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Realism: Arts
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Realism is a word that can be used in many different ways. It is used mainly in the arts to describe the way that writers, musicians, painters etc thought in the late 19th century. These artists were trying to show the world as it really is, instead of trying to escape to a world of fantasy, which is what the Romantics had been doing. The Realists wanted to give an accurate description of Nature and of the way people lived in society.
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Realism is a catch-all school of thought which refers to a series of artistic, political, and intellectual movements that have taken place throughout history. When you look at art movements in the post-Renaissance era, it's easy to pick out a pattern of mindset swings. Western artistic movements alternately become infatuated with romanticism, which views the world as idealized, and realism, which views the world "as it is."
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Realism appears in art as early as 2400 BC in the city of Lothal in what is now India, and examples can be found throughout the history of art. In the broadest sense, realism in a work of art exists wherever something has been well observed and accurately depicted, even if the work as a whole does not strictly conform to the conditions of realism. For example, the proto-Renaissance painter Giotto di Bondone brought a new realism to the art of painting by rendering physical space and volume far more convincingly than his Gothic predecessors. His paintings, like theirs, represented biblical scenes and the lives of the saints.
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Correspondingly, Realism is used to describe medieval views that allowed species and genera some kind of distinct existence outside of their conception by the mind. There it meant not only that individual men and individual animals and so on exist outside cognition but ... that the specific nature of man and the generic nature of animal and the like have an existence of their own in the outside world. For Realism, objects "fall into" such categories as humanness, mountainness, and so on naturally. For its opponents, however, this is not always the case: thus, in terms of a modern illustration, graniteness--that which all the granite rocks share in common--does not exist except as an artificial category set up by the mind (conceptualism) because it merges by imperceptible gradations into diorite or felsite as its mineral composition and texture gradually change. (see also Middle Ages)
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Realism or the Realist school and realism - The realistic and natural representation of people, places, and/or things in a work of art. The opposite of idealization. One of the common themes of postmodernism is that this popular notion of an unmediated presentation is not possible. This sense of realism is sometimes considered synonymous with naturalism.
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If any American artist symbolizes the persistence of Realism during the Modern era, it is Andrew Wyeth (born 1917). As a watercolorist he carried the legacy of Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent into the twentieth century. And he is no less talented with tempera and dry brush. Had Dürer painted American farm scenes they might look something like Wyeth's. Erickson's Barn, a watercolor from 1968, is a case in point. The pale gray clapboards, the overcast sky, and the beautiful green pine tree are typical of his masterly arrangement of compositional elements and precise handling of the delicate tonal medium.
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