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Art History In 3 Minutes | That Art History Girl

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Year 10 Food Workshops: Sarah Graham Documentary

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Year 10 Food Workshops: Sarah Graham Documentary

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Art explainer: how to read a portrait - National Portrait Gallery

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Develop your skills in analysing portraits and explore how artists use different elements, techniques and media to communicate mood, feelings and ideas.

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Year 10: How to Analyse an Artist's work

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Year 10: How to Analyse an Artist's work

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Creating research about artists is a creative and exciting part of a GCSE course. It will allow you to discover new artworks and learn about how artists think and work.

This GCSE artist research guide will help you find an appropriate artist, analyse their work and present your research to a GCSE standard. The purpose of research in GCSE Art is to help you understand the artist's style, techniques / processes and themes. You will use this knowledge to inform your own artwork.
Researching artists / art exhibitions / photographers / designers is an important aspect of your GCSE Art course and can help you improve your own work and generate new ideas.
Successful GCSE artist research pages are produced by collecting information and images about an artist you are studying or want to study. Your research should include:

1. A brief biography of the artist

2. Pictures of their artwork

3. Analysis of their artwork(s)

4. The inspiration behind their pieces

5. Your own response

A guide to creating high quality artist research:

1. Choose an appropriate artist

It is important to choose a relevant artist. If your project is about , you shouldn't really be looking at artists who specialise in landscapes!

You should also choose an artist that you like. It's no good choosing an artist if you think their work is boring.

Use an artist who has similar skills to you. Do you prefer drawing? Avoid painters!

2. Find out facts about their life and education
This will show that you understand the context of their work.

3. Find good quality pictures of their artwork
This will make your research look more professional.

4. Try to find out what their process for making art is
Artists often use social media to show their processes. Online museums and galleries also share information about the artist's work or techniques.

How to present your artist research:

Once you have found an artist that you're interested in and you have started to research them, you need to present what you have found. Use these tips to help show off your research:

Let's look at a good example of GCSE artist research:

1. Plan your layout
The layout is simple and clear; the background lines link to the artworks.

2. Include colours related to the artist
The student has stuck to black and white, just like the artist.

3. Have a clear title
The title is clear and reflects the 'glitch' style of the art

4. Write neatly, checking spellings and grammar

5. Type up annotations if it will help you
The writing is neat, along straight lines

6. Create a response using the same materials as the artist (eg. acrylic paint)
The drawing is high quality and uses appropriate materials (pencil and white pen). The student has clearly studied the artist's work carefully.

How to analyse artwork:

You should choose a piece of artwork by the artist to analyse. Writing an image analysis about art can seem strange because there are no absolutely 'correct' answers. However, if you're not sure how to analyse artwork, this guide to analysing art can help.
You don't need to answer every question, but aim for at least 2 or 3 from each section:

Let's analyse an artwork using some questions from the "Content, Form, Process, Mood" Guide:
What can you see in the picture? Think about objects, colours, shapes and textures.
The painting shows two packets of green pears, there are six in total. They are still in the wrapper and there are a lot of reflections painted to show the plastic covering them.
What is the composition (layout) of the work?
The pears fill the whole canvas and we can't see much of the background. There is some symmetry with three pears on each side.
Is there a colour scheme? Why or why not?
There is a limited, harmonious colour palette of calm greens, blues and yellows. The colours are quite realistic and natural to reflect the subject matter.
Is it realistic, or surreal, or both? Why?
Overall the piece has realistic and surreal elements due to the sharp shapes of the light reflections that add contrast to the soft natural shapes. The shape of the reflections stand out against the soft round edges of the pears.
How was the artwork made?
The artist has used oil paints which enhances the glossy, plastic effect.
Do you think the artist made any other versions or sketches?
I think they would have sketched different layouts and mixed tester colours to match the fruit carefully.

Creating your own artist response:

Your response to an artist or artwork should use the same (or similar) materials to the artist. You might choose to focus on their use of colour or composition for example.
You should always include your opinion about an artist's work in your research, explaining why you like/dislike their work.
You should also explain how it will inspire you or influence your own work.

In this artist research example the student has studied the artwork of Tjalf Sparnaay. Their response is a good quality drawing of a fried egg, copied from one of the artist's paintings. The artist is a hyperrealist painter, but the student has responded with coloured pencils, showing skill in the accuracy of their drawing and managing to show some realism in their work through natural colours and a range of tones.

In this example, the student has researched the ceramic artist Mechelle Bounpraseuth. Their response doesn't use clay like the artist, but the student has used the same idea as Bounpraseuth and chosen to draw a food object that reminds them of their family / friends. The drawing is highly skilled, showing a range of tones and highlights with exceptional attention to detail.

GCSE Artist Research examples:

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Artist research page checklist:

Now that you're got an idea of what good artist research looks like, download the checklist below to use and help make sure you have included everything you need.

This artist research page checklist is simple to use and will make sure you / your students have included everything they need to make a successful, GCSE standard artist research page!

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Creating research about artists is a creative and exciting part of a GCSE course. It will allow you to discover new artworks and learn about how artists think and work. This GCSE artist research guide will help you find an appropriate artist, analyse their work and present your research to a GCSE standard.

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Year 10 Architecture Workshops: All Printmaking Techniques in One Place

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Year 10 Architecture Workshops: All Printmaking Techniques in One Place

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Types of Printmaking — Techniques, Processes, and Iconic Artists

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Explore the main types of printmaking, from woodcut to screen print. Learn how each technique works and discover iconic artists who used them.

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Marc Quinn (‘Self’) by Marc Quinn - National Portrait Gallery

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A self-portrait sculpture by the artist Marc Quinn, made from his own frozen blood.

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Georgia O'Keeffe: A Brief History (School Friendly)

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Present

Pauls painting style has evolved into a free flowing fusion of various media, choosing not to stick to the constraints of any one medium, simply picking what he feels would communicate the ideas he has for a piece best.

Paul's paintings have continued to evolve and Paul has become one of Britain's most successful and sought after artists. Paul is currently exhibiting throughout the UK in over thirty prestigious galleries, and has followers and collectors all over the world. In 2012 he was commissioned to paint three large pieces for the 2012 London Olympic games, the paintings were to capture the mood and excitement of London and the Olympic park during the games, and were hung in the Olympic park for the games. Paul was one of the contributing artists for 'The Big Egg Hunt 2012' which was one of the largest and most interactive public art displays London has ever seen.

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Pauls painting style has evolved into a free flowing fusion of various media, choosing not to stick to the constraints of any one medium, simply picking what he feels would communicate the ideas he has for a piece best. Paul's paintings have continued to evolve and Paul has become one of Britain's most successful and sought after artists.

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Beauty and travel from beauty journalist Fani Mari | BREAKEVEN

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Abby Diamond is a young illustrator and artist from Pennsylvania. She gets inspired mostly by birds, insects and nature in general and creates beautiful colourful illustrations.

From the moment I found her Tumblr page I cannot get enough of the playful birds she draws, the sketches are so inspiring to look at.

Each illustration is composed out of many different circles and lines from ink and the watercolour blots here and there make her sketches come to life. The same is true for her more "serious" illustrations, of wolves, wild boars and dark landscapes are truly inspiring.

xo F

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Abby Diamond illustrations * Beauty and travel from beauty journalist Fani Mari | BREAKEVEN

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Abby Diamond is a young illustrator and artist from Pennsylvania. She gets inspired mostly by birds, insects and nature in general and creates beautiful colourful illustrations. From the moment I found her Tumblr page I cannot get enough of the playful birds she draws, the sketches are so inspiring to look at.

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Birds Illustrated on Vintage Envelopes by Mark Powell

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It’s been over a year since we last checked in with artist Mark Powell (previously) who draws portraits and birds on old vintage envelopes. His works have become increasingly more detailed the last few months and I’m especially enjoying his series of birds. See much more here.

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Michael Craig-Martin on style, the YBAs and being the great late bloomer of British art

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Michael Craig-Martin on style, the YBAs and being the great late bloomer of British art

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In 1961, aged 20, Michael Craig-Martin enrolled at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture and immediately found himself all at sea.

"Back then," he recalls, "abstract expressionism was still lingering and painting was painterly. The first thing I realised was that I was the only person on the course who really couldn't do it. I was just not given to that kind of painting. I remember thinking, 'That's it. It's all over for me.'"

Now 83, and about to have his firstfull British retrospective at the Royal Academy of Art, Craig-Martin sees that moment of panic and self-doubt as a necessary part of a creative epiphany that has underpinned his subsequent journey as an artist.

"That's when I learned what I later passed on to my students in my years as a teacher. You have to use what you've got. You cannot try to become something you're not. The people who work in that painterly way are doing what is natural to them. If you are struggling to try to do the same, even with the best will in the world, it ain't gonna work."

In the company of other gifted graduate students including Chuck Close, Brice Marden and Richard Serra, Craig-Martin embraced nascent conceptualism and began making small geometric sculptures. Painting, of a playfully conceptual rather than painterly kind, would come years later. "I was totally green when I wandered into it - and it made my life," he says of the heady, ideas-based environment at Yale.

I thought that the chance to do a retrospective show of this scale in the UK was gone. It could hardly be later

As his career-spanning Royal Academy exhibition will make clear, Craig-Martin's creative life has been singular in its long, slow-burning trajectory, deeply informed by the genres he encountered as a curious art student and afterwards: minimalism, pop art and what he calls "thought-process art". He is, by his own admission, one of contemporary art's great late developers, having worked quietly for decades until, in the mid-1990s, he created his signature style - large-scale, boldly coloured, minimalist paintings of everyday objects such as spoons, chairs and lightbulbs. By then, he was 55 years old and more widely known as an art teacher than an artist, having been the most important mentor of the YBA [Young British Artists] generation - Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume et al - while a tutor at Goldsmiths College in London in the late 1980s and early 90s.

Although he has had previous retrospectives - at London's Whitechapel Gallery in 1989 and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 2006 - this one is larger and more definitive, tracing a long arc from what he calls his "monochrome prehistory" to his embrace of colour and beyond into digitally generated work. "To be honest," he says, "I did think that the chance to do a retrospective show of this scale in the UK was gone, but here it is. It could hardly be later, but, in another way, it's happening at exactly the right time."

The show will begin in 1967 with a small-scale sculptural pop-up book and culminate with Cosmos, a single-room, immersive digital-video installation created specifically for the exhibition. "It's half an hour long, with sound and vision on four walls, and features around 300 images," he says, palpably excited. The installation has been in gestation for nearly a year and, as we speak, is still unfinished. "It will be ready on the night," he tells me, confidently.

I am chatting with Craig-Martin in his expansive, light-filled apartment high up in one of the Barbican's modernist tower blocks. His view of the capital extends from the glass-and-steel skyscrapers that now loom over the east of the city to the vast expanse of north London as far as Alexandra Palace's towering television transmitter mast in the distance. In his open-plan living space, the decor is immaculately stylish, ultra-minimalist and carefully curated, from the white leather Corbusier sofa and armchairs to the large black-and-white canvas by Mark Lancaster on one wall and the small silhouetted figure by Julian Opie that stands atop a plinth in front of a wall-length window.

Dressed in a black T-shirt and trousers, and sporting pristine white Prada trainers, Craig-Martin exudes an air of self-assuredness, his thoughts on art and culture expressed with the clarity and confidence that, one senses, made him such an inspiring teacher at Goldsmiths.

"Michael hand-picked his students, and those who weren't in his group tutorials were always inquisitive about them and maybe slightly envious," says artist Michael Landy, who graduated from Goldsmiths in 1988. "For me, he is right up there as a tutor, because it is no mean feat to simplify things for students who, like me, could find so many reasons to not do stuff. Plus, he always had such great anecdotes from his own life."

Craig-Martin's early life, as with several preceding generations of his family, was initially nomadic. He was born in Dublin but his family moved to London when he was an infant, and soon after they were evacuated to Colwyn Bay in Wales, where he spent the following four years. When the war ended, his father, an economist, was offered a job by the World Bank, and they relocated to Washington, which he hated as a boy - "it seemed unbelievably provincial" - but now considers it to be the first of many strokes of good luck that have attended his life. Working on the retrospective, he says, has made him reflect on his life as well as his work.

"It has really made me realise how much luck has to do with everything, including success, of course, and the one piece of luck you have no control over is when you get born. I was born in 1941 and as I grew into adulthood in the 60s, postwar America was thriving culturally and economically. Things were changing with such momentum. I saw out the old world and saw in the new."

From the outside, his upbringing seems gilded. In the 1950s, his father was granted extended home leave from work every three years, which enabled the family to travel to Europe for the summer. Their first destination was always his grandparents' house in Dublin.

"There were lots of cousins and I remember my grandfather as a kind of Edwardian pater familias," he says, wistfully. " He drank whiskey and would have crates of soda siphons delivered to his house by horse-drawn cart. The laundry was collected and delivered that way too. I have rich memories of that world, which, of course, has now gone without trace."

As a boy in 50s America, he was "visually alert and interested in everything that was modern". To this day, he can identify every make of classic American car from that time. When he was 15, his father was transferred to Bogotá, Colombia, where the young Craig-Martin first took drawing classes at the Lycée Français with an artist called Antonio Roda, an exile from Franco's Spain. His college education, like his young life, was peripatetic: he studied English literature and history at Fordham University in New York, then art at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris before, as he puts it, "stumbling into Yale" in the autumn of 1961, "when a dean there took an incredible chance on me".

It was Craig-Martin's great good fortune that, during his time at Yale, a cultural shift occurred that resounds to this day. Painting, as he puts it, "began to be doubted as the central concern of art, and indeed treated with a degree of suspicion, as other ways of doing things were suddenly in the ascendant".

That shift had begun a decade before, when Josef Albers, one of the luminaries of the Bauhaus movement, instigated a dramatic transformation of the teaching of art at Yale. Albers integrated the disciplines of painting, sculpture, graphic arts and architecture departments under the single heading of design. More importantly for what was to follow, he asserted that the process, rather than the finished object, was the defining element of artistic creativity. Craig-Martin imbibed it all and, when he found his style decades later, the bright brashness of pop art and the formal logic of minimalism somehow came together.

Like most worlds, the art world is essentially straight

After Yale, he says, he couldn't find "a teaching job anywhere in America that I wanted to go to", so he travelled to England on the advice of fellow artist Victor Burgin. There, he was immediately offered a teaching post at Bath Academy of Art at Corsham, and began to create his series of box sculptures at home in the evenings. In 1972, the year before he began teaching at Goldsmiths, one of his early wall pieces, Six Images of an Electric Fan, was included in a pivotal group show, The New Art, at the Hayward Gallery, the first British survey of conceptualism. The show also included work by Burgin, Gilbert & George and Richard Long and, perhaps unsurprisingly, divided critics. Richard Cork, writing in the Evening Standard, hailed the exhibition's "brave new voices", while the Telegraph dismissed it as "a journey into nowhere". The gallery's director of exhibitions took the middle view, confessing to a colleague, "I cannot find much to love in it, but a lot to think about."

In 1974, Craig-Martin made headlines of his own with what, for the next few decades, was his defining work and is now recognised as a landmark moment in the history of conceptual art. First exhibited at the Rowan Gallery in London, An Oak Tree, created in 1973, comprised a glass of water on a glass shelf mounted high on a gallery wall with accompanying text describing how "the actual oak tree is physically present but in the form of the glass of water".

As well as being a mischievously provocative statement about the nature of the artistic imagination, the text echoed the Roman Catholic idea of transubstantiation: the moment when the communion wafer and wine become the body and blood of Christ. "That's where the initial idea came from," he nods. "Only a Catholic would know what the term even meant, but what I was really saying was that works of art only work on the basis of a certain kind of faith. If you don't give yourself to the piece, it won't work."

In 1976, aged 35, Craig-Martin experienced a period of traumatic upheaval in his personal life, coming out as gay after 13 years of marriage to Jan Hashey, whom he had met at Yale, and with whom he has a daughter, Jessica. I ask if, having been raised a Catholic, he had grappled with his sexuality for a long time.

"Oh, definitely. I stopped going to church at 19. At that age, there was nothing of help for me there. I came up against the absolute failure of Catholicism at the exact point that I needed it. When I sought help and guidance, I was dismissed. It was made very clear to me that I should shut my mouth."

He smiles now at the absurdity of that moment, before becoming more reflective. "Today, one has a clear idea of gay and straight, but in 1960 the language wasn't the same. I was 21 before I heard the world 'gay'. It was a closeted word. The change that has happened since has been remarkable. Back then, though, like many people at that time, one's greatest wish was that it wasn't true and that, if one did the right things, it might go away. So, yes, there was a trauma for me and it came out eventually in the marriage, which was impossible."

The art world, he tells me, as a kind of afterword, is not really as gay as he expected it to be. "There are many gay artists, of course, and if you are gay, you get to know virtually all of them but, like most worlds, it is essentially straight."

In one of the most ironic twists of fate that have accompanied Craig-Martin's life, he retired from his teaching post at Goldsmiths in 1988, just at the moment the YBA generation he had nurtured first gatecrashed the public consciousness. The catalyst for their breakthrough was the now legendary Freeze group show curated in 1988 by Damien Hirst, who would go on to become the most stellar of Craig-Martin's former students. "I gave up teaching the moment I could afford to and suddenly found myself a spokesperson for an institution I no longer had anything to do with," he says, laughing.

The YBAs' extraordinary success was also a dramatic vindication of Goldsmiths' free-form teaching environment in which there were no classes, no year divisions and no departments. Students were simply given a studio to create in and a tutor to bounce ideas off. "We were essentially taught to present work and talk about it in order to understand what we were doing," says Michael Landy. "It was not prescriptive. You could go in there a painter and come out a poet. It was all a bit daunting, but liberating, and it gave us an incredible confidence to go out into the world beyond."

Why, though, is Craig-Martin alone so fondly remembered by his former charges? "He was just so enthusiastic about us making things, which was different from some of the other tutors, who seemed as if they were weighed down by their own practice and somehow transmitted that to their students," says Landy. "Michael didn't have any of that anxiety. He was always so encouraging and positive."

For his part, Craig-Martin remembers that halcyon time at Goldsmiths with deep fondness and remains friends with many of his former students, but he is also keen to clarify his role there. "There is still this idea that I suggested to people that they should network in order to make it in the art world," he says. "This is a misunderstanding. What was important to me was to let them know that they were on to something and that the existing art world was not going to do anything for them. No gallery was going to pick them up, so what they had to do was create their own exhibitions, which they did in such an amazing way. I remember I was invited to see Freeze a few days before it opened, and I was utterly flabbergasted."

Did he anticipate how successful they would become? "Well, in terms of my teaching experience, it was a completely exceptional time. I'd never seen anything like it in terms of creativity and engagement. I thought they could be the next generation of British art, but no one could have predicted what actually happened."

More than once he singles out Hirst for his most effusive praise. "I sometimes talk to Damien about the importance of taking risks as an artist," he says. "I have taken risks with my work, but he is an absolutely staggering risk-taker. He risks his own reputation by doing things that people think are abominable."

What, I ask, does he make of the recent controversy arising from Hirst's supposedly cavalier approach to dating some of his signature sculptural pieces, which were made in 2017, but dated to the 1990s.

"Are the people who bought them complaining?" he replies without hesitation, before elaborating. "Imagine if I produced a sculpture in an edition of three, and let's say I made the first one in 1995, and maybe two of them sold then. Now, you could come to me years later and want to buy the third, so what happens? We will make it for you, but date it from the year the first one was made. That is normal practice. It's about the date of conception, not the date it was physically made. And besides, is one piece somehow more authentic than the other?"

Craig-Martin's own pivotal moment as an artist actually began in the mid-1990s, when he belatedly discovered colour and applied it to the big monochrome wall drawings he had been making since the late 1970s. Before then, he tells me, he was "frightened" of colour: "It was daunting to me as a very logical person. Also, I didn't want to do just red, yellow and blue."

The miracle is that we look at a picture of a shoe and see a shoe... It is that disparity between object and image that I play with

Instead, he created "the reddest red, the yellowest yellow and the bluest blue" to further transform the everyday objects he had already altered in terms of scale and context. "Colours at their most intense become exciting," he says. To his still obvious delight, he found that audiences responded to his new paintings, "not with respect and interest, but emotionally. There was a sense of joy in the gallery."

Often in his work, he says, he is "playing with things to see what happens". He is loth to explain his art further. "I absolutely believe the most essential things about a work of art are unsayable. The explanation is the work of art itself, which is one of the reasons that you make it. You can't look for that explanation in some other language because the art itself is the language."

As we wind down our conversation, Craig-Martin tells me that there are a couple of mistakes that people often make about his work. The first is that they confuse the subject - everyday objects - with the content, which he describes as "an exploration of the wonder of making a two-dimensional image". I ask him to elaborate. "A painting of a shoe looks nothing like a shoe, being entirely flat and made of bits of colour put together," he says. "The miracle is that we look at it and can see a shoe as clearly as if there was a shoe in the room with us. It is that disparity between the object and the image that I play with."

The other misconception hinges on the term "man-made objects", which is often used to describe his ordinary everyday subject matter. "We tend to describe the world in terms of natural and man-made as if the two are fundamentally at odds with each other. That is wrong, because we are nature as much as the plants, the trees and the animals. And when we make things, we are doing something that is natural to us. In a way, the iPhone is as natural as a stone."

As one of art's elder statesmen, what advice would he give those starting out in today's more brutally commodified art world? "Well, the one thing they could take heart in is that it is much easier to be creative in your 20s. One has a mental and emotional fluidity and an energy at that age. It is much harder to sustain that creative capacity over a lifetime."

How did he manage it? "One realises that success creates opportunities and, if you seize those opportunities and act on them when they arise, they create further success. It's circular. The people who have lasted have acted well on their opportunities. So, with this new work, Cosmos, it may be that I'm about have a whole new career as an immersive artist." That would not surprise me.

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'I have taken risks, but Damien is a staggering risk-taker': Michael Craig-Martin on style, the YBAs and being the great late bloomer of British art

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Ahead of a major retrospective at the Royal Academy, the veteran artist and mentor to Hirst, Lucas et al talks about his nomadic early years, halcyon days at Goldsmiths - and the moment he stopped being 'frightened' of colour

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Artist Sarah Graham on Nostalgia, Colour and How to Create The Blur

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Artist Sarah Graham on Nostalgia, Colour and How to Create The Blur

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Her hyper-realistic paintings of brightly coloured sweets, stacks of liquorice allsorts, Brighton rock, shiny marbles, plastic toys and her signature Chupa Chups are clearly capturing the imaginations of art teachers and students alike.

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Artist Sarah Graham on Nostalgia, Colour and How to Create The Blur -

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Artist Sarah Graham talks to The Arty Teacher about her work, influences and why her work is so popular with art teachers and art students.

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Composition for Artists - A Beginners Guide

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Year 10: Experimentation and story Van Gogh's work 

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Year 10: Experimentation and story Van Gogh's work 

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Van Gogh's Art in 7 Minutes: From Iconic Paintings to Immersive Experiences

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Year 11: Ian Murphy - Skills + Techniques

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Year 11: Ian Murphy - Skills + Techniques

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Year 11: 8 Major Modern Art Movements You Need to Know

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Year 11: 8 Major Modern Art Movements You Need to Know

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8 Major Modern Art Movements You Need to Know

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Plan your visit | Visiting | National Gallery, London

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Plan your visit to the National Gallery. Book your Gallery entry ticket or exhibition ticket in advance.

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Drawing techniques and materials - National Portrait Gallery

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What drawing materials are right for you? Take inspiration from artists past and present and discover techniques you can try for yourself.

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Realism Art Movement

First, let's define Realism in art

The Realism movement is one of the key art periods in human history, during which artists engineered a profound shift in the way that art was created, defined, and conceptualized.

Here's a quick backstory before we get to the examples.

REALISM ART DEFINITION

What is Realism in Art?

The Realism art period was a stylistic and social movement that began in France in the mid-nineteenth century. The Realism movement rejected the artistic approach of the Romantic period that had preceded it, which glorified nature and heroic figures. Before Realism, painting and sculpture had been concerned with rendering Biblical and mythological figures that exalted the best of humanity. Human figures were presented as Classical Greek ideals, with perfect bodies and beautiful, unblemished faces.

Realism artists, on the other hand, began to paint human subjects as they really existed in all their flaws, suffering, and imperfections. They wanted to hold up "regular" people as worthy of artistic representation. The Realism movement grew out of the 1848 Revolution in France that established people's "right to work" and focused on worker's rights. In this way, it was as much a political as an aesthetic movement.

Realism Art Characteristics:

Rejected Romantic ideals

Represented subjects "as they were"

Focused on everyday people, settings, and situations

Responded to a new national emphasis on workers

Realism Art Movement

Romantic Art and Realism

The Realism artistic movement rejected Romanticism - the art, literature, music, architecture and philosophy movement which had preceded it in the first half of the 19th century.

As this video explains, Romanticism was a reaction to the birth of the modern world and processes such as industrialization, urbanization, and secularization.

Romanticism Preceded the Realism Movement

Famous painters of the Romantic period included Eugene Delacroix, whose masterpiece "Liberty Leading the People" (1830) embodies the Romantic ideals of heroism, suffering and the Classical Greek form. Many of the details are not realistic, but meant to be allegories for political ideas.

"Liberty Leading the People" * Eugene Delacroix

The contrast of light and dark in the figure is known as chiaroscuro, a lighting effect also used commonly in cinema.

Check out this tutorial for a more in-depth explanation.

What is Chiaroscuro? Cinematic Lighting 101 * Subscribe on YouTube

Another key artist of the Romantic period was the painter Caspar David Friedrich, known for his masterpiece "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" (1818).

"Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" * Caspar David Friedrich

Friedrich's painting embodies the Romantic ideal of the place of the individual within the majesty of the natural world.

What is Realism Painting

Realism Art Examples

As we defined above, Realism art characteristics included:

Rejecting Romantic ideals

Representing subjects "as they were"

Focusing on everyday people, settings, and situations

Responding to a new national emphasis on French workers

This video does a great job of summarizing key features, dates, and figures of the Realism art movement.

What is Realism in Art

One of the most important early Realism artists was Gustave Courbet, whose work, "The Stone Breakers" (1850) depicts many of the features of Realism painting, such as a focus on everyday workers and settings.

Realism Art Examples * "The Stone Breakers"

Another example in the same vein is "The Gleaners" (1857) by Jean-François Millet, which depicts women picking up loose grain in the field. Like "The Stone Breakers," the painting is meant to depict both the hardships and the dignity of regular people at work, bringing empathy and recognition to their difficult station in life.

Realism Art Examples * "The Gleaners"

A famous example of American Realism painting is "The Gross Clinic" (1875) by the influential Philadelphia artist, Thomas Eakins. Because of its realistic depiction of blood and viscera on the operating table, the painting was originally considered too graphic for exhibition - a powerful testament to its Realism art characteristics.

Art and Realism * "The Gross Clinic"

One final example is "Ploughing in the Nivernais" (1849), by Realism artist Rosa Bonheur, one of the most prolific female painters of the 19th century. Bonheur specialized in realistic depictions of animals.

Define Realism in Art * "The Ploughing in the Nivernais"

Realism Art Definition

What is Realism in Art Post-1800s

Many 20th century artistic movements - including Abstract Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism, among others - rejected Realism in favor of new modes of depicting human experience and emotion. This video summarizes Abstract Expressionism and presents a number of prominent examples.

Abstract Expressionism in Painting

However, while many movements rejected Realism, other movements pushed 19th century Realism even further. Their aim was to use new techniques and technologies to make paintings look as real as possible, like photographs. These contemporary art movements include Photorealism and Hyperrealism.

Israeli painter Yigal Ozeri is considered a master of Photorealism. Painting on oil, Ozeri often takes women posing in nature as his subject:

Art and Realism: Photorealism

Hyperrealism builds on Photorealism and Realism art characteristics. Photorealism aims to present a painting that looks exactly like a photograph. But Hyperrealism often combines realistic images with an element of something that is unreal but still looks real because of the techniques with which it has been rendered.

Hyperrealism tends to make more of a pointed statement about its subject and is not typically as literal a representation. Here are examples of Hyperrealism, by Ron Mueck and Johannes Wessmark:

Realism Art Definition: Hyperrealism

In this video, the artist provides a tutorial on how to use drawing techniques to create Hyperrealism.

Creating Hyperrealism

Realism has evolved greatly since the 19th century, but it has the same basic philosophical approach - to convey subjects so that they look true to life. In the next section, we'll see how this same approach has been adopted in film.

What is Realism in Art Cinema

Realism in Cinema Movements

Realism took root in many art forms in the 19th and 2oth centuries beyond painting, as various movements emerged within literature, drama, and film.

As with painting, the expression of Realism in these arts was both aesthetic and ideological.

Realism in cinema can refer to a number of film modes and movements. But historically Realism movements have been a reaction against the artificiality and fantasy of commercial film eras that preceded them. As with Realism in painting, a historical shift has usually prompted the cinematic shift.

One of the most famous cinematic Realism movements is Italian Neorealism, a group of low-budget films shot on location in post-War Italy. These included films by Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, and Vittorio De Sica.

The historical shift was World War II and the end of Mussolini's fascism in Italy. Neorealist films such as Ladri di Bicicletti ( The Bicycle Thief), Roma Citta Aperta ( Rome, Open City), and Ossessione were a reaction against Italy's highly stylized fascist propaganda films. And their aim was to show the reality of poor and working class people through a new generation of filmmakers.

Italian Neorealism

Other famous film movements that have tried to present realistic scenarios of people, places, and eras include the French New Wave of the late 1950s and '60s, the New Hollywood movement of the early 1970s, and the late 1990s Danish film movement, Dogme 95.

A Brief History of Dogme 95

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What is Italian Neorealism?

We have explored the question of what is realism in art, and given examples of Realism in painting from the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as today. We have also briefly explored how Realism manifested in various cinema movements. Next, take a more thorough look at one of the most famous and important of those movements: Italian Neorealism.

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What is Realism in Art - Examples & Characteristics Explained

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Realism is an art movement that attempted to paint human subjects as they really existed in all their flaws, suffering, and imperfections.