A1 - Short Story

Gabriela Llerena

EC II

Prof. Frost

February 14, 2013

A1 Short Story:

Realism Movement

     One of the artistic movements that was much more meaningful in relation to economic and political history is the Realism movement. The Realism period lasted for about 20 years, from 1850-1870. It initiated as a response towards the Romantic Movement (1789-1850) before the French Revolution, where artists depicted people as happy and worry free, while singing and dancing in meadows. The Realism period in painting was not just about grasping people's expressions and the exact shadows' colors on an image and then putting it all on a canvas, it was about setting the right atmosphere and elements to transmit feelings of melancholy and sympathy from the viewer towards the subject at hand.

     In this painting by Jean-Honore Fragonard, The swing, there is this garden that looks much like a utopia. Here, a girl is pushed in the swing by a man who is barely noticeable due to the trees' shadows. On the left of the painting, lies the girl's lover whose cheeks express excitement at the sight of the girl's legs. In this image, the shadows and shapes have very realistic qualities but they fail to show real emotion. Historically, it shows nothing about the circumstances they are going through. It becomes only a pretty painting.
         In reality, people were suffering and working from the beginning of their puberty until far into their advanced age. When the revolution was proven to not show the results that the working class community needed, the elite did not realize how bad the world had turned for people outside their circle; this is when artists like Gustave Courbet began expressing the unheard voice of the poor.

     Here is one of Courbet’s famous paintings, The Stone Breakers, 165 x 257cm. The artist sets the mood with this color theme to transmit feelings of sadness, misery, and sorrow.
This painting is set around midday, yet the shadows on the mountain rest right upon them to represent the obscure and depressing life the working class deals with in a daily basis. There is a presence of a boy who is barely hitting puberty. This boy is trying to carry a clearly heavy basket full of broken rocks with the help of his knee. He wears a pair of wore down old shoes, socks with holes in them, a ripped shirt, and a muddy pairs of pants with only one strap doing the work of two. Next to him, there is an old man who is doing the even heavier work of breaking the rocks with no kind of protection on his face. Painting with these kind of dimensions in the romantic period, before the revolution, where only for portraits of the kings, aristocrats, and palaces, but Courbet’s painting was made in this size to give more focus and significance to the problems of the poor.

     The Realism movement differs from what people call realistic now, because Realism is a period in time that give way to a domino effect throughout many people in every socioeconomic class. It began after the people took charge over their own politics and made the aristocrats disappear, which left artists, who were employed by aristocrats, out on the streets. At the same time, working class people and poor people were left with the bare minimum. What people call realistic is the sole meaning of a painting being a still-life, where every shadow cast and every detail on the set up is present in the painting.