Realism Quotes

“Degas, more than any other Realist, looked upon the photograph not merely as a means of documentation, but rather as an inspiration: it evoked the spirit of his own imagery of the spontaneous, the fragmentary and the immediate. Thus, in a certain sense, critics of Realism were quite correct to equate the objective, detached, scientific mode of photography, and its emphasis on the descriptive rather than the imaginative or evaluative, with the basic qualities of Realism itself. As Paul Valéry pointed out in an important though little known article: ‘the moment that photography appeared, the descriptive genre began to invade Letters. In verse as in prose, the décor and the exterior aspects of life took an almost excessive place.… With photography… realism pronounces itself in our Literature’ and, he might have said, in our art as well.”
― Linda Nochlin, Realism: (Style and Civilization)

“The works of the Impressionists, as much as those of any medieval craftsman or renaissance Humanist, are related to a world view, a context of interdependent beliefs and ideas about what is good and bad, true and false, the nature of existence and the means for investigating it. There are no ‘value vacuums’ in human history, no ‘intermediary periods’, only periods which are more or less unified, more or less amenable to the procedures, and temperaments, of historians.”
― Linda Nochlin, Realism: (Style and Civilization)

“The artist striving for truth or sincerity had to guard his spontaneous vision against distortion or alteration by aesthetic conventions or preconceptions.”
― Linda Nochlin, Realism: (Style and Civilization)

“Courbet’s Meeting[1], for example, was clearly based on a prototype in popular imagery [2]: yet Courbet observed the countryside around Montpellier with scrupulous attention to its peculiarities and he recorded the local flora, the bright clear atmosphere of the Midi, as well as the appearance of himself, Bruyas and his servant, with striking and convincing accuracy. What is more, he succeeded in achieving his aim: creating an image that looks like and was for long held to be an objective, almost photographic, record of an actual event.”
― Linda Nochlin, Realism: (Style and Civilization)