What is realism?

What is realism? In art and literature, this term means an objective reflection of reality through specific techniques and techniques that are inherent in a certain type of artistic creativity. Realism in its turn can take various forms, which depends on the chosen creative methods. For example, they highlight enlightening, critical, socialist and other types of realism. Each of these methods differs in its features and trends.

In a broad sense, realism in art is defined as a trend in the development of artistic culture, which continues the chosen traditions of world art. A measure of the realism of a work is its penetration into life, the reflection of important aspects of everyday events in an artistic form.

To better understand what realism is, one should understand the narrower meaning of this word. According to him, this is the artistic style that emerged in the era of the Enlightenment. The most clear and thorough description of its main features can be found in the critical realism of the XIX century and in the socialist realism of the twentieth century. In this sense, realism deals with the study of a person's personality and its connection with society, social status, and some external factors. It should not be forgotten that realism of thinking has different manifestations in different genres and types of art.

Realism is different from other similar directions. For example, naturalism takes as its basis a superficial similarity without affecting the deep processes of reality, and abstract thinking expresses reality accurately, paying attention only to the essence of the element of an object or phenomenon. The artistic meaning of the art of realism is directly related to the measure of the correspondence of the chosen form to the expression of a certain idea of the creator.

What is realism? Among the common features of the method is the reliability in the reproduction of events, phenomena and objects. Despite this, this art is full of variety of ways of knowing and displaying reality. Proof of this will be a long list of names of famous artists, writers and other artists who are unique in the chosen creative methods. All of them, from Rembrandt to Repin, prove that the possibilities of realism are incredibly wide and varied.

In the visual arts, the distinctive feature of realism is the appeal to the image of everyday life. The development of this direction is connected with the work of the masters of the Enlightenment, who criticized social order. For example, in Russia these were the Wanderers, who worked to establish positions of realism in the historical and everyday genre, landscape and portrait paintings.

Very often it is regarded as the opposite of Romanticism, whose representatives were determined to create a new reality.

Critical realism, which took place in the art of many European countries and the United States, was guided by the image of the complex life of the lower strata of society, the opposition of the poor to the rich, sympathy for the unfortunate fate of the dispossessed. Critical Russian realism gained momentum in the second half of the nineteenth century, embodied in the plays of P. Fedotov, artists I. Repin, I. Kramskoy and many others. The dominant theme in the work of these figures was the criticism of the injustice of public life.

Another manifestation is socialist realism (1930s-1980s). It is considered the main artistic direction in the art of the USSR. The goal of socialist realism was the establishment of socialist ideals, images of new social relations and people who participate in them. The rigid program of this direction was based on the glorification of the revolution and its leaders, socialist construction and the Soviet worldview.

Later, the art of realism in different countries acquires national features, and within its limits different forms and directions manifest themselves. The possibilities of realistic methods are very diverse and wide, but they have a limit that limits them. As a holistic creative method, realism dominated in the past centuries, today it has to contend with those trends that limit its development. Thus, the question of what realism is, may not have one answer, since this concept is very complex and versatile.