Why Realism? by Frederick Ross - Part 6

We are incredibly fortunate to be speaking together on the cusp of one of the most important, moments in all of art history. It is very rare indeed for people to have the opportunity of living through major cultural shifts of the underlying tectonic plates of culture. We in the realist art community are bringing about a world-wide shift in the perception and definition of what constitutes great art. The modernist establishment's attempts to silence us have failed. Ironically, aided by the most modern of technologies, the Internet, the truth is available in more and more places. Many of the students in the ARC schools have told us how they wasted years and fortunes of money in college art departments. The institutions of the art world must change or perish. After more than a century of blind alleyways, nightmarish detours, and mind numbing “Art-Speak”, to boost up what should have been rejected long ago. The validity of the established modernist view is finally being questioned.

Together, all of us here are picking up the torch that has been dropped. The job we have today must be to reform and reinstitute proper training methods across the whole infrastructure. It's not enough to again be making great works of art, we need to sell and market them and we need to take back or at least equally cohabit the major museums which play an indispensable role in educating the people as to what objects from the past and present are to be considered the most precious by society and culture. The 20th century was so damaging to the visual arts that the pent up demand and need for more gratifying and meaningful art has grown enormously in society, resulting in the resurgence of classical based realism. We are only at the very beginning of where this movement is headed. Contemporary Realism has only just begun to reassert its value and importance and the realist artists coming forth are but scratching the surface of the great works of art which are certain to emanate from this movement as the decades of the 21st century take form.

So now, as historians, artists, and art lovers, we must ask what happened and what do we need to know of the past to not only pick up the torch and move forward but then to understand art history, and make sense of what has taken place. Then new generations of artists will have a strong foundation based on that truth and the real achievements and potential of the fine arts which are firmly grounded in the human psyche and the wants and needs of human beings to communicate visually, for which the fine arts are so uniquely well equipped. We must continue to rewrite the art history of the past 150 years. We must get the truth into the books being used to teach our youth. We must teach the validity, power and beauty of the realist visual language.

So let us look deeper at what has occurred. The writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau said "Men are born free but everywhere they are in chains." Let's substitute "artists" for "men" and we have a declaration which more accurately describes that state of the art world through most of the last century. “Artists are born free, but everywhere they are in chains.” Artist have been virtually (if not actually) imprisoned; whether we are talking about the chained constraints of "conceptual art,” or the drudgery of "deconstruction," ; the “shackles of shock”, or being mired in "minimalism,” or the vapid, inane impoverishment or works described as "abstract". All are chains which have been “forged link by link and yard by yard”, paying lip service to composition and design, while long ago having abandoned all of the parameters of fine art; but especially the paramount need to harmonize great subjects and themes with drawing, modeling, perspective, color, and tone, and expert manipulation of the paint. And what are these subjects and themes? I'll repeat again...they are the way by which the artist can communicate ideas, values, beliefs and the endless range of human thoughts and emotions.

If we look more closely, we can see that for most of the past century, there has been and ongoing attempt to malign and degrade the reputations and artwork produced during the Victorian era and its counterparts in Europe and America. Sadly they were very successful. But in the past 30 years it has started to change. I tend to think of 1980, when the Metropolitan Museum took some of their finest academic paintings that had been in storage since World War I, and hung them in the new Andre Meyer Wing and announced their decision to the world. Hilton Kramer of the NY Times lead a widespread journalistic assault accusing the museum of taking corpses from their basement and excoriated them for daring to hang William Bouguereau and Jean Leon Gerome next to Goya and Manet. I was even more outraged at Kramer's remarks than he was at what the museum had done, and after failing to get them to publish an Op-ed response, I had to pay for the space in the Sunday NY Times Arts and Leisure section in order for people to hear a responsible rebuttal. It ran twice and I received dozens of supportive letters including one from Thomas Wolfe whose sympathizing beliefs were satirically expressed in his legendary book titled "The painted word". Fortunately the Met stuck to their guns and today that section has expanded considerably, though there are still masterpieces in their vaults which remain under appreciated.

Over the past three decades, I and other art historians have done a great deal of research and found an overwhelming preponderance of evidence that proves that the modernist descriptions of this era are no more than lies and distortions fabricated in order to denigrate all of the traditional realist art produced between 1850 and 1920. Emile Zola's wrote a novel called the "Masterpiece" was a fictional story about Impressionist painters being mistreated by the officials of the Paris Salon run by the Academic masters of that time. This totally made-up account of what occurred amazingly started to be written into art history texts as if it all had actually occurred and to this day the heart of Modernist accounts of the art history between 1850 and World War I are based on this book's tale of woe.

The suppressed truth about this period, however, is that during the 19th century there was an explosion of artistic activity unrivaled in all prior history. Thousands of properly trained artists developed a myriad of new techniques and explored countless new subjects, styles and perspectives that had never been done before. They covered nearly every aspect of human activity. They were the product of the expansion of freedom and democracy and a profound respect for human beings. They helped disseminate the growing view that every individual was valuable, that all people are born with equal inalienable rights; especially the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The artists and the writers of the 19th century identified, codified, protected and perpetuated the great humanist values and momentous Age-of-Reason discoveries of the 18th century Enlightenment. The writers from that era, such as Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens, have been widely praised and celebrated, while the artists of the same period, communicating most of the same concepts and values....in stark contrast....have been mercilessly ridiculed and slandered. But working together, this generation helped free the slaves, protect the environment, stop child labor, eradicate unsafe working conditions, insured women equal rights and the right to vote, broke up monopolies, and protected and assured minority rights. And for this, their pay back, at least for the artists, has been to dismiss their work, denigrate their methods, lie about the meaning of their subjects and berate their achievements. Why? Because they didn't lead the way to splattered paint, blank canvases or industrial size Campbell's soup cans? Therefore they were called "irrelevant"?

And here we have a keystone concept of the modernists. These 19th century artists, who we love, are not considered "relevant". (And if they are not relevant, certainly modern realists are even less relevant by such standards.) Only works and techniques that shed all the former definitions and parameters of fine art were to be considered "relevant". Only those artists, that lead the way to abstract expressionism were worthy to be called "relevant". Nothing could have been further from the truth! In light of what I have just explained, the purpose of art is to communicate. It is successful if it explores the most profound aspects of the human experience, and accomplishes it with poetry, beauty and grace. If it is unskilled, awkward, and self-conscious, it fails and is unsuccessful. But to say that Academicians were irrelevant to their times or to the over-arching path of the fine arts through the ages is utterly wrong and incorrect. They were, in fact, at the pinnacle of 500 hundred years of art development on every level. The modernists were the impediment to the main path of the fine arts throughout history.

Relevance must be understood on many levels and perhaps one of the most essential elements, to understand the art of any era, is to see it in its historical context. Understanding the 19th Century will then show us how it relates to our world today. In order to understand the relevance of William Bouguereau and other masters of the 19th century it is essential to place them in their own time. And what was happening in history during their time was nothing short of "momentous". I am speaking about some of the most significant events in all of human history. The academic artists of the 19th century were not only "relevant" to the times, and relevant to the major thread of art history, but they were relevant to the evolution of art itself, as these artists were working at what will certainly be considered the most important crossroads in human history.