis Garlick realised for the Situation Symposium at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne in 2014. One of the conceptual premises of the project was the communication of two physical ‘sites’ through digital media. Roes—located in Belgium—would communicate with Garlick—in Australia—about an installation that was to be realised at the physical location of the exhibition in Melbourne. Their attempts to communicate (about) the site were conducted via e-mail messages, Skype-chats and video conversations. The focus of these conversations increasingly distanced itself from the empty exhibition space of the Design Hub and instead came to include coincidental spaces (and objects) that happened to be close at hand during the 3-month working period leading up to the exhibition. The focus of the project thus shifted from attempting to communicate a particular space towards attempting to communicate the more general experience of being in(side) a space. The project led to the production of a series of small in-situ installations, a large series of video’s and images, a book with a selection of these images as well as texts from the conversations, and the final exhibition in which artefacts that were found during the collaborative process were exhibited. A step by step reading of the visual argument contained within images of this project illustrates how a visual essay can function as a tool for disclosing/articulating/communicating the kind of embodied thinking that occurs within an artistic practice or practice-based research.

Figure 1 shows (albeit in reduced form) a field of photographs and video stills that summarises the project without emphasising any particular aspect. Each of the Figs. 2 – 5 isolate different parts of this same field in an attempt to construct/disclose a form of visual argument (that was already contained within the work). In the final part of this essay we will provide an illustration of how such visual sequences can be possibly ‘read’.

First image of the visual essay. Remco Roes and Alis Garlick, as copyright holders, permit the publication of this image under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Second image of the visual essay. Remco Roes and Alis Garlick, as copyright holders, permit the publication of this image under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Third image of the visual essay. Remco Roes and Alis Garlick, as copyright holders, permit the publication of this image under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Fourth image of the visual essay. Remco Roes and Alis Garlick, as copyright holders, permit the publication of this image under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Fifth image of the visual essay. Remco Roes and Alis Garlick, as copyright holders, permit the publication of this image under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Figure 1 is a remnant of the first step that was taken in the creation of the series of images: significant, meaningful elements in the work of art are brought together. At first, we quite simply start by looking at what is represented in the pictures, and how they are presented to us. This act of looking almost inevitably turns these images into a sequence, an argument. Conditioned by the dominant linearity of writing, including images (for instance in a comic book) one ‘reads’ the images from left to right, one goes from the first spread to the last. Just like one could say that a musical theme or a plot ‘develops’, the series of images seem to ‘develop’ the problem, gradually revealing its complexity. The dominance of this viewing code is not to be ignored, but is of course supplemented by the more ‘holistic’ nature of visual perception (cf. the notion of ‘Gestalt’ in the psychology of perception). So unlike a ‘classic’ argumentation, the discursive sequence is traversed by resonance, by non-linearity, by correspondences between elements both in a single image and between the images in their specific positioning within the essay. These correspondences reveal the synaesthetic nature of every process of meaning-making: ‘The meaning of something is its relations, actual and potential, to other qualities, things, events, and experiences. In pragmatist lingo, the meaning of something is a matter of how it connects to what has gone before and what it entails for present or future experiences and actions’ (Johnson, 2007 , p. 265). The images operate in a similar way, by bringing together different actions, affects, feelings and perceptions into a complex constellation of meaningful elements that parallel each other and create a field of resonance. These connections occur between different elements that ‘disturb’ the logical linearity of the discourse, for instance by the repetition of a specific element (the blue/yellow opposition, or the repetition of a specific diagonal angle).

Confronted with these images, we are now able to delineate more precisely the problem they express. In a generic sense we could formulate it as follows: how to communicate with someone who does not share my existential space, but is nonetheless visually and acoustically present? What are the implications of the kind of technology that makes such communication possible, for the first time in human history? How does it influence our perception and experience of space, of materiality, of presence?

Artistic research into this problem explores the different ways of meaning-making that this new existential space offers, revealing the different conditions and possibilities of this new spatiality. But it has to be stressed that this exploration of the problem happens on different lines, ranging from the kinaesthetic perception to the emotional and affective response to these spaces and images. It would, thus, be wrong to reduce these experiences to a conceptual framework. In their actions, Roes and Garlick do not ‘make a statement’: they quite simply experiment with what their bodies can do in such a hybrid space, ‘wandering’ in this field of meaningful experiences, this Denkraum , that is ‘opened up’: which meaningful clusters of sensations, affects, feelings, spatial and kinaesthetic qualities emerge in such a specific existential space?

In what follows, we want to focus on some of these meaningful clusters. As such, these comments are not part of the visual essay itself. One could compare them to ‘reading remarks’, a short elaboration on what strikes one as relevant. These comments also do not try to ‘crack the code’ of the visual material, as if they were merely a visual and/or spatial rebus to be solved once and for all (‘ x stands for y’ ). They rather attempt to engage in a dialogue with the images, a dialogue that of course does not claim to be definitive or exhaustive.

The constellation itself generates a sense of ‘lacking’: we see that there are two characters intensely collaborating and interacting with each other, while never sharing the same space. They are performing, or watching the other perform: drawing a line (imaginary or physically), pulling, wrapping, unpacking, watching, framing, balancing. The small arrangements, constructions or compositions that are made as a result of these activities are all very fragile, shaky and their purpose remains unclear. Interaction with the other occurs only virtually, based on the manipulation of small objects and fragments, located in different places. One of the few materials that eventually gets physically exported to the other side, is a kind of large plastic cover. Again, one should not ‘read’ the picture of Roes with this plastic wrapped around his head as an expression, a ‘symbol’ of individual isolation, of being wrapped up in something. It is simply the experience of a head that disappears (as a head appears and disappears on a computer screen when it gets disconnected), and the experience of a head that is covered up: does it feel like choking, or does it provide a sense of shelter, protection?

A different ‘line’ operates simultaneously in the same image: that of a man standing on a double grid: the grid of the wet street tiles and an alternative, oblique grid of colourful yellow elements, a grid which is clearly temporal, as only the grid of the tiles will remain. These images are contrasted with the (obviously staged) moment when the plastic arrives at ‘the other side’: the claustrophobia is now replaced with the openness of the horizon, the presence of an open seascape: it gives a synaesthetic sense of a fresh breeze that seems lacking in the other images.

In this case, the contrast between the different spaces is very clear, but in other images we also see an effort to unite these different spaces. The problem can now be reformulated, as it moves to another line: how to demarcate a shared space that is both actual and virtual (with a ribbon, the positioning of a computer screen?), how to communicate with each other, not only with words or body language, but also with small artefacts, ‘meaningless’ junk? What is the ‘common ground’ on which to walk, to exchange things—connecting, lining up with the other? And here, the layout of the images (into a spread) adds an extra dimension to the original work of art. The relation between the different bodies does now not only take place in different spaces, but also in different fields of representation: there is the space of the spread, the photographed space and in the photographs, the other space opened up by the computer screen, and the interaction between these levels. We see this in the Fig. 3 where Garlick’s legs are projected on the floor, framed by two plastic beakers: her black legging echoing with the shadows of a chair or a tripod. This visual ‘rhyme’ within the image reveals how a virtual presence interferes with what is present.

The problem, which can be expressed in this fundamental opposition between presence/absence, also resonates with other recurring oppositions that rhythmically structure these images. The images are filled with blue/yellow elements: blue lines of tape, a blue plexi form, yellow traces of paint, yellow objects that are used in the video’s, but the two tones are also conjured up by the white balance difference between daylight and artificial light. The blue/yellow opposition, in turn, connects with other meaningful oppositions, like—obviously—male/female, or the same oppositional set of clothes: black trousers/white shirt, grey scale images versus full colour, or the shadow and the bright sunlight, which finds itself in another opposition with the cold electric light of a computer screen (this of course also refers to the different time zones, another crucial aspect of digital communication: we do not only not share the same place, we also do not share the same time).

Yet the images also invite us to explore certain formal and compositional elements that keep recurring. The second image, for example, emphasises the importance placed in the project upon the connecting of lines, literally of lining up. Within this image the direction and angle of these lines is ‘explained’ by the presence of the two bodies, the makers with their roles of tape in hand. But upon re-reading the other spreads through this lens of ‘connecting lines’ we see that this compositional element starts to attain its own visual logic. Where the lines in image 2 are literally used as devices to connect two (visual) realities, they free themselves from this restricted context in the other images and show us the influence of circumstance and context in allowing for the successful establishing of such a connection.

In Fig. 3 , for instance, we see a collection of lines that have been isolated from the direct context of live communication. The way two parts of a line are manually aligned (in the split-screens in image 2) mirrors the way the images find their position on the page. However, we also see how the visual grammar of these lines of tape is expanded upon: barrier tape that demarcates a working area meets the curve of a small copper fragment on the floor of an installation, a crack in the wall follows the slanted angle of an assembled object, existing marks on the floor—as well as lines in the architecture—come into play. The photographs widen the scale and angle at which the line operates: the line becomes a conceptual form that is no longer merely material tape but also an immaterial graphical element that explores its own argument.

Figure 4 provides us with a pivotal point in this respect: the cables of the mouse, computer and charger introduce a certain fluidity and uncontrolled motion. Similarly, the erratic markings on the paper show that an author is only ever partially in control. The cracked line in the floor is the first line that is created by a negative space, by an absence. This resonates with the black-stained edges of the laser-cut objects, laid out on the desktop. This fourth image thus seems to transform the manifestation of the line yet again; from a simple connecting device into an instrument that is able to cut out shapes, a path that delineates a cut, as opposed to establishing a connection. The circle held up in image 4 is a perfect circular cut. This resonates with the laser-cut objects we see just above it on the desk, but also with the virtual cuts made in the Photoshop image on the right. We can clearly see how a circular cut remains present on the characteristic grey-white chessboard that is virtual emptiness. It is evident that these elements have more than just an aesthetic function in a visual argumentation. They are an integral part of the meaning-making process. They ‘transpose’ on a different level, i.e., the formal and compositional level, the central problem of absence and presence: it is the graphic form of the ‘cut’, as well as the act of cutting itself, that turns one into the other.

Concluding remarks

As we have already argued, within the frame of this comment piece, the scope of the visual essay we present here is inevitably limited. It should be considered as a small exercise in a specific genre of thinking and communicating with images that requires further development. Nonetheless, we hope to have demonstrated the potentialities of the visual essay as a form of meaning-making that allows the articulation of a form of embodied knowledge that supplements other modes of inquiry in the humanities. In this particular case, it allows for the integration of other meaningful, embodied and existential aspects of digital communication, unlikely to be ‘detected’ as such by an (auto)ethnographic, psychological or sociological framework.

The visual essay is an invitation to other researchers in the arts to create their own kind of visual essays in order to address their own work of art or that of others: they can consider their artistic research as a valuable contribution to the exploration of human existence that lies at the core of the humanities. But perhaps it can also inspire scholars in more ‘classical’ domains to introduce artistic research methods to their toolbox, as a way of taking into account the non-conceptual, yet meaningful bodily aspects of human life and human artefacts, this ‘visceral connection to lived experience’, as Johnson puts it.

Obviously, a visual essay runs the risk of being ‘shot by both sides’: artists may scorn the loss of artistic autonomy and ‘exploitation’ of the work of art in the service of scholarship, while academic scholars may be wary of the lack of conceptual and methodological clarity inherent in these artistic forms of embodied, synaesthetic meaning. The visual essay is indeed a bastard genre, the unlawful love (or perhaps more honestly: love/hate) child of academia and the arts. But precisely this hybrid, impure nature of the visual essay allows it to explore unknown ‘conditions and potentials of human life’, precisely because it combines imagination and knowledge. And while this combination may sound like an oxymoron within a scientific, positivistic paradigm, it may in fact indicate the revival, in a new context, of a very ancient alliance. Or as Giorgio Agamben formulates it in Infancy and history: on the destruction of experience (2007 [1978]): ‘Nothing can convey the extent of the change that has taken place in the meaning of experience so much as the resulting reversal of the status of the imagination. For Antiquity, the imagination, which is now expunged from knowledge as ‘unreal’, was the supreme medium of knowledge. As the intermediary between the senses and the intellect, enabling, in phantasy, the union between the sensible form and the potential intellect, it occupies in ancient and medieval culture exactly the same role that our culture assigns to experience. Far from being something unreal, the mundus imaginabilis has its full reality between the mundus sensibilis and the mundus intellegibilis , and is, indeed, the condition of their communication—that is to say, of knowledge’ (Agamben, 2007 , p. 27, italics in original).

And it is precisely this exploration of the mundus imaginabilis that should inspire us to understand artistic research as a valuable form of scholarship in the humanities.

We consider images as a broad category consisting of artefacts of the imagination, the creation of expressive ‘forms’. Images are thus not limited to visual images. For instance, the imagery used in a poem or novel, metaphors in philosophical treatises (‘image-thoughts’), actual sculptures or the imaginary space created by a performance or installation can also be considered as images, just like soundscapes, scenography, architecture.

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Roes, R., Pint, K. The visual essay and the place of artistic research in the humanities. Palgrave Commun 3 , 8 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-017-0004-5

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The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar wilde, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

The Mortality of Beauty and Youth Theme Icon

The novel opens with a theory of the purpose of art, which Wilde reasons out until he reaches that “all art is quite useless”. Whether or not this is some kind of warning from the narrator, we as readers don’t know, but what follows certainly seems to illustrate his point. It presents art in many forms and the danger of it when it is taken too literally or believed too deeply. It starts with a painting, which alters the perspectives that look on it and seems to alter itself. Once Basil has attributed to the painting the power of capturing the spirit of Dorian Gray , and once Dorian has attributed to it the power to host and represent his own soul, the painting has a dangerous life of its own. Dorian ’s romance with the actress Sybil Vane is composed of the romantic characters she played and the drama of each nightly performance. To see the girl die on stage and then find her backstage alive and beautiful is a supernatural kind of existence that cannot last. The danger of seeing life only through the lens of art is that one must stay at a distance or risk ruining the illusion, just like a mirage. This is Dorian’s trouble, and Basil ’s trouble, and through these examples we learn that the closer one comes to art, the closer one comes to some kind of death or destruction.

The set up of Dorian ’s world in society and in his own home is full of pictures, stills and images through which we see life frozen or removed. Whether portraits, tapestries, or scenes, these images build up and up in the novel until Dorian’s climactic act of stabbing his own painting . It is the ever-present pressure of art—of being a piece of living art himself, and of seeing real life mirrored in the portrait—that destroys Dorian. In addition, as we read the novel, we are aware of the power of the narrator to embody the characters omnisciently, and to implant repetitions of their particular vocabulary, imitating the influence that Lord Henry ’s memorable phrases have on Dorian ’s mind. As a piece of art itself, the novel invites us to question its form and purpose, as the argument of the preface suggests.

Art and the Imitation of Life ThemeTracker

Art and the Imitation of Life Quotes in The Picture of Dorian Gray

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.

Surfaces, Objects and Appearances Theme Icon

All art is quite useless

“He is all my art to me now.”

“An artist should create beautiful things but should put nothing of his own life into them”

“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul”

“If it were only the other way! If it were I who was always young, and the picture that was to grow old!”

“I have seen her in every age and every costume. Ordinary women never appeal to one’s imagination. They are limited to their century.”

Mrs. Vane fixed her eyes on him, and intensified the smile. She mentally elevated her son to the dignity of an audience. She felt sure that the tableau was interesting.

“The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows and thought them real.”

“So I have murdered Sybil Vane,” said Dorian Gray, half to himself, “murdered her as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife. Yet the roses are not less lovely for that.”

“The girl never really lived and so she never really died.”

“One day, a fatal day I sometimes think, I determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you as you actually are, not in the costume of dead ages, but in your own dress and in your on time.”

It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and trouble the brain.

And, certainly, to him Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.

What was that loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening, on one of the hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood?

“She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.”

The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast, were more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious shapes of Art, the dreamy shadows of Song.

If the tapestry did but tremble in the wind, he shook. The dead leaves that were blown against the leaded panes seemed to him like his own wasted resolutions and wild regrets.

“You would sacrifice anybody, Harry, for the sake of an epigram.”

“It is not in you Dorian to commit a murder. I am sorry if I hurt your vanity by saying so, but I assure you it is true. Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I don’t blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.”

His beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery. What was youth at best? A green, unripe time, a time of shallow moods and sickly thoughts.

Peredvizhniki

Summary of Peredvizhniki

Established in 1870, The Society for Itinerant Art Exhibitions, commonly known as Peredvizhniki - meaning "Itinerants" or "Wanderers" - believed in representing subject-matter drawn from everyday life, with an accuracy and empathy which reflected their egalitarian social and political views. They worked across several types of painting, from landscape and portraiture to genre and historical painting, and by the close of the 19 th century had become the most famous art movement in Russia. In 1923 the group was disbanded, but its impact was felt across many subsequent genres of Russian art, from Neo-Primitivism to Socialist Realism .

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

The Peredvizhniki artists were perhaps best-known for their landscapes, paintings of archetypal Russian settings such as pine forests, wheat fields, and water meadows, which depicted their subject-matter with near photographic accuracy. At the same time, these landscapes were symbolically significant, representing the mood of the painter or viewer - as in the so-called "lyrical landscape" - or summing up some archetypal aspect of Russian culture or character.
Peredvizhniki was the first group of Russian artists to recognize that the everyday Russian citizen was a worthy subject of their attention. They set about creating portraits and genre paintings which evoked aspects of the worker or peasant's daily life, or their hopes, fears, and allegiances. In an era where focusing on the common man or woman was synonymous with political radicalism, this work effectively sounded a clarion call for democratic reform.
Peredvizhniki was the first great nationalist movement within Russian art. Rejecting what they saw as the Academy's slavish adherence to European taste, they forged a body of work which could become a talisman for an independent Russian spirit. Through their historical and religious paintings, for example, they presented the events and figures who had shaped the collective Russian consciousness.
Like many of their peers in the French Realist movement of the mid-19 th century, the painters of Peredvizhniki were striving not just for a new stylistic paradigm within their nation's art, but for sweeping social and political change. But if Gustave Courbet's involvement with the Paris Commune of 1870 symbolized an unrewarded revolutionary fervor, the Peredvizhniki movement survived to witness the Russian Revolution of 1917, and thus for the transformation it had willed: if not in the form it would have expected.

Artworks and Artists of Peredvizhniki

Barge Haulers on the Volga

Artist: Ilya Repin

Ilya Repin's painting, arguably the defining work of Peredvizhniki, shows a group of exhausted men in harness pulling a barge along the sandy banks of the Volga. The composition emphasizes the harrowing effort of their labor, the diagonal line of workmen mirrored by the diagonal line of the shore (as if the whole scene were responding to and compounding the scale of their task). The laborers at the front of the line are larger, tilting forward with slack arms as if bearing down upon the viewer - the front man fixes our gaze pointedly - while the men that follow seem on the verge of collapse; at the end of the line, one figure slumps forwards, as if only held upright by the strap around his torso. In the distance to the left, a barge with sails unfurled can be seen on the still reflective waters: perhaps an ironic nod to Romantic landscape painting, emphasizing the abjection of the central scene. Repin began making preliminary sketches for this work in situ on the Volga in 1870, though the painting took three years to finish. Each of the barge haulers was based upon a real person whom Repin encountered during this preliminary visit, such as Kanin, a former priest, and Konstantin, a former icon painter. By using a wide, narrow canvas to accentuate the line of men, and by working with a high degree of naturalistic detail - creating precise tonal gradations, for example, and contrasting the lightness of the landscape with the shadow surrounding the men - Repin transformed what might otherwise have been a staid work of genre painting into a harrowing masterwork of Realism. Repin was the most famous artist in Russia by the close of the 19 th century: the almost uncanny visual and psychological accuracy of works such as Barge Hailers influenced a whole generation of painters, and also had a deep effect on the nation's social conscience. The work was arguably all the more powerful because, as Vladimir Stasov wrote, it was "not painted to move the viewers to pity," but simply to "show [...] the types of people Repin saw."

Oil on canvas - Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

The Rooks Have Come Back

Artist: Alexei Savrasov

Alexei Savrasov's landscape painting shows a group of bare, twisted trees on a snow-covered hillside in front of a monastery. In the distance, beyond the steeple, a snowy expanse stretches to the horizon, generating a sense of enveloping isolation. The white of the snow and tree trunks, and the sharp angles of the walls and spires, create a kind of harsh clarity, suggesting the biting cold of the winter, but the top half of the canvas is dominated by billowing clouds and blue sky, and by the rooks which flock to the tops of the trees, heralding the spring. Savrasov painted almost exclusively in the landscape genre, and was associated with the development of so-called "lyrical landscape", a genre associated with the Peredvizhniki group in which the landscape becomes a mirror for human emotions. During the 1860s he had travelled to Europe, and had been influenced by Romantic landscape painters of the Swiss (Alexandre Calame) and British (John Constable) schools, but this work conveys a distinctly Russian spirit. It practical terms, it represents the area around the Ipatiev Monastery in Kostroma, a provincial town 200 miles north-east of Moscow. Seen as the high-point of Savrasov's career, The Rooks Have Come Back is at once a highly allegorical work, showing the replenishment of the landscape after winter, and a piece of almost informal-seeming naturalism. It was well-received when it was shown at the first Peredvizhniki touring exhibition of 1871, and was later admired by Isaac Levitan, a pupil of Savrasov's whose emotionally evocative landscapes would themselves become famous. As Levitan put it, the work is "very simple, but beneath the simplicity [...] is the tender artist's soul".

Oil on canvas - The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Artist: Fyodor Vasilyev

This painting, depicting a water-meadow in the Russian countryside, is sometimes taken as the founding work of the "lyrical landscape" style, and is a classic example of Peredvizhniki landscape painting. In the foreground, scrubby vegetation is picked out with naturalistic detail; behind, a patch of earth leads in zig-zag pattern to a shallow lake, which in turn forms a curving diagonal drawing the eye upwards to the tree on the horizon line. The sky, filled with low-lying clouds, and the earth, are presented as contrasting areas of light and dark, with a shadow cast across the whole ground, stretching from left to right of the canvas. Though he was only twenty in 1870, Fyodor Vasilyev became one of the founding members of Peridvizhniki, and by the time he composed Wet Meadow in 1872 he had already collaborated with, and been tutored by, some of the most important artists attached to the movement. In 1867, he spent several months working on Valaam Island with the landscape painter Ivan Shishkin; in 1870, he travelled to the Volga with Ilya Repin - the trip on which Repin made his preparatory sketches for Barge Haulers - creating works in response such as Volga View: Barges (1870). A year later, in 1871, Vasilyev's painting The Thaw propelled him to fame - a copy was ordered by the family of the Tsar - as a result of which his friendship with Shishkin devolved into a rivalry. This particular work was created in the Crimea, while Vasilyev was attempting to recover from Tuberculosis. Its composition is based on memories of his native Russian landscapes, which perhaps helped to concentrate the strongly emotive mood of the piece. Vasilyev never recovered from his illness, dying in 1873 at the age of 23. However, by this point he had already produced a body of work that would have a profound influence on the development of landscape painting within the Peredvizhniki group, inspiring artists such as Isaac Levitan and Valentin Serov.

Portrait of Leo Tolstoy

Artist: Ivan Kramskoi

This portrait shows the venerated 19th-century Russian writer Leo Tolstoy in three-quarter pose, gazing intently at the viewer. His hands lie in his lap, suggesting self-containment or withdrawal, while the black frock coat wrapped around his shoulders lends him a priestly demeanor. The wall behind the writer is blank, implying a life of austere solitude, though his face registers quiet, even humorous contentment. Ivan Kramskoi was the leader of the "revolt of fourteen" out of which Peredvizhniki developed, and was renowned for his portraiture, including works depicting everyday Russians such as Portrait of a Peasant (1868), and others focused on Peredvizhniki members, such as Portrait of the Artist Konstantin Savitsky (1871). Tolstoy was already famous by the time he granted Kramskoi the commission for this portrait - an honor sought by many artists, and only secured after some persuasion - and following the sitting the two would become close friends, corresponding on the state of Russia and the ideals of Russian art. Proper to Tolstoy's developing reputation as an ethical and religious figurehead as well as a great writer, Kramskoi conveys a clear sense of moral authority, and of humane and perceptive attentiveness. Many of Kramskoi's sitters became iconic figures, and it is likely that the qualities suggested by this painting enhanced the Tolstoy myth. As for Tolstoy himself, he grew to like Kramskoi so much that he included a character based on him in Anna Karenina (1877), and would later remark of his Christ in the Wilderness (1872) that "he knew no better Christ." This is an important work of Peredvizhniki art not only in showing the achievements of their leader, but also in indicating the channels of mutual influence between writing and painting which characterized Russian culture during the 1860s and 70s. Both Kramskoi and Tolstoy were working to define not only a new Russian art, but also a new moral and social conscience for their nation.

Artist: Ivan Shishkin

This iconic landscape painting shows a field of rye just before harvest season. The intense color of the composition suggests the heat of late summer, the field burgeoning with its yield; in the foreground, wild flowers in blossom are picked out with the artist's customary precision, while the curve of the track draws the eye towards the center of the painting, echoed by the curves in the rye-stalks. Pine trees punctuate the skyline, and billowing clouds fill the air. Ivan Shishkin is remembered as the master of Perdvizhniki landscape painting, especially for his forest scenes and works depicting trees, such as Oak Grove (1887) and Forest Distance (1884). But whereas his contemporaries Vasilyev and Savrasov presented the landscape as a frame for the human condition, Shishkin was renowned for his scientific attention to natural detail; though this work is also replete with symbolic meaning. The painting depicts the rye fields of Lekarevskoe, at the edge of Yelabuga, the town where Shishkin was born and one of the engines of Russia's agricultural economy, known as 'Russia's Granary'. In this sense, the piece is a nationalistic paean to the wealth and plenitude of the Russian land. At the same time, it has a more poignant, biographical significance, having been composed based on material gathered during a trip to Yelabuga in 1877, after the death of Shishkin's wife and two sons. The two barely discernible figures in the center of the canvas are assumed to be Shishkin and his daughter - his last surviving relative during that trip - while the two black swallows in the foreground, and the larger, dead bird on the road, seem highly allegorical. The painting thus represents the loss and replenishment of life - human and natural - whilst also being a meticulous representation of a particular landscape, one which epitomized everything that Shishkin loved about the Russian countryside: "expansiveness; space; fields of rye; God's paradise; Russian riches..." It was his ability to convey the character of that landscape both realistically and emblematically that made him an enduringly influential figure in modern Russian art.

Morning in a Pine Forest

This canvas shows four bears, a mother and her cubs, playing around a fallen tree in a forest glade lit up by the morning sun. The triangular arrangement of the animals matches the triangular shape formed by the fallen pine at the center, which directs the eye towards the haze of sunlight behind. The cub to the right, outlined against the light, creates another focal point, while the verticals of the surrounding trees, reaching up beyond the top of the canvas, immerse the viewer in the woodland scene. A bluish morning mist clings to the trunks on the left-hand side. Painted around a decade after Rye , Morning in a Pine Forest is one of various works which Shishkin created throughout his career depicting lush coniferous woodland, also including Pine Forest (1866) and The Sestroretsk Forest (1896). The natural scene is recreated in such detail - each pine needle in its variation, the plants mingling in the foreground, the backwards-curving trunk behind the fallen tree - that the effect is of a near-photograph freshness. In this sense, the work is a quintessential example of Shishkin's oeuvre, but it is relatively unusual in representing animals. Indeed, when the painting was first shown at a Peredvizhniki exhibition, it was presented as a collaboration with Konstantin Savitsky, a painter known mainly for his working-class portraits who was thought to be responsible for the depiction of the bears. This is quite likely, but Savitsky's signature was later removed from the piece, and it was credited solely to Shishkin. This painting was well-received at the time, and remains popular to the point of cultural ubiquity in Russia. It is regularly cited as one of the nation's favorite paintings, and since 1925 a version of the image has appeared on the wrapper of the popular Clumsy Bear chocolate bar.

Vladimirka (The Road to Vladimir)

Artist: Isaac Levitan

This atmospheric landscape painting depicts the Vladimirka Road, part of the Great Siberian Road that led from Moscow to the wilderness areas of Northern Russia. The surface of the track seems to be broken up by grass and wagon ruts, as it cuts upwards from the left foreground, forming a disappearing diagonal reaching to the horizon. The vastness of the land and sky is emphasized by their emptiness - save for a single clump of trees, and a tiny church spire in the distance - and by the presence of a single pilgrim, passing an icon-and-cross station located to the right of the road. Levitan was a master of plein air painting. Often creating his works on location, he had the ability, like the French Impressionist painters of his era, to capture the atmosphere of a natural setting on a particular day, at a particular time, through an intuitive use of color. In this case, the atmosphere generated might seem subtly oppressive, the sky an icy blue-grey, the horizon a source of shadow rather than light. That mood is complemented by the impression of lonely penitence conveyed by the presence of the pilgrim, and - if the viewer knows anything of the location they are looking at - by the cultural associations of the landscape itself. The Great Siberian Road was associated with the transportation of prisoners north from Moscow to Siberian workcamps or to exile, a journey famously taken by Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866), and recalled in the memoirs of the political activist Alexander Herzen. The poet Nikoly Nekrasov had also presented a (fictionalized) account of the journey in his 1872 work Russian Women . In its cultural and emotional allusiveness, Levitan's work is a classic example of the Russian "lyrical landscape"; indeed, he brought to all his natural scenes a poetic sensibility to match that of the writers who had described the journey along the Vladimir Road. Such psychologically affecting works would have a profound influence on subsequent Russian painters, including the Impressionist Konstantin Korovin and the Symbolist Mikhail Nesterov.

Artist: Mykola Pymonenko

This classic late work of Peredvizhniki genre paintings shows two children driving a small herd of calves across a shallow ford in a rural village. In the foreground, the track is deeply rutted by coach-wheels, filled with water lit up by the sun, while the children's movement away from the viewer, and their depiction mid-stride, creates a sense of informality and photographic accuracy, as if relaying a particular moment in time. In compositional terms, the road-surface forms a diagonal sweep across the canvas, while the angle of the fence on the far side of the ford parallels the line of the hill beyond. Pymonenko was a second-generation Peredvizhik, born in 1862, just a year before the "revolt of the fourteen", and only eleven years old at the time of the first Itinerant Exhibition. Enrolled as a member of the group in 1899, he produced scenes of working-class and peasant life, many of which, such as Victim of Fanaticism (1899), contain a strong element of ethical and social commentary. This work is relatively unusual in the simple, idyllic nature of the scene depicted, though perhaps the prominent groove-lines imply the children's future lives unfolding along predictable and arduous paths. Works like A Ford , and Matchmakers (1882), sum up Pymonenko's detailed and empathetic attentiveness to everyday Russian life. He was the best-known Ukrainian artist associated with Peredvizhniki, and later in his life would forge an unexpected connection with the future Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich, a pupil at the Kyiv Art School where Pymonenko worked from 1906.

Oil on canvas - Odesa Museum of Fine Arts, Odesa, Ukraine

Red Sunset on the Dnieper

Artist: Arkhip Kuindzhi

This painting, depicting a sunset on the Dnieper River, is dominated by a large luminous body of cloud. The red glow of the sun behind it, reflecting on the river, fills the entire canvas with unearthly light, while in the foreground the thatched roofs of huts can just be made out. However, the viewing point appears to be in mid-air, so that the scene below is flattened and miniaturized, the top half of the canvas given over entirely to the representation of the sky. The Ukrainian-born artist Arkhip Kuindzhi initially worked as a retoucher in a photography studio, and had considered opening a studio himself before becoming a painter. As a result, his work, like that of the French Impressionists, was deeply influenced by photography: this piece is exemplary in using unexpected color combinations and fine tonal gradations to capture the dramatic effects of sunlight in realistic ways. His paintings often present vast, empty panoramas, in which the features of the landscape are reduced to a minimum and the refraction and reflection of light becomes the primary object of attention. In this case, the scene becomes almost abstracted in its minimalism, the river banks forming homogenous dark bands on either side of the luminous strip of water. In its exaggerated, emotionally expressive use of color, and in its move towards a kind of compositional abstraction, Kuindzhi's work became a touchstone for Russian painters of the Symbolist and Expressionist schools, such as Nicholas Roerich, Konstantin Bogaevsky, and Arkady Rylov. In this sense, his work indicates the threads of continuity that run from Perdvizhniki Realism to later movements in Russian and European art, suggesting the significance of the movement as a whole.

Oil on canvas - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Beginnings of Peredvizhniki

Artel of artists.

Peredvizhniki developed out of The Artel of Artists, a cooperative commune established in 1863 following what was called the "revolt of fourteen." This came about when fourteen young artists, all studying at the St. Petersburg Academy of Art, rebelled against the choice of topic for the annual Gold Medal competition, "The Entrance of Odin into Valhalla". The group felt that the topic summed up the Academy's stifling focus on the Neoclassical tradition, and wanted to paint the reality of contemporary Russian life, learning from the examples of Realism and Naturalism in Europe.

The leader of the rebellion was Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoi, a student at the Academy since 1857, who had become increasingly dissatisfied with the conservatism of Russian art and society. Influenced by the literary critics Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky and Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Kramskoi became an increasingly vocal advocate for democratic reforms, arguing for the social and political responsibility of the artist, and for the development of a specifically Russian art. Finding the Academy hostile to both his political and his artistic views, he became the figurehead for a growing number of restless young students.

The Society for Itinerant Art Exhibitions

An 1885 group photo of Peredvizhniki: (from left to right): Grigoriy Myasoyedov, Konstantin Savitsky, Vasily Polenov, Sergey Ammosov, Alexander Kiselyov, Yefim Volkov, Nikolai Nevrev, Vasily Surikov, Vladimir Makovsky, Alexander Litovchenko, Ivan Shishkin, Kirill Lemokh, Ivan Kramskoi, Nikolai Yaroshenko, Ilya Repin, Pavel Brullov, Ivanov (manager of Peredvizhniki cooperative), Nikolay Makovsky, Alexander Beggrov

Having established the Artel of Artists in 1863, in 1870 the group led by Kramskoi began plans to hold a series of "Itinerant Art Exhibitions", to be held in provincial locations and funded without state assistance, displaying the achievements of Russian art to the common man and woman. These were the founding activities of Peredvizhniki, a group also including Vasily Grigoryevich Perov, Nikolai Ge, and Grigory Myasoyedov. Perov, the eldest of them, was already well-known for his genre paintings, such as Arrival of a New Governess in a Merchant House (1866), and his tutelage of younger artists such as Nikolai Kasatkin, Konstantin Korovin, Isaac Levitan, Abram Arkhipov, and Mikhail Nesterov, would have a significant impact on the group's artistic development.

The first of Peredvizhniki's "Itinerant Art Exhibitions" was held in 1871, and from then on the group organized a series of shows across Russia, accompanied by artists' lectures, and talks on social and political reform. These exhibitions also created a new marketplace, a context in which artists could sell their work independently of Academic patronage, to an increasingly prosperous middle class. Between 1871 and 1923, no fewer than 47 exhibitions were organized by Peredvizhniki, in cities such as Kyiv, Odesa, Kazan, Orel, and Riga, as well as Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky and Nikolai Chernyshevsky

Vissarion Belinsky was a noted literary critic, whose writing on Russian prose became a vehicle for his progressive political views. He was an ardent critic of serfdom, a system he described as "trampling upon anything that is remotely human", and of the autocracy of Tsarist government. Belinsky's influence on Russian society was so profound that the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years in a Siberian prison camp for reading and planning to distribute one of Belinsky's letters attacking the feudal system. Like the great prose stylists whose work he promoted - Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev - Belinsky believed in a type of writing that would express a social conscience, and transcribe the psychological reality of lived experience.

Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky as depicted by an unknown artist in 1888, a year before his death.

Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky was a writer and literary critic whose famous novel What Is to be Done? (1862) transformed public consciousness around the issue of serfdom (its title was later borrowed by Lenin for his revolutionary pamphlet of 1902). Partly as a result, Chernyshevsky - who was influenced by Belinsky - became a leading voice of revolutionary democratic movements in Russia, and the head of the Narodniks, a populist movement within the middle classes who felt that only the peasantry could overthrow the monarchy and establish a socialist regime. In 1874, the Narodniks began - in their words - "going to the peasants" to persuade them to revolt; the idea was very similar to that expressed by the Peredvizhniki exhibitions, which took art to the villages as a pretext for social reform.

Sovremennik Magazine

Sovremennik ("The Contemporary") was a magazine launched by the poet Alexander Pushkin, though its first issue was published following his unexpected death in a duel in 1836. The magazine became one of Russia's leading literary journals, printing work by the most famous writers of the golden age of Russian prose, including Ivan Turgenev, Dmitry Grigorovich, Alexander Druzhinin, and Leo Tolstoy.

Vissarion Belinsky became involved with the magazine in the late 1840s, at which point it was managed by the poet Nikolay Nekrasov and the critic Ivan Panaev. Often threatened with official censorship, but avidly consumed by the intelligentsia, Sovremmenik continued to appear until 1866. Between 1853 and 1862 Chernyshevsky edited the magazine printing his own work in it, such as his academic thesis The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality (1855), which called for an art that would "reproduce nature and life." The young members of the Artel of Artists were deeply influenced by the radical ideas espoused in Sovremmenik , seen as one of the motivating factors behind their own revolt in 1863.

Pavel Mikhaylovich Tretyakov and Vladimir Vasilievich Stasov

Important early supporters of the Peredvizhniki artists included the art critic Vladimir Stasov - who was particularly influential in justifying their naturalistic treatment of social reality - and the collector Pavel Tretyakov. Stasov was the most respected critic of his era, a venerated figure who felt that Russian art should be "authentic, genuine, and not trivial." He believed that "after long years of scarcity, pretense, and imitation," such an art had finally been cultivated by Peredvizhniki, particularly as they had succeeded in freeing their work from European influence.

Tretyakov was a wealthy businessman and banker who began collecting art in 1854, with the aim of creating a National Gallery in Russia. He was an avid collector and supporter of the Peredvizhniki, buying works at their exhibitions and direct from the artists' studios, sometimes purchasing complete series of paintings at once. As a result, he held the largest collection of works by Perov, Repin, Kramskoi, Levitan, Serov, and various other Peredvizhniki artists. He also commissioned original work by the artists, including portraits of noted Russians, and often provided financial assistance to group members who were struggling to pay their way. In 1893, he established the Moscow City Gallery of Pavel and Sergei Tretyakov, now known as the Tretyakov Gallery, where many Peridvizhniki works can still be viewed.

Peredvizhniki: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

Though perhaps best-known for their landscape paintings, the Peredvizhniki artists also worked across several other genres, including portraiture, genre painting, and historical and religious art, as evidenced by the wide-ranging oeuvre of Ilya Repin, the most famous figure attached to the group. Rebelling against the Neoclassical tradition of the Academy, Perdvizhniki sought to redefine the relative importance assigned to different types of painting by the Academic art-world, feeling that a historical painting, for example, was no more or less significant than a genre painting; they often sought to create work which combined the conventions of particular genres. Nonetheless, it is still possible to assess their achievements by reference to various inherited 'types' of painting: from landscapes and portraits to genre paintings and historical and religious works.

The extent of Peredvizhniki's interest in landscape painting varied. Some artists, such as the renowned Ivan Shishkin, focused primarily on the genre, producing works - such as Oak Grove (1887) - displaying a rapt attentiveness to the natural environment. Indeed, Shishkin became so identified with his images of forests that he was dubbed 'the singer of the forest' or 'Tsar of the forest.' Yet some critics argued that, for all their realism, his landscapes were too understated in their emotional content.

By contrast, the artist Alexei Kondratyevich Savrasov, with works such as The Rooks Have Come Back (1871), created so-called "lyrical landscapes" or "mood landscapes", a creative path followed by younger artists such as Fyodor Alexandrovich Vasilyev, Nikolay Nikanorovich Dubovskoy, and Isaac Ilyich Levitan. Levitan, whose Secluded Monastery (1890) is another good example of this genre, was devoted to painting on location, and his understanding of light and color enabled him to capture the psychological and emotional impact of certain natural scenes with extraordinary accuracy. His work was seen as a radical departure from the conventions of the landscape genre, transcending naturalistic depiction to present landscapes as vessels or mirrors for human thought and emotion.

A more luminous treatment of landscape, emphasizing color and light in more exaggerated ways, is found in the work of Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi, while a further version of the Peredvizhniki landscape style is provided by the paintings of Ilya Yefimovich Repin. The most famous artist of the group, Repin's landscapes often focused on the human figure, as in Ploughman (1887), for example, which presents the famous writer Leo Tolstoy plowing a field.

The most well-known portraitist amongst the Peredvizhniki group was Kramskoi, who was celebrated not only for his portraits of noted Russians such as Tolstoy and Tretyakov, but also for his paintings of the Russian peasantry, and other real-life subjects. Works of Kramskoi's such as Portrait of An Unknown Woman (1883) capture the complexity of the individual subject while simultaneously blending and subverting the tropes of portraiture and genre painting. Nikolai Ge, Vasily Perov, Nikolai Yaroshenko, Valentin Serov, and Nicolai Kuznetsov were also known for their portraits. Despite their opposition to the stereotypical constraints of the genre, Peredvizhniki's portrait paintings often depict figures seen to exemplify some particular aspect of Russian identity, as in Serov's Portrait of the Composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1898) and Kuznetsov's Portrait of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1893), both of which focus on famous composers and Russian cultural icons.

Genre Painting

The St. Petersburg Academy considered historical painting a higher form of art than genre painting, but the Peredvizhniki painters felt that genre painting - in short, the painting of scenes from everyday life - could be used to represent important moments in Russian history, and to capture the realities of Russian life. Perov's early genre work played an important role in establishing the group's emphasis on genre painting, but it was Ilya Repin's masterful Barge Haulers on the Volga (1870-73) that set the standard for painting in this style, constituting both a striking landscape and a psychologically harrowing portrait of Russian working life.

A number of other Peredvizhniki painters also excelled in genre work. Vladimir Makovsky's work often focused on urban life, bringing an emotional and occasionally satirical scrutiny to city-scenes, as in his On the Boulevard (1887), which depicts an alienated couple on a park bench. Mykola Pymonenko, a Ukrainian artist of a younger generation, was a similarly talented genre painter, though he focused on rural rather than city life, as in A Ford (1901). From the 1880s onwards, the genre painting of Peredvizhniki took a markedly political cast, with works such as Repin's Unexpected Visitor (1886) - which shows a hollow-eyed young man returning to his family after political exile - and Pymonenko's Victim of Fanaticism (1899).

Historical and Religious Painting

Despite opposing the bias in favor of history painting within the Academy, the Peredvizhniki artists themselves created historical scenes, though mainly based on episodes drawn from Russian national history (rather than classical antiquity). The most famous of these was perhaps Repin's Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire (1880-91), depicting the legendarily obscene response of the Ukrainian Cossacks to the Ottoman Sultan's demand for surrender following a 17th-century battle; it was described by the artist as "a study in laughter." Vasily Surikov became well-known for his trilogy of historical paintings The Morning of the Streltsy Execution (1881) - focused on Peter the Great's brutal suppression of a military revolt - Menshikov in Berezovo (1888) - showing a 17th-century military leader in exile - and Boyarynya Morozova (1887), which depicts the folk hero Feodosia Morozova at the moment of her arrest for resistance to religious reforms in 1671. All of these paintings represented pivotal and painful moments in the birth of the modern Russian state.

The works of Nikolai Ge and Kramskoi, by contrast, frequently focused on religious themes. Kramskoi's Christ in the Desert (1872) was exhibited at the second Peredvizhniki exhibition, with the contemporary critic Ivan Goncharov praising the depiction of Christ's "pauper appearance, under the rags, in humble simplicity, inseparable [from] true majesty and force." Older than most of Peredvizhniki, Ge became associated with the group late in his career, and continued to focus on religious subjects to an unusual degree, as in What Is Truth? (1890), a late work showing Christ being questioned by Pontius Pilate. In Orthodox Russia, religious paintings were seen as depicting historical fact, and for the Peredvizhniki artists, the figure of Christ - presented as poor, humble, and deeply human - became a symbol for the suffering of the common Russian.

Later Developments - After Peredvizhniki

Following a pattern repeated throughout the history of modern art, the initially revolutionary methods of Peredvizhniki had themselves been institutionalized by the 1890s, with many of the movement's key artists accepting teaching positions at the Imperial Academy. Indeed, by the turn of the century, oeuvres such as Repin's were perceived as monuments to a new creative orthodoxy, and younger artists increasingly viewed Peredvizhniki style with skepticism or frustration. In 1898, the art patron Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev - later famous for founding the Ballets Russes- established the group Mir Iskusstva (World of Art), which promoted new artists and movements in effective defiance of the Peredvizhniki hegemony.

The response to these new developments within the group itself was resistance in some instances, friendship and support in others, as in the notable case of the ageing Stasov. Younger artists associated with Peredvizhniki, such as Konstantin Korovin, Isaac Levitan, and Valentin Serov, also became allies of Diaghilev. Partly as a result, while early-20th-century artists were often outwardly hostile to the legacy of the group, their work continued to display the impact of Peredvizhniki techniques and concepts. The painters Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov , for example, who were responsible for defining Russian Primitivism and Rayonism - two of the most important styles within Russian avant-garde art of the 1910s - both advocated for the specific genius of Russian art, and for the depiction of working and rural life. Kazimir Malevich, who founded the Suprematist movement in 1913, went on to create works depicting peasants on Soviet collective farms, such as Mower (1930), which showing thematic influence of his teacher Pymonenko; we can also sense Peredvizhniki themes and tropes in Sergev Konenkov's sculptures, and in the Post-Impressionist landscapes of Konstantin Ivanovich Gorbatov. Even Russian Futurism , in its clamor for a new, egalitarian Russian society, arguably expressed the indirect influence of the Peredvizhniki ethos.

The group's most superficial cultural legacy, however, was rather bleaker, standing for the new cultural autocracy which gripped post-revolutionary Russia. In 1922, Peredvizhniki was replaced by the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AARR), led by Pavel Radimov - the last leader of Peredvizhniki - and incorporating other realist painters from the older group. The AARR rejected new developments in avant-garde art, and became closely associated with the advent of Socialist Realism during the 1930s. The emphasis on realistic representation and everyday subject-matter which had been so subversive in the 1860s thus became the basis for a constrictive orthodoxy, with Ilya Repin's work presented as the exemplar of Soviet art for decades.

All art movements, however, accommodate individuals of skill and significance, and many of those who became attached to Socialist Realism, such as Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, were initially inspired or incited by Peredvizhniki. Isaac Levitan's landscapes, whose non-human subject-matter in a sense transcended the cultural battles of the 1930s, were lauded by very different movements and figures, from Diaghilev to the Socialist Realist painter Czeslaw Znamierowski. Indeed, just as Levitan's work stood aloof from the Realist/Avant-garde debate, Znamierowski's Impressionist -influenced landscapes avoided the more explicitly propagandist motifs of Socialist Realism while remaining culturally acceptable in mid-century USSR. Later in the 20 th century, artists of the so-called Nonconfirmist School, such as Oleg Vassiliev, arguably carried the progressive spirit of Perdvizhniki forwards.

Works by the Peredvizhniki artists themselves have become ingrained in Russian cultural consciousness, as evidenced by the send-up of Repin's Barge Haulers in various political cartoons, and the naming of minor planets after Shishkin and Tretyakov by Soviet astronomers. As for the group's reception in the west, the influential American critic Clement Greenberg, in his 1939 article "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" cited Repin's Reply of the Cossacks (1880-91) as a particularly ignoble example of Kitsch. Perhaps as a result, the group's work was ignored to some extent for the following decades, though that situation began to change around the start of the 21st century.

Useful Resources on Peredvizhniki

Truth and Beauty: Realism in Russian Painting

Ilya Repin By Grigori Sternine and Elena Kirillina
Ivan Shishkin By Irina Shuvalova
The Russian Vision: The Art of Ilya Repin By David Jackson
The Wanderers and Critical Realism in Nineteenth-century Russian Art Our Pick By David Jackson
Tolstoy, Ge, and Two Pilates By Jefferson J.A. Gatrall
Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin: At the Edge of the Pine Forest By Sotheby's
How Shishkin's Nephew Inspired a Mel Brooks Movie By Sothebys
RN Documentary: The Volga Boatmen Audio Stories
Review of The Peredvizhniki: Pioneers of Russian Painting Our Pick By Inessa Kouteinikova / 19th Century Art Worldwide: A Journal of Nineteenth-century Visual Culture / Autumn 2012
Crossed Destinies - Anton Chekhov and Isaac Levitan By Galina Churak
Titan of the Russian Forest: An Ivan Shishkin Art Gallery By Alice E.M. Underwood / Russian Life / Jan 25, 2017

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The history of photography, more than of the city, is traced through 34 monochrome works by photographers who lived and worked in Moscow from the 1920s to the present. These photographs are from the collection of the Cultural Center Dom, Moscow, and were exhibited at Columbia University April through June 2003. An essay, interview, and biographies are included.

Reimagining Design with Nature: ecological urbanism in Moscow

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The twenty-first century is the era when populations of cities will exceed rural communities for the first time in human history. The population growth of cities in many countries, including those in transition from planned to market economies, is putting considerable strain on ecological and natural resources. This paper examines four central issues: (a) the challenges and opportunities presented through working in jurisdictions where there are no official or established methods in place to guide regional, ecological and landscape planning and design; (b) the experience of the author’s practice—Gillespies LLP—in addressing these challenges using techniques and methods inspired by McHarg in Design with Nature in the Russian Federation in the first decade of the twenty-first century; (c) the augmentation of methods derived from Design with Nature in reference to innovations in technology since its publication and the contribution that the art of landscape painters can make to landscape analysis and interpretation; and (d) the application of this experience to the international competition and colloquium for the expansion of Moscow. The text concludes with a comment on how the application of this learning and methodological development to landscape and ecological planning and design was judged to be a central tenant of the winning design. Finally, a concluding section reflects on lessons learned and conclusions drawn.

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Home — Essay Samples — Geography & Travel — Travel and Tourism Industry — The History of Moscow City

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“the temple of invention augmented reality experience” debuts at the smithsonian american art museum april 18.

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History comes alive in a new augmented reality (AR) experience at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Before it was an art museum, the historical building housed the patent office for the United States, where ingenuity was celebrated and knowledge shared through the display of thousands of patent models. Known as a “temple of invention,” it was a place for ideas and exploration, creativity and change.

“The Smithsonian American Art Museum is delighted to present the latest in AR technology that allows visitors to experience history in a new way in its Luce Foundation Center, a space where we pilot innovative programs and new approaches to audience engagement,” said Jane Carpenter-Rock, deputy director for museum content and outreach at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “It is particularly fitting to see this technology used in SAAM’s historical building, which, as the patent office, was the heart of America’s early drive to inspire innovation, displaying models for inventions like the light bulb and the telephone.”

Through this AR game, produced by Smartify and supported by AT&T, visitors will meet some of the fascinating people—including inventors, soldiers, poets, artists and architects—who walked the halls and experience key moments such as Clara Barton tending to wounded Civil War soldiers, President Abraham Lincoln’s raucous second inaugural ball and a disastrous fire in 1877 that destroyed thousands of patent models.

The Temple of Invention Augmented Reality Experience is recommended for families and elementary school-age children. It is available Thursday, April 18 through Thursday, May 16, from noon to 5 p.m. on selected days. The experience is free and registration is encouraged ; walk-ins welcome on a limited, first-come, first-served basis.

About the Historic Patent Office Building

On July 4, 1836, President Andrew Jackson authorized the construction of a patent office building in Washington, D.C. It is the third oldest federal building in the city, and was designed to celebrate American invention, technical ingenuity and the scientific advancements that the patent process represents. In 1840, the Patent Office moved into the south wing of what is now the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s historical main building. Patent law in the United States in the 19th century required the submission and public display of a model with each patent application. These scale models in miniature illustrate not only the imaginative fervor of the era but also the amazing craftsmanship required to fabricate these often-intricate works of art. Many of the models were constructed by specialized makers in workshops located near the Patent Office. When the building was completed in 1868, about 200,000 models were displayed in cases 9 feet high in the grand galleries on the third floor.

To learn more about the museum’s National Historic Landmark building, listen to the audio guide or purchase Temple of Invention: History of a National Landmark by Charles J. Robertson and published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The Temple of Invention Augmented Reality Experience is generously powered by AT&T 5G.

About the Smithsonian American Art Museum

The Smithsonian American Art Museum is the flagship museum in the United States for American art and craft. It is home to one of the most significant and inclusive collections of American art in the world. The museum’s main building, located at Eighth and G streets N.W., is open daily from 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. The museum’s Renwick Gallery, a branch museum dedicated to contemporary craft, is located on Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street N.W. and is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Check online for current hours and admission information . Admission is free. Follow the museum on Facebook , Instagram and YouTube . Smithsonian information: (202) 633-1000. Museum information (recorded): (202) 633-7970. Website: americanart.si.edu

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In Maryland, female migrant laborers face an uncertain future as sea levels rise – photo essay

For the women who pick and prepare Maryland’s famous crab, the once profitable work is far more uncertain – and the climate crisis has had a damaging impact

In the evening light, Maribel Malagón stepped outside into a rain storm.

It was late October and Malagón, 53, had worked all day picking crab off the eastern shore of Maryland . That night, she and a handful of other seasonal workers walked to a neighbor’s house for an evening of prayer. On the way, Malagón clutched a pendant of St Judas, the patron saint of lost causes, that hung around her neck; she hoped he would hear her prayers for more work.

About an hour later, when the women were ready to call it a night, the coastal waters had risen so high that the road leading back to their house was completely submerged.

“We didn’t know which way to go. We were afraid that we would fall into the ditches,” Malagón said in Spanish, thinking back on that night two years ago. To make it back home, the women waded through knee-high murky waters. “The island is changing every year.”

Maribel Malagon poses for a portrait outside of the home she rents from her employer on Hoopers Island, Maryland.

For more than 20 years, Malagón has been coming to work in crab processing plants on Hoopers Island, one of the many island communities in the Chesapeake Bay.

Hoopers Island, a chain of small islands linked by causeways, has been the center of the state’s seafood industry since the early 1900s. Due to its low-lying nature, the region has faced erosion and destructive storms over the years.

But rising sea levels are increasing the frequency of flooding, creating uncertainty for the village’s watermen and their families, who have long depended on the seafood industry for their livelihoods. The situation is especially worrying for female migrants such as Malagón, who have limited job prospects back home in Mexico and wonder how long they will be able to work on the island.

Twenty-four years ago, when Malagón first arrived on the island, her output was prolific. With the precision of a machine and a sharp tiny knife in hand, she would break off the claws, crack open the shells, remove the legs, and scrape out the white meat into containers in seconds. She estimates picking between 40 and 48lb of crab meat in her eight-hour shift.

Now, she says 10 hours could go by, and she’ll only have picked 30lb. She suspects the crab population has decreased in number and size over the years.

“The crab was huge in my first years here. Our hands would hurt from how big they were. We produced a lot of pounds, but unfortunately, we were paid $2 a pound back then,” said Malagón, who works for one of the five crab houses that remain.

A worker extracts meat from crabs on Hoopers Island.

Aubrey Vincent, the owner of Lindy’s Seafood, a processing plant on the island, said wages have significantly increased for her employees. They make about $16 an hour, compared to four or five years ago when they made $7.52 an hour, she said.

Some employers pay workers per pound, so the more abundant the catch and meatier the crabs, the more money the women can send home.

“For the past five or six years at least, the work is not 100% consistent every season, and it seems to sometimes vary across workplaces,” said Julia Coburn, director of projects and special initiatives at Centro de los Derechos del Migrante (CDM), an advocacy group that supports workers in the region.

“The workers are coming with certain expectations about what they can pick in a season and how much pay they can take home, and that’s changing. It’s having a widespread impact on their families beyond their immediate circumstances.”

Freshly boiled crabs at G.W. Hall Seafood, left. As their lunch break begins, employees at G.W. Hall Seafood rush home.

Vincent said the unpredictable nature of the work has to do more with shifting environmental conditions and weather than any fluctuations in crab availability. She described an industry at odds with numerous economic conditions.

“You’ve got a certain amount of costs [of doing business] that have gone up, just like everybody else’s expenses,” she said.

Crab populations fluctuate yearly and have always been difficult to predict. But recent years have raised concerns among the state’s seafood houses, which have relied on the temporary worker program since the 1980s, to stay open.

Each winter, when crabs are in semi-hibernation, Maryland and Virginia conduct a survey to estimate the number of blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. In the mid-1990s to the late 2000s, there was a dramatic decline in the blue crab population. Biologists, as well as the federal and state governments, believed that the problem was due to overfishing and poor water quality, causing a decline in habitat and food, which ultimately led to restrictions on the number of crabs caught for commercial sale in 2008.

A worker scrapes the meat out from a crab on Hoopers Island, Maryland. Boats and crab houses are visible across the landscape on Hoopers Island, Maryland.

The 2022 survey estimated 227 million crabs, the lowest ever recorded in the survey’s 33-year history . This led to new limits on the number of male and female crabs watermen could harvest. In 2023, the population bounced back to 323 million , a 40% increase; while these figures are encouraging, scientists urge continued vigilance based on low numbers of juvenile crabs.

Today, researchers believe overfishing is less likely to be the sole contributing factor, and instead argue that factors related to the climate crisis could be affecting blue crab reproduction and survival.

“We’re certainly seeing evidence in the data that reproductive success is declining,” said Tom Miller, a professor of fisheries science at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences who studies blue crab populations.

Employees at G.W. Hall Seafood in Hoopers. There, the men catch, steam, and package crabs, while the women use tiny knives to pick the meat out of them.

The climate crisis could affect the blue crab population in other ways. With shorter winters, crabs could face a longer fishing period, meaning more of them would be caught, said Miller. However, he added that the impact is unclear and an active area of research. Ocean acidification may also contribute to the shells of blue crabs becoming less strong, making them more susceptible to predators.

Conservationists also believe pollution and the recent decline in the Bay’s underwater grasses is probably contributing to low blue crab numbers. Another factor could be the presence of the invasive blue catfish in the Chesapeake Bay.

“They’re going to be doubly impacted by not only shorter winters, but the shells will become less strong than they once were. There’s a lot changing in the world for crabs,” said Miller.

The 2024 blue crab winter dredge survey results will be released in May .

Employees at G.W. Hall Seafood, left. Crab pots are seen near a dock on Hoopers Island, Maryland.

Despite the unpredictable and temporary nature of the work, many women in central Mexico vie for these positions when recruiters come to towns, hoping to score work authorization.

“What we make here in a day would take us a week to make back home,” said Elia Ramírez Rangel, a crab-picker from Hidalgo.

For women in particular, there is a dearth of job opportunities in their communities in Mexico and abroad in the US. For some, crab-picking is their best chance of finding sustainable work, said Coburn.

An American flag and a Mexican flag hang outside Russell Hall Seafood on Hoopers Island.

“There is no source of work back home,” a laborer working on the island for 14 years said in Spanish. She spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity for fear of employer retaliation.

In 1996, she left Mexico to make a living picking crabs in the Carolinas. She described having to make the arduous decision to leave her two children, aged nine and 11, in the care of her sister and family friends. Over the years, with her earnings and faith in God, she said she was able to afford a house and basic necessities like food and clothing for her children, who are now grown.

“It’s been very difficult for me to be far away from them. Even though they’re grown up, I still feel like there’s a void,” she said in Spanish. “When I left them, I didn’t see their achievements, for example, in school. I missed their birthdays.”

Employees at G.W. Hall Seafood in Hoopers Island, Maryland. There, the men catch, steam, and package crabs, while the women use tiny knives to pick the meat out of them.

In 2021, women made up just 12% of H-2B visa recipients to the US . On Hoopers Island, these women often describe coming to the US for work out of necessity. For nine months out of the year, they report leaving their families and children behind for a steady, albeit seasonal, paycheck.

Some workers, like Malagón, come to Hoopers Island year after year to work in the local seafood industry, so long as their seasonal work visas are granted. Her father spent decades picking under the hot sun in California’s farmlands as a bracero. At the age of 22, she said poverty and desperation led her to follow in her father’s footsteps; later, she switched to picking crabs, a job her father described to her more suited for women.

Over the course of the 20th century, crab-picking in the US became gendered and racialized work. Research shows picking crab meat was work delegated to women based on beliefs that their hands are typically smaller and more nimble. Some scholars argue hiring immigrant workers was a way to pay women less for the work.

Crab houses say they have turned to workers from Mexico in recent decades because of a local labor shortage. In order to obtain visas, they need to prove local workers are not able to fulfill those jobs. Before the 1980s it was low-paid work largely carried out by Black women .

Workers at G.W. Hall Seafood, a crab processing plant on the island, prepare their hands with gloves and finger protectors during a shift.

The journey from central Mexico to Maryland involves an arduous three-day journey by bus. For Malagón, the biggest sacrifice has been the time spent away from her sisters, mother and son.

“Leaving was horrible,” said Malagón, who sends money home to her ageing father. Seasons spent laboring abroad have allowed her to transform her family’s once-dilapidated property in the countryside of Guanajuato into a comfortable living space.

“The grace of God has given me license to build everything I wanted. I have comforts that I didn’t have before,” Malagón said in Spanish. “We used to sleep on the floor when we were kids, but now, thank God, we have beds. We’ve got a fridge, we’ve got a TV.”

Maribel Malagon shows photos of her at a young age with her son, who she left behind to become a seasonal laborer first in California, then Maryland.

With the rising cost of living and less predictable hours, some women report earning less than they once did.

Previously, working 10-hour days six days a week could earn them $280 a week, but now, with workers reporting dwindling crab harvests, they sometimes only work three to four days a week and for shorter periods of time. Vincent said women have the opportunity to earn above their hourly rate if they are more productive.

Clara Ramirez, poses for a photo during her lunch break, left. A seasonal labor at G.W. Hall Seafood, picks meat from crabs during a shift.

Other crab-house owners acknowledge that workers may take home less pay depending on the harvest. Jay Newcomb, the former owner of Old Salty’s, a popular crab house and restaurant on the upper island, said his employees make $5 a pound or $17.50 an hour.

“That can fluctuate due to the quality of crabs, males versus females, the size of the crabs. Some days it may be better but we have to pay whatever is the highest,” said Newcomb, who downsized his operations in 2021 and sold Old Salty’s to open a smaller restaurant on nearby Taylors Island.

The federal average rate is currently $16.42 an hour.

A seasonal laborer from Oaxaca, Mexico, hangs clothes to dry outside the home she rents from her employer on Hoopers Island, Maryland.

To fill their idle hours, many of the women make phone calls home, watch TV together, or look for ways to earn extra income. Currently, workers in Maryland’s seafood industry are exempt from minimum wage and overtime protections under state law .

Without public transportation, they often pay or rely on favors from acquaintances to drive them 40 minutes to the nearest city of Cambridge for errands.

Over time the repetitive hand motion of picking crab can result in arthritis, back pain, allergies to crab meat, and cuts to their hands from working quickly with the knives used to cut the shells open, according to CDM. Vincent acknowledged that crab picking, like other production jobs, can be physically demanding.

Birds fly near the coast line on Hoopers Island, Maryland. Remnants of crab shells and claws are visible across the landscape of the island.

The advocacy group also said that women are disincentivized from reporting work-related issues or take sick days because their immigration status is tied to their employer, making them susceptible to labor abuses. Vincent said she provides an anonymous tip line where employees can report issues.

Despite the challenges, the women emphasize that they are grateful for the opportunity to work and note that there have been some improvements over time.

Today migrant workers have successfully gained more labor protections in part due to laborer testimony and a coalition of groups such as CDM, which have fought for policies that improve working conditions.

Some women have begun organizing a Comité de Defensa, where they discuss ongoing issues such as Covid-19 vaccine information, accessing healthcare in this remote region, and how to report work-related injuries. Part of that work also involves disseminating information about their rights with other women on the island and their families, many of whom are also contractors.

The view from the cabin where Malagon rents from her employer overlooks the Honga River estuary and distant pine forests.

The view from the cabin where Malagón rents from her employer overlooks the Honga River estuary and distant pine forests. A tree directly outside the house that once provided shade and a place to hang dry clothes was swept away in a storm recently, leaving only a small stump behind.

This three-and-a-half-mile stretch of land known as Hoopersville is the middle island of the three that make up Hoopers, dividing the Honga River from the Chesapeake Bay.

Surrounded by a lush ecosystem of marshland, wildlife and tall seagrass, the women are also geographically and socially isolated.

A seasonal laborer hangs decorations for her birthday celebration on Hoopers Island.

Nestled in Dorchester county, a tight-knit community with predominantly conservative values, the women say they turn to their faith in God and seek solace in each other’s company while away from home.

The narrow bridge connecting the middle to the upper island routinely floods in high tide, leaving the women trapped. Lower Hoopers Island, formerly Applegarth, became uninhabitable due to erosion, and a hurricane washed away the bridge in 1933.

Malagón vividly remembers the first time she saw the bay’s waters encroaching on the doorstep of the house in 2006. “When I looked outside, I was terrified,” she said. “We had never seen the tide rise that high. Now we see it as more normal.”

Flooding has become routine in recent years, threatening the daily lives and futures of locals and women alike.

The Chesapeake Bay has risen by about one foot during the past century, which is nearly double the global average. By 2050, sea levels are projected to rise by as much as two feet. Climate models predict that over half of Dorchester county, the third-largest county in Maryland by land area, could be underwater by the end of the century.

A house on Hoopers Island where sea levels are rising year after year leading to more nuisance flooding in the Chesapeake Bay region off Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Vincent said she has an emergency management plan for a major flooding event during work hours, where she would evacuate her employees, but says there’s only so much she’s responsible for as an employer.

CDM argues there is a pressing need for climate adaptation measures from both governments and employers to safeguard seasonal workers’ wellbeing in the long run.

“With roads washing out, the communication lines go down – it just increases all these layers of vulnerability,” said Coburn.

“The truth is it’s very beautiful living here – except when the tide rises,” said the laborer who has worked on the island for 14 years. During a recent grocery trip to Walmart, 40 minutes away, she said her housemates were unable to return to the island because the bridge was closed due to flooding.

A Virgen de Guadalupe statue seen at a workers home on Hoopers Island, Maryland, left. Trees dead from salt water intrusion, known as “Ghost” pines on the marsh edges of Hoopers Island.

Language barriers can make it difficult for women to stay informed and they often rely on word of mouth from other workers about the bridge flooding.

With every passing season, the grueling nature of the job and looming precarity can take a toll emotionally and physically – some of the women question whether it’s worth coming back.

“As long as we’re here, we’re going to make the most of it,” said Clara Ramrez, a worker at GW Hall & Son, one of the crab processing plants on the island. (GW Hall & Son did not respond to requests for comment.)

Some owners share a common sentiment.

“We just do the best we can with what we’ve got, and ultimately, everybody’s goal is the same: to try and make a living,” said Vincent.

A water delivery truck drives through a flooded road in Cambridge, Maryland near Hoopers Island. “Ghost” pines, dead from salt water intrusion, are seen in the background.

Back at the house, a group of women started to arrive for the new crab season that started on 1 April.

This year more visas have been made available , and Vincent scored 80 visas for her employees through the lottery system. Speaking via WhatsApp from Mexico in early April, Malagón said she was getting ready to make the trip to Maryland via bus. If all goes well, she and the other workers from Lindy’s will arrive by 15 April.

Newcomb, the former owner of Old Salty’s, said he won 23 employee visas this season, up from the roughly 18 or 20 he’s gotten in previous years.

AE Phillips & Son, another crab house on the island, was unable to obtain visas and will not be operating this season, a major setback for the company and its employees.

Seasonal workers chat with one another just before lunch ends during a shift at G.W. Hall Seafood.

Malagón says she has put her faith in God for a bountiful season, with hopes of returning every year to have enough money to retire. Still, she worries for the future of the industry and the region itself.

“If God allows it, my goal is to work for 10 more years. But if there’s no crab, what will we do then?”

Maribel Malagon holds her St. Judas pendant.

Art and design
The Guardian picture essay
US politics

Keeping U.S. Power Behind Israel Will Keep Iran at Bay

President Biden looking pensive in front of an Israeli flag.

By Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh

Mr. Gerecht is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Mr. Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Until Iran’s barrage of missiles and drones against Israel, the two countries had avoided open military intrusions into each other’s territory. Tehran most often acted through proxies, and Jerusalem via bombing runs and unacknowledged assassinations in the region.

Iran’s unprecedented attack this weekend, which failed to kill a single Israeli, has perhaps now opened the clerical regime to a major reprisal. The White House clearly does not want Jerusalem to undertake such a response, fearing escalation that could bring the United States into a regional war.

But the chances are good that Israel will strike back to deter future direct attacks. And the best way for Washington to limit the expansion of this conflict is to signal clearly its intention to support an Israeli counterattack. It’s the recurring military paradox: To contain a war, a belligerent sometimes needs to threaten its expansion. Iran’s internal situation, its memory about past U.S. military action and a conspiratorial worldview all support this strategy.

An Iranian regime well aware of its weaknesses knows how convulsive a war with Israel and America would be and how unwelcome it would be received by a restive populace already protesting a dysfunctional economy and increasing oppression. Many within the elite are surely angry at having fallen from the inner circles of power and wealth as the 84-year-old supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, engineers his succession.

A powerful Israeli response could include a preventive strike against Iran’s nuclear sites. In what may prove a miscalculation, Ayatollah Khamenei is not known to have given the green light to assemble a nuclear weapon. Why strike Iran hard and leave its atomic ambitions undamaged? Washington will surely want to reduce the consequences in the region from such an attack. To do that, the White House will need to make Tehran understand that U.S. forces will immediately intercede if Iran then tries to escalate.

To be sure, Israel and America may both be at fault for giving Ayatollah Khamenei the impression that they had no appetite for escalation. Tehran has abetted Islamic militants who have killed a lot of Israelis and Americans while seeming to be immune from a direct attack. The occasional Israeli and American assassination of Iranian military men on foreign soil, or in Iran without fanfare, actually highlighted a reluctance to confront Iran more directly.

And yet the Islamic Republic remains careful not to get into direct conflict with America. Senior clergy members and the commanders in the Revolutionary Guards are all old enough to remember that the U.S. Navy inflicted severe damage on the Iranian Navy in 1988 in retaliation for the mining of an American warship. It was one of the biggest U.S. naval operations since World War II. The United States said the downing in 1988 of Iran Air flight 655 by the Navy warship Vincennes was an accident, but Tehran believed it was deliberate and an indication that Washington was ready to intervene in the war with Iraq. It was thought to be a factor in helping to convince Iran to end the conflict. Senior Revolutionary Guardsmen, angry at Israel for the killing of senior commanders on April 1 in a strike in Syria, may doubt Washington’s volition, but they have no doubts about American military hardware.

Sometimes conspiracy-mindedness, instead of interfering with clear thinking, can be useful to an adversary. It is a conceit of the Iranian Islamist elite that Jews manipulate Americans into wars not of their choosing. Ayatollah Khamenei has articulated this idea : “The Western powers are a mafia,” he said in 2022. “At the top of this mafia stand the prominent Zionist merchants, and the politicians obey them. The U.S. is their showcase, and they’re spread out everywhere.”

It is time for Washington to feed this conspiratorial thinking. The United States should augment its presence in the Gulf, dispatch admirals and spy chiefs to Israel and undertake joint Israeli-U.S. military exercises that highlight long-range bombing runs. With its darkest conspiracies reconfirmed, Iran’s elite will search for a way out — even if Israel decides on a frontal assault.

The United States has often favored containment and de-escalation with Iran. When Iran’s proxies killed three American service members in Jordan on Jan. 28, Washington didn’t hold Tehran directly responsible. While attacking the proxies, the White House conveyed to Tehran its non-escalatory intentions. It had even renewed a sanctions waiver granting Iran access to $10 billion held in escrow by Oman for Iraqi electricity purchases.

The strategy has worked. Ayatollah Khamenei clamped down on his surrogates, who desisted from further attack on Americans. But the supreme leader can turn that spigot back on at any time.

Today, the problem with Washington distancing itself from Jerusalem, as it has over the large-scale civilian deaths and humanitarian suffering in the Gaza war, is that it will not defuse a crisis that puts Iran and Israel in direct confrontation. And Ayatollah Khamenei will not allow himself to be seen as backing down to Jews — particularly if they are unmoored from superior American power.

For the United States, standing by Israel would allow Ayatollah Khamenei another path, a way to back down without losing face. There is a precedent for such a retreat. Again, the Iran-Iraq war is instructive. The founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ruhollah Khomeini, opted for an armistice with Iraq, a country he had long denigrated, because of the sheer exhaustion of his nation and the fear that the war could simply not be won. The implicit threat of American involvement was a big factor in this decision.

Now only the United States can again prompt similar foreboding in Tehran about the intercession of an indomitable force. For years Washington has been doing, more or less, just the opposite.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Iranian targets officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Art as Reality
When reality is seen by a self without interfering with it, or lessening it, it is art. Art can be described as reality seen right by a self seeing right. The possibility reality has of being seen right, is reality, too; so reality, including its possibility, is art. It can be put this way: Reality is always reality, for it always has the ...
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Modern art and reality. By Dr. Charles Cramer and Dr. Kim Grant. Left: Umberto Boccioni, States of Mind: The Farewells, 1911, oil on canvas, 70.5 x 96.2 cm (MoMA); Right: Norman Rockwell, Breaking Home Ties, 1954, oil on canvas, 112 x 112 cm (private collection) If asked, most people would probably say that modern art is not true to reality.
Smarthistory
Modern art and reality. by Dr. Charles Cramer and Dr. Kim Grant. Left: Umberto Boccioni, States of Mind: The Farewells, 1911, oil on canvas, 70.5 x 96.2 cm (MoMA); Right: Norman Rockwell, Breaking Home Ties, 1954, oil on canvas, 112 x 112 cm (private collection) If asked, most people would probably say that modern art is not true to reality.
The Artist's Reality: Mark Rothko's Little-Known Writings on Art
The Artist's Reality is a magnificent journey from beginning to end. Complement it with this rare interview with Rothko on the transcendent power of art, then revisit other timeless reflections on art by Jeanette Winterson, Vincent van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, Henry Miller, Leo Tolstoy, Susan Sontag, E.E. Cummings, and Georgia O'Keeffe.
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Essay on the Concept of Art and Reality Zoltán Gyenge Art shows something of reality as a whole, a reality that exists above or below the directly perceptible world. There is a ﬁrst reality, or empirical reality, which can be mapped and captured through sense perception and is characterized by immediacy; and then there is a second or ...
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Art and Reality
in the biennial Art Number of Education, December 1942; that by Dean R. M. Ogden appeared in Education, April 1943; and the paper by Paul Zucker is to appear in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. It had been expected that the papers planned for the Baltimore meeting, with the title, Art and Reality, could
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The following essay addresses this question while using as a case study a collaborative artistic project undertaken by two artists, Remco Roes (Belgium) and Alis Garlick (Australia).
Art and Reality: EssayZoo Sample
For example, you might discuss a character/narrator/subject in a work of art (novel, poem, film, graphic novel, short story, television show, song, painting, etc.) who you think captures the idea that we have an essential, shared human nature and that art reflects this reality for us. • Explain the idea that art is truth by discussing ...
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Modernisms 1900-1980

Impressionism and optical realism

Modern art and reality

Impressionism and optical realism

Discarding artificial conventions

Is naturalism true to nature?

Correcting for perceptual distortion

Modernism and science

Modernism and spiritualism

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The Artist’s Reality: Mark Rothko’s Little-Known Writings on Art, Artists, and What the Notion of Plasticity Reveals about Storytelling

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The artist's reality : philosophies of art

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SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

What is Realism in Art — Examples & Characteristics Explained

Realism Art Movement

REALISM ART DEFINITION

Realism Art Characteristics:

Romantic Art and Realism

Romanticism Preceded the Realism Movement

“Liberty Leading the People” • Eugene Delacroix

What is Chiaroscuro? Cinematic Lighting 101 • Subscribe on YouTube

“Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" • Caspar David Friedrich

What is Realism Painting

What is Realism in Art

Realism Art Examples • “The Stone Breakers”

Realism Art Examples • “The Gleaners”

Art and Realism • “The Gross Clinic”

Define Realism in Art • “The Ploughing in the Nivernais”

Realism Art Definition

Abstract Expressionism in Painting

Art and Realism: Photorealism

Realism Art Definition: Hyperrealism

Creating Hyperrealism

What is Realism in Art Cinema

Italian Neorealism

A Brief History of Dogme 95

What is Italian Neorealism?

Up Next: Italian Neorealism →

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Essay on the Concept of Art and Reality

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The visual essay and the place of artistic research in the humanities

Introduction

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